STATEMENT BY PAUL LEVENTHAL

Founding President, Nuclear Control Institute

Press Conference on Irans Nuclear Program

National Press Club, Washington DC

September 16, 2005

The purpose of this press conference is to establish a complete record of all allegations made by the Iranian opposition about Irans secret nuclear program and to hold the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) accountable for actions taken and not taken, and to encourage the IAEA promptly to investigate and determine the veracity of the allegations.

We emphasize promptly because any significant delay allows the Iranian regime time to remove incriminating evidence of secret nuclear operations at military sites and to sweep the sites clean of radioactive traces. In a number of cases, however, the problem has not been delayed investigation, but no investigation at all, either because Iran has held the inspectors at bay or because the IAEA has not pressed the regime to enter sites identified by the opposition.

Based on the remarkable accuracy of the oppositions initial revelations, which triggered the IAEAs investigation of Iran in 2002, there is really no excuse, other than political, for the IAEA not to act boldly on the subsequent information put out by the opposition. At one point, IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei suggested that he did not want to harass Iran by pursuing every accusation made. This, in our view, is an unacceptable position once the oppositions initial allegation of 18 years of secret Iranian uranium enrichment and other fuel cycle activities, in violation of Irans safeguards obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, was verified by the Agencys inspectors.

As a courtesy, we have already transmitted to the IAEA the summary document we are releasing today, with a request to Mr. ElBaradei that he circulate it to the members of the Board of Governors at the outset of their meeting on Monday, September 19, and that he report to the Board on the status of the unresolved allegations of secret nuclear activities in Iran. Because of the secret nature of such activities, they have to be assumed to be weapon-related.

In fairness to Mr. ElBaradei, he makes clear in his confidential report on Irans nuclear program, circulated to members of the agencys Board of Governors on Sept. 2, that he is losing patience with a longstanding pattern of Iranian concealment and deception. Although his language is polite, his message is blunt:

In view of the fact that the Agency is not yet in a position to clarify some important outstanding issues after two and a half years of intensive inspections and investigation, Irans full transparency is indispensable and overdue. Given Irans past concealment efforts over many years, such transparency measures should extend beyond the formal requirements of the Safeguards Agreement and Additional Protocol and include access to individuals, documentation related to procurement, dual use equipment, certain military owned workshops and research and development locations.The Agency is still not in a position to conclude that there are no undeclared nuclear materials or activities in Iran.

But Mr. ElBaradei also has held informal sessions with the press, as he did on February 15, in which he said that there had been no discoveries in the last six months to substantiate claims that Iran was secretly working toward building a nuclear bomb. "On Iran, there really hasn't been much development, neither as a result of our inspections or as a result of intelligence," he was quoted as saying in one press account. However, he did not raise, nor was he asked about, a detailed allegation made in Paris and Vienna on November 17, 2004 by the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) that had been front-page news at the time---namely that Iran had moved from one military site to another in Tehran secret uranium enrichment and other nuclear activities, as well as biological warfare work, after the first site was exposed by the NCRI, razed and swept clean by the regime, and then turned into a municipal park.

ElBaradei, in his current report to the Board, appears to be silent regarding this second military site, Lavisan II, but, as noted below, indicates that the IAEAs investigation of Lavisan I (the so-called Lavisan-Shian site) is continuing. It is our understanding that Iran has barred the IAEA from having access to Lavisan II. We call on Mr. ElBaredi to be explicit to the Board next week on the status of the IAEA investigation into Lavisan II. This and other unresolved aspects of the IAEAs investigation should be made explicit and not allowed to fall between the cracks.

The IAEA Director General is also silent on the question of whether the Agencys inability to obtain all the information it needs to determine if Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program constitutes grounds for referring Iran to the UN Security Council. This is a question the IAEA Board of Governors has avoided for two years and that it must address again when it meets next week. A careful reading of ElBaradeis report, which also includes a description of the re-start of the uranium conversion plant at Isfahan in breach of Irans commitment to the EU-3 to suspend all enrichment-related and other fuel-cycle activities, leaves little doubt that referral of Iran to the Security Council is long overdue and well justified.

That Iran is in violation of its safeguards obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) is manifest in statements by high Iranian officials---in particular by Irans former chief nuclear negotiator---acknowledging that nuclear equipment and scientists have been moved to undisclosed locations. As a non-nuclear weapon state party to the NPT, Iran is obligated to declare all equipment capable of producing or using fissile material to the IAEA for the application of safeguards. The IAEA Board is obligated under the Agencys statute and the IAEA model safeguards agreement to report safeguards violations to the Security Council.

ElBaradei is to be commended for the degree of detail he does provide in this and earlier reports to the Board of Governors, describing the IAEAs investigation of Irans nuclear program. It is important that the latest information be fully vetted and subject to tough questions in the run-up to the Board of Governors meeting.

One such question pertains to whether the traces of highly enriched and other enriched uranium found on centrifuge components in Iran are evidence of undeclared enrichment by Iran or, as Iran claims, of contaminated components that Iran had imported secretly, beginning in 1987, from Pakistan. In May 2005, the Agency received a number of centrifuge components from an unnamed member state (presumably Pakistan) to compare traces of uranium on them with the traces found in Iran. ElBaradei reported:

The analysis of swipe samples taken from those components, which was carried out at the Agencys Safeguards Analytical Laboratory, was completed in early August 2005. Based on the information currently available to the Agency, the results of that analysis tend, on balance, to support Irans statement about the foreign origin of most of the HEU contamination.

However, even this carefully worded finding fails to address possible collusion between Iranian and Pakistani scientists to deceive the Agency. Iran has placed great importance on the IAEA coming to a finding of foreign contamination rather than of unreported Iranian enrichment. Iran also has engaged in a pattern of elaborate deception and concealment over the past 20 years. One cannot rule out, therefore, the possibility of a scheme by Iranian and Pakistani scientists to provide the Agency with sample components that, in fact, were returned to Pakistan from Iran but passed off as Pakistani in origin.

ElBaradei should be asked whether such a bait and switch deception scheme was considered, investigated and eliminated by the Agencys technical analysis team. It should be noted that Iran has made use of imported as well as domestic uranium; also, that because uranium isotopes decay very slowly (over hundreds of millions of years), any attempt to pinpoint the date of enrichment by isotopic analysis to within a period of less than 20 years (that is, after Iran first imported centrifuge components in 1987) may defy the laws of physics.

The other tough question, as noted above, pertains to the significance of places where the IAEA has been barred access by Iran entirely or has been given only partial, delayed access. At one point, ElBaradei suggests there is not currently a problem gaining access to once-secret facilities that Iran now agrees are subject to IAEA safeguards:

since December 2003, Iran has facilitated in a timely manner, Agency access under its Safeguards Agreement and Additional Protocol to nuclear materials and facilities, as well as to other locations in the country, and has permitted the Agency to take environmental samples as requested by the Agency.

But at another point, he reports continuing difficulties in gaining access to military sites, including the ones that Iranian expatriates associated with the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) have alleged are where Iran is pursuing secret nuclear fuel cycle activities and weapons development work:

absent some nexus to nuclear material, the Agencys legal authority to pursue the verification of possible nuclear weapons related activity is limited. The Agency, however, has continued to seek Irans cooperation in following up on reports relating to equipment, materials and activities which have applications in the conventional military area and in the

civilian sphere as well as in the military nuclear area. Iran has permitted the Agency to visit defense related sites at Kolahdouz, Lavisan and Parchin. While the Agency found no nuclear related activities at Kolahdouz, it is still assessing information (and awaiting some additional information) in relation to the Lavisan site. The Agency is still waiting to be able to re-visit the Parchin site.

ElBaradei should be asked how long inspectors were delayed from entering each of the military sites and the likelihood that incriminating evidence could have been removed during those periods. The so-called Lavisan II site is significant because the NCRI alleges that enrichment activities and work on developing a nuclear warhead trigger had been moved there from the nearby Lavisan-Shian site in Tehran. That site, the subject of earlier NCRI allegations, had been razed and swept clean by Iran, purportedly to make room for a municipal park. At Parchin, a sprawling military base, IAEA inspectors were permitted to visit only one of four areas of concern and had to limit inspections to five buildings. Although nothing was found, ElBaradei reports that IAEA is still discussing with Iran gaining access to the other three areas at Parchin.

It should be clear that Iran has been stinting in providing the cooperation needed by the IAEA to reach a bottom-line determination as to whether Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program at secret locations. In reporting that the Agency is still not in a position to conclude that there are no undeclared nuclear materials or activities in Iran, ElBaradei stated: In view of the past undeclared nature of significant aspects of Irans nuclear programme, and its past pattern of concealment, this conclusion can be expected to take longer than in normal circumstances.

Given the obstacles Iran is placing in the way of the IAEA inspectors at military sites, it is puzzling and somewhat misleading that ElBaradei refers only to past concealment as if nothing rises to the level of current concealment (other than the shell game Iran is playing with the IAEA at Parchin). 

Pierre Goldschmidt, until recently the IAEAs safeguards chief, has been more forthcoming than the Director General in describing the problems being encountered by the Agency in Iran. In an interview on Sept. 11, 2005 in the London Sunday Telegraph, he said: "It is reaching the point where it is beyond critical. The IAEA can only work on the basis of the facts that are presented to it, and there have been many serious omissions by the Iranians. The Iranians are exploiting all the loopholes in the international agreements. As to why they are doing this you can draw your own conclusions. As it stands, the investigating authority of the agency is too limited with regard to Iran. To do its job properly it needs to have more authority than is currently available to it."

In an op-ed article on Sept. 14 in the New York Times, Mr. Goldschmidt says, [T]wo and a half years after its noncompliance was discovered, Iran is still holding back information and full cooperation.Inspectors are still unable to specify the origin of all enriched uranium particles found in Iran.Nor can inspectors rule out the possible involvement of Irans military in nuclear-related activities.It is time for the International Atomic Energy Agency to get the authority it needs from the Security Council to complete the verification that Irans nuclear program is and has been, as claimed, exclusively for peaceful purposes.

We agree that IAEA referral of Iran to the Security Council is long overdue, but wish to stress that one of the reasons for doing this is that the Agencys Board has refused to exercise the statutory authority it already has to strengthen the hand of its inspectors. Specifically, last November, the Agencys Board turned down a U.S. proposal to authorize anyplace, anytime inspections, which would have forced Iran to open its military sites or face referral to and possible sanctions by the Security Council. The Board also did not impose sanctions of its own, as authorized by Article 12C of the IAEA statute, for dealing with a state that fails to remedy its non-compliance: direct curtailment or suspension of assistancecall for the return of materials and equipment made availablesuspend any non-complying member from the privileges and rights of membership. After all, there should have been a price immediately imposed on Iran for secretly violating the safeguards requirements of the NPT for nearly 20 years.

It is also important to compare ElBaradeis findings with those in a new U.S. State Department report, released August 30, which examines compliance by Iran and other nations with arms control agreements. Excerpts of the report applying to solely to Iran have been compiled by the Nuclear Control Institute.

After an extensive review of Irans concealment of uranium enrichment, plutonium production, heavy-water production and weapons-related activities prior to disclosures by Iranian dissidents in 2003, the State Department report finds:

. The breadth of Irans nuclear development efforts, the secrecy and deceptions with which they have been conducted for nearly 20 years, its redundant and surreptitious procurement channels, Irans persistent failure to comply with its obligations to report to the IAEA and to apply safeguards to such activities, and the lack of a reasonable economic justification for this program leads us to conclude that Iran is pursuing an effort to manufacture nuclear weapons, and has sought and received assistance in this effort in violation of Article II of the NPT. This weapons program combines elements of not only the activities declared to the IAEA and ostensibly run by the civilian Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), but also any still undeclared fuel cycle and other activities that may exist, including those that may be run solely be the military.

In addition, Irans past failure to declare the import of UF₆, failure to provide design information to the IAEA on the existing centrifuge facility prior to the introduction of nuclear material, and its conduct of undeclared laser isotope separation, uranium conversion experiments, and plutonium separation work further reinforce this assessment and also make clear that Iran has violated Article III of the NPT and its IAEA safeguards agreement.
 

One the basis of this U.S. government analysis and all documentation and concerns presented at this press conference, we believe the IAEA Board should delay no further the referral of Iran to the Security Council.

Thank you.