Doug Lorimer
A claim by US intelligence officials that they possess "strong circumstantial" evidence that Iran has a secret nuclear weapons program were dismissed on November 14 by US nuclear weapons expert David Albright.
According to the November 13 New York Times, "senior US intelligence officials", who asked not to be named, claimed to have informed officials of Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA — the UN's nuclear industry watchdog), in July about the contents of what they said was a stolen Iranian laptop computer.
The NYT article quoted the US officials who attended the meeting as saying the laptop contained more than 1000 pages of Iranian computer simulations and accounts of experiments indicating a long effort to design a nuclear warhead.
In a statement issued on November 14, Albright said the NYT article had repeatedly characterised the laptop's contents as information about a nuclear warhead design, "when the information actually describes a re-entry vehicle for a missile. This distinction is not minor. The information does not contain any words such as nuclear or nuclear warhead. The 'black box' carried by the re-entry vehicle may appear to be a nuclear warhead, but the documents do not state what the warhead is."
Albright, a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq who now heads the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security think-tank, told the Reuters news agency he had been briefed by several US intelligence and technical experts on the laptop's contents.
Iranian officials rejected claims reported in the NYT as another attempt by Washington to turn IAEA members against Iran ahead of the next IAEA board meeting, scheduled to begin on November 24.
"The baseless claim made us laugh. We do not use laptops to keep our classified documents", Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hamid Reza Asefi told reporters in Tehran on November 14.
The 35 member-country IAEA board of governors is scheduled to meet on November 24 to review Iran's civilian nuclear power program, which it is developing with Russia's assistance.
On the basis of unsubstantiated allegations made by US officials that Iran has a secret nuclear weapons program, on September 24 the IAEA board adopted — by 22 to 1 against, with 12 abstentions — a resolution calling upon Iran to relinquish its right under the IAEA statutes to research the development of enriched uranium as a nuclear fuel or be deemed "in further non-compliance with its safeguards agreement" with the IAEA.
The 1970 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), to which Iran is a signatory, requires every signatory country that doesn't already have nuclear weapons to conclude a safeguards agreement with the IAEA, with a view to preventing diversion of "source or special fissionable material" to the production of nuclear weapons.
If IAEA inspectors determine that safeguarded materials have been used "in furtherance of any military purpose", they are to report such "non-compliance" to the IAEA director-general, who is then required to report it to the IAEA board for possible referral to the UN Security Council.
The September 24 board resolution declared that Iran was in "non-compliance with its safeguard agreement", despite the fact that more than a year ago IAEA director-general Mohammed ElBaradei reported to the board that "all the declared nuclear material in Iran has been accounted for, and therefore such material is not diverted to prohibited activities".
The September 24 resolution declared Iran to be in "non-compliance" because Iran had failed to disclose to the IAEA until 2003 its acquisition of less than one kilogram of fissionable material, even though it was not required by its safeguard agreement, signed in 1974, to make such a disclosure, unless it acquired or produced more than one kilogram of fissionable material.
In 2003 Iran voluntarily agreed to abide by IAEA's 1997 "model additional protocol", which provides for intrusive go-anywhere, see-anything IAEA inspections and for full disclosure of all past activity involving the acquisition or production of any quantity of fissionable materials, even milligram amounts.
Because Iran did not make such a disclosure until after it had agreed to abide by the 1997 additional protocol, it has been accused by the US and its Western allies of having conducted an 18-year-long "secret" uranium enrichment research program.
Iran is not the only country that has failed to report to the IAEA the acquisition or production of materials containing less than one kilogram of fissionable material. South Korea, which had signed the additional protocol in June 1999, revealed last year that it had failed to disclose its past secret nuclear research activities, including that it had conducted chemical uranium enrichment from 1979 to 1981, separated small quantities of plutonium in 1982, experimented with uranium enrichment in 2000, and manufactured depleted uranium munitions from 1983 to 1987.
Unlike Iran, US officials have not pushed for an IAEA board resolution finding South Korea in "non-compliance with its safeguard agreement". That's because the pro-US regime in South Korea is not on Washington's hit list of "rogue states" to be subjected to an Iraq-style invasion and occupation, having suffered that fate more than 50 years ago.
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, November 23, 2005.
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