IAEA can’t guarantee any nuclear programme is peaceful

LONDON: Having failed to reach an agreement on a comprehensive nuclear accord in November, Tehran and the six world powers set a new deadline - July 1, 2015.
The diplomats are to meet again on Jan 18, though prospects for a rapid breakthrough remain thin. One big roadblock is that the International Atomic Energy Agency has set for itself the impossible goal of verifying the “purely peaceful” nature of Iran’s nuclear program.
The agency, however, cannot do this. Not for Iran - not for any country. By holding Iran to this impossible standard, the agency undercuts the likelihood of a nuclear deal.
No matter how stringent the agency’s oversight, for example, some Iranian scientist or engineer could always idly doodle bomb designs - with or without the knowledge of the government. So no one can prove that all nuclear activities in Iran are purely peaceful.
As long as actual nuclear materials are not involved, such weapons research is not against the letter of the law. Even running computer simulations of nuclear bombs would be consistent with the (rather lax) requirements of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and those of the IAEA nuclear safeguards agreement.
Yet after the previous round of talks ended, the head of the agency, Yukiya Amano, said on CNN that his group “cannot yet give the assurance that all nuclear activities in Iran are for peaceful purposes.” By repeating the phrase four times in the short interview, he suggested this is a key role of his agency.
But it is not. Amano also failed to mention that Iran is not unique in this. The agency cannot vouch for the purely peaceful nature of nuclear activities in Argentina, Brazil and 51 other states as well. The agency has admitted that its “legal authority to pursue the verification of possible nuclear weapons-related activity is limited” unless nuclear material is involved.
The organisation can seek the voluntary cooperation of a signatory state to go beyond this standard. But it does not have either the legal basis or the technical capability to verify that “all nuclear activity” is peaceful in any nation.
A former agency director, Hans Blix, recently explained this point. “There could always be small things in a big geographical area that can be hidden,” Blix said, “and you can never guarantee completely that there are no undeclared activities.”
The atomic energy agency was designed as an apolitical technical organisation. It was set up to take regular accounting of member states’ nuclear materials, ensuring that none is diverted to weapons use. The agency has executed this mission well. Over the decades, for example, it has repeatedly confirmed that declared nuclear material in Iran has not been diverted to any military programme.
Contact with member states is governed by bilateral safeguards agreements, whose sole purpose is to confirm this nuclear material accountancy. But nowhere does it state the agency’s job is to monitor “all nuclear activities,” or that it is responsible for ensuring the purely peaceful nature of any nation’s nuclear programme.
The reason is simple: The agency also does not have the manpower, budget and specialized technical skills to carry out nuclear-weapons investigations in signatory states. By suggesting it can prove all Iran’s nuclear activities are peaceful, the agency is overselling its capabilities. There are actually few nuclear-weapons experts at the agency, and those few are banned by Iran from working on its inspections file.
So the agency’s material-accountancy experts are trying to make technical judgments on weaponisation work they are unfamiliar with. And they appear to be getting things wrong.
After the latest round of talks ended in November, for example, Iran provided evidence that supported its claims that the agency’s reports describing the “possible military dimensions” of its nuclear program are “full of errors.”