I was in Brussels for the EU event this weekend but I won’t be in Washington for the meetings this week. Instead I will be here in Berlin and, in fact, when Mousavian is being introduced at Maryland I’ll be arriving at Herbert-von-Karajan-Str. 1, on occasion of Sir Simon Rattle’s presenting the long-awaited Samale/Mazzuca/Philips/Cohrs version of the completed Symphony Nr. 9 by Anton Bruckner. On February 24, they’ll be at Carnegie Hall where they will perform the American premiere of this work.

The focus of all the meetings in Brussels and Washington is on doing diplomacy with Iran, a subject which–to remain in central Europe for a moment–might have inspired Theodor Fontane a century ago to call it ein weites Feld, a pet phrase he used to describe a topic which was difficult to sum up in less than a 500-page novel.

On Saturday we had a good discussion on Iran in Brussels, and since I’m not going to be at any of the events in Washington this week, I’ve jotted down some notes from that discussion, and included a few points which came my way during some recent meetings in other Western capitals. A good deal of this may seem ho-hum to some readers who are following this subject daily at close range. But it might be worth reiterating for a more general audience because the recent escalation of the Iran crisis has perhaps deterred people from asking tough questions about what the advocates of “engaging Iran” exactly have in mind. Let’s hope the meetings this week will drill into these issues.

• Crisis management or conflict resolution?  At the Brussels EU meeting, Prince Turki Al Faisal Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud suggested in simple terms that what engagement means needs to be clarified: “Crisis management and conflict resolution are not the same.”  The recent escalation of the war of words and deeds–Iran beginning uranium enrichment at  Fordo, threats by Israelis to bomb targets in Iran, Iranian war games and threats to block the Strait of Hormuz and counter-posturing by the United States–has inevitably shifted attention away from the quest for what looks like the holy grail–an ultimate peaceful resolution to the Iran nuclear dilemma–and instead toward what’s called for right now to prevent a war with Iran during the first half of 2012. The interest of P5+1 states in preventing a war is not necessarily identical with the kind of commitment which would be required from them, and from Iran, to achieve a comprehensive negotiated settlement.
•  Are Iran’s Six Interlocutors on the Same Page?  So far, it doesn’t look like it. US-Israel shuttle diplomacy and the wave of bilaterals held by China and Russia with Iran the last two months suggest that none of the P5+1 wants a war with Iran. But it is far less clear that the U.S., the U.K., France, and Germany are on the same page about what a roadmap for a negotiation would look like and about what opening gambit they would present in any negotiation with Iran about the kind of ”comprehensive solution” which the EU’s last letter to Iranian leaders seems to imply would be the endgame. To say nothing about differences between the Western powers and Russia which have emerged in response to the Lavrov proposal back in mid-2011.
• What endgame do the players want?  That’s not clear either. Regardless of what Ashton’s October letter to Iran says is the desired outcome, at least a few important people in Washington will tell you they would prefer regime change to a negotiated solution. Likewise, in the trenches you will sometimes hear the view that the U.S. should go into any negotiation with Iran aiming for a 2003 Libya-type outcome–where Iran gives up its nuclear assets. My understanding is that Iran would never agree to that. On the basis of the Ashton letter, and the things in the Lavrov proposal which Western officials say they liked, I’m assuming instead that a negotiated solution would imply that the parties basically agree that, at the end of the day, the Islamic Republic of Iran 1.) would have a nuclear energy program under IAEA safeguards including the Additional Protocol, 2.) would retain some nuclear assets which support a cliff-edge nuclear weapons capability, 3.) would be enriching uranium, 4.) would not be subject to international sanctions, and 5.) would benefit from an imprimatur from the IAEA (“broader conclusion”) following from implementation of the AP, expressing  the IAEA’s confidence that Iran’s nuclear activities are exclusively dedicated to peaceful use. But is everybody who matters on board with this?
• Role of  top-level decision makers in the U.S. administration. After doing the rounds in Washington a  month ago, I take it as given that some key players are clearly not enthusiastic about launching any ambitious diplomatic initiatives with Iran at the present time. There will be no U.S. move in this direction unless some very senior officials in key U.S. agencies–at or just below the secretary level–take the initiative and assume the political risk. But is that going to happen in 2012?
• Iran’s obligation to suspend enrichment is at the crux of any negotiation toward a settlement. When Lavrov floated his Iran roadmap last year, Western states didn’t like the provision permitting Iran to resume enrichment and the heavy water (a.k.a. plutonium production-related) activities after suspending these activities for just three months. Were something like the Russian plan to go forward in the future, Western states would want Iran to demonstrate its credibility over a far longer period before the suspension obligation under UNSCR would be lifted. What’s more, some Western states would likely want the UNSC, where they have veto power–and not the IAEA, where they don’t–to be the ultimate arbiter of when and on what terms sanctions against Iran would be lifted. That would be a bitter pill for Iran to swallow.
•  The IAEA November report moved the goal post. When the IAEA put out its report on Iran’s nuclear weapons-related activities in November, there was a lot of fretting on the sidelines about the wisdom and indeed, the legality, of the IAEA having done that (during the IAEA board meeting the governors witnessed what sounded over my cell phone like  the Russian diplomatic equivalent of a hissy fit over this). But in fact, three months later it would seem that the IAEA report has re-framed the debate: We might argue about whether Iran is doing weaponization work now, but in the wake of the IAEA report there are not a lot of people out there who express doubt that Iran since 1989 has done work putting them on the cusp of a nuclear weapons capability. The IAEA report appears consistent with the view that in 2003, Iran took a high-level decision to suspend activities which could have only a nuclear weapons rationale, but also to continue with those dual-use activities which in theory could be explained, if they were to be exposed, by a peaceful application. So does the IAEA report imply that the 2007 U.S. NIE on Iran is now out of date? Nope.
• Lack of trust remains the biggest impediment to a negotiation. In May, 2010, Turkey, Iran, and Brazil negotiated the Tehran Declaration. The U.S. found the result wanting on two main points: there was no agreement by Iran not to enrich uranium to 20% U-235, and no legal assurances that Iran’s LEU would be taken out of the country as agreed. So the U.S. then had a choice to make: Renegotiate that deal with Iran to cover those two points, or instead scuttle it and impose UNSC sanctions. The U.S. chose sanctions over a renegotiation. Why? Two main reasons: They prior to this effectively squared the circle and persuaded Russia and China to agree to sanctions, and they concluded that Iran never intended to implement the Tehran Declaration in the first place but instead aimed to dodge imminent UNSC penalties. The U.S. might make that same choice again. To be sure, China and Russia haven’t agreed to further sanctions, but the U.S. has probably less confidence now than it did in 2010 that Iran’s leadership, having marginalized or eliminated moderate voices, is serious about negotiating a comprehensive solution.
• Why is the West confident sanctions will work? There is certainly evidence that the sanctions regime so far has hurt Iran’s economy but little to show that the sanctions would compel Iran to comply with UNSC resolutions. So what are the possible rationales for the West imposing new and more severe sanctions on Iran, as the West plans? Two possibilities come to mind: 1.) As diplomats suggested at the Brussels EU meeting, sanctions are prompted by the need of the nonproliferation regime to be credible. 2.) There is also the possibility that Western governments have information from people on the ground in Iran which provides them high confidence that imposition of draconian sanctions against Iran’s oil economy and central bank will result in political changes inside Iran, either because Iran’s hardline leaders fear a wave of popular opposition, or because they are confident that the new sanctions will prompt opposition forces in Iran to take matters into their own hands. Does the U.S. and its allies have such information? They’re not telling.
• A new Turkish-Brazilian thrust? Since last fall some people in Vienna will tell you they want to see a restart of an intermediated negotiation with Iran. Mostly you hear about Turkey but sometimes also Brazil. For sure, some Turkish diplomats have in recent weeks been keen, even premature, in saluting what looked like a restart of diplomacy based on an Iranian reply to the Ashton letter. But at the working level, both Turkey and Brazil in 2010 experienced first hand the difficulties of negotiating with Iran. Back then Turkey had a policy of “no problems with its neighbors.” They have problems now, including with Iran’s ally Syria. Brazil’s decision in 2010 to negotiate the Tehran Declaration was a presidential decision. Brazil’s current president might have a different appreciation of the cost and benefit of such an approach.

The stream of dual-use goods is virtually endless, and so has been the internal debate at the NSG about whether items should be listed or not. That’s even more so right now, because as I explained in this report published by Carnegie last month, the NSG has launched a comprehensive review of both its lists, and the decisions it makes about what to control and how to do it will profoundly impact how we attack procurement threats in years to come.

One of the items which is not on the NSG dual-use list is a chemical substance which Iran has been keenly and furtively trying to import since the mid-1990s. This is anhydrous hydrogen fluoride, or AHF. (The term “anhydrous” is just a fancy way of saying that hydrogen fluoride [HF], otherwise known as hydrofluoric acid, is more or less pure, having less than 400 ppm of water.)

Iran needs AHF to process UO2 into UF4 for two programs that the UN Security Council says should be suspended: uranium enrichment and the Arak heavy water reactor.

The open literature on Iran’s nuclear program contains a few misleading references asserting that back in 1985, when the U.S. and China were negotiating a bilateral civilian nuclear cooperation agreement, the U.S. believed that efforts by Iran to import AHF were a tell-tale signature of Iranian interest in reprocessing, and that China therefore agreed not to supply AHF to Iran because the NSG controlled exports of AHF.

In fact, some papers in my files, authored in 2003 by scientists from the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, spelled out for anyone who cared to know that AEOI wanted AHF for two reasons: First, to produce F2 gas by an electrolysis process, and then use the F2 to fluorinate UF4 and generate UF6; and second, to use HF to hydrofluorinate UO2 to produce UF4 (also known as green salt), which would be subsequently reduced to uranium metal in a reduction vessel. These disclosures match findings in John Garver’s recent and comprehensive tome on Sino-Iran relations, namely, that China before that had “supplied Iran with blueprints, test reports, and design information” for a UF6 production plant and a second plant to produce uranium metal. In 2005, the AEOI reported in fact that the uranium conversion plant it built at Esfahan using Chinese technology features both chemical processes. UF4 can be processed into UF6 in Building 101C, or instead into uranium metal in Building 104.

Garver points out that when the U.S. in 1997 objected to China about its plans to sell AHF to Iran, the Chinese riposted that the transaction was perfectly legal because AHF wasn’t on the NSG dual-use list. That might have been just a tad disingenuous since China at that time was not a member of the NSG anyway. But the Chinese statement was correct.

It’s also correct today. AHF is still is not on the NSG list, regardless of its critical role in UF6 production in some enrichment programs, including Iran’s. If Iran wants to use its Chinese technology to provide the F4 in UF4 or the F6 in UF6 for enrichment feedstock or uranium metal fuel, it needs the AHF.

China-Korea-Thailand-UAE-Iran

Iranian procurement agents were not deterred by assurances which China provided to the U.S. in 1998 that planned sales of AHF to Iran would be indefinitely “suspended.” Customs intelligence files of at least three Western governments testify to repeated efforts by Iran–some successful, some not–to import Chinese-origin AHF for a period of nearly 15 years. In the beginning, Iran tried to import the AHF directly from Chinese producers. As time went on, Iran added transit destinations to hoodwink export controllers.

In December 2004, while Iran was negotiating with the EU-3 over a deal to suspend its enrichment program, Iran announced that it had approved construction of its own AHF production plant, also at Esfahan–a point that stuck in the craw of EU negotiators who saw that step as a demonstration of bad faith by Iran. Until that plant was up and running, however, Iran would need to import AHF and throughout the last decade they kept trying to get their fingers on it.

Iran’s AHF production plant, with a capacity of 5,000 tons of AHF/yr, far more than what is needed to produce UF6 at current rates in Esfahan, was scheduled to be finished and working in just two years. Some intelligence information however suggested that Iran encountered delays. For whatever reason, Iran has continued to try to snag large amounts of AHF, and to disguise its efforts by organizing complex transactions involving multiple transit points. In 2008, for example, in Thailand, the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines loaded a large consignment of Chinese AHF onto a Liberian-flagged vessel bound for the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas on the Persian Gulf, with an intermediate stopover in the UAE where it would again change hands.  Before that, Iranian procurement agents had arranged for the AHF to be purchased from a Chinese producer by a Korean firm, and then forwarded to Thailand. Western customs intelligence agencies got wind of the transaction, and the AHF was intercepted in the nick of time at the Port of Dubai before it headed to Iran.

NSG List vs Catch-All Approach

So why, if AHF is a potential bottleneck in Iran’s designs to produce UF6 for its centrifuges, and Iran is going to great lengths to deceive us about its efforts to import the stuff, isn’t AHF on the NSG dual-use list?

AHF is just one of many items which could be considered nuclear dual-use and which are not routinely controlled. The way the NSG works, all 46 members must agree to put an item on a control list. In some cases, business pressure groups in key NSG states object to their governments and an item may be left off the list. (That’s why my report last month urged that the NSG closely monitor efforts by these lobbies to interfere with consensus-formation during the control list review).

There are a lot of companies making AHF, in a lot of countries worldwide. Producing it doesn’t require much if any proprietary know-how. And its nuclear use accounts for just a fraction of demand. These data from NNSA suggest that any efforts to put AHF on the NSG list would kick up a fuss, because uranium fuel processing accounts for just 3% of global use of HF. A major consumer is the petroleum industry–which would not be amused by a new requirement that AHF be subject to nuclear-use controls whenever it was sought for use in a gasoline refinery anywhere in the Middle East.

Furthermore, there’s the China factor to consider. By its own admission, the biggest producer of HF in the world is a U.S. firm, Honeywell. But according to industry market intelligence for this sector, there is now a shift underway in HF production away from advanced industrial countries. One reason for this globalization may be that making this stuff is a nasty health hazard. AHF is highly toxic and corrosive. If you breathe it in, deep in your lungs the gas precipitates to hydrofluoric acid. China presently makes HF cheaply and with comparatively little oversight and has half of the world’s fluorite reserves used to make HF. According to one market survey, “the growing tight supply of fluorite resources forced the tycoons in [the] fluorine chemical industry… to transfer the production of HF to China, and establish their plants there successfully.” (In one case, this process may have been just a little too successful: a German AHF producer last year sued its Chinese partners for secretly building 12 unauthorized AHF plants in China using the German firm’s technology.) Would China consent to tightening controls on AHF?

AHF is on the control list of the Australia Group because it is also identified as a precursor for nerve agents containing fluorine. My NSG report recommended that the NSG intensify contacts with the Australia Group and other multilateral export control arrangements in the interest of efficiency. Perhaps the CWC people have a best practice or two that would help the NSG keep AHF out of the wrong hands.

Just because AHF is not on the NSG control list, that doesn’t mean no one at the NSG is paying attention to it. Given repeated attempts by Iran to import it, AHF is on a so-called “watch list” of unlisted items which the U.S. government has provided NSG members to trigger catch-all controls for shipments to Iran.

The “watch list” is there to flag NSG members to halt exports of non-listed goods to suspicious end-users. But if Chinese-origin AHF is headed for Iran via non-NSG intermediate destinations like Thailand, it won’t be stopped if the intermediary entrepots have no catch-all controls on their books. What’s more, catch-all controls won’t be effective unless they are applied by all NSG states themselves when they are needed. South Korea is a member of the NSG; that 2008 transaction involved a South Korean AHF vendor.

In years ahead, the NSG will be challenged by a massive global trade increase in unlisted goods. That means that effective application of catch-all controls will be absolutely critical to halt proliferators–something for the NSG to think hard about as it reviews its control lists over the next three years.

The logic for the US letting Russia move forward on its offer to Iran with some background guidance from Washington was this: President Obama through election day 2012 will be under pressure from Congress and Republican foes to be firm on Iran, depriving him of any freedom to lead the way toward a diplomatic resolution which the US has said it favors. The P-5+1 might persuade Iran to seriously take up the Russian-sponsored gambit in light of increasing threats from Israel that it’s patience is running out. Russia and China might  join with the West because the outcome would lift nuclear sanctions and permit their bilateral relations with Iran to return to business as usual.

That scenario assumes that all the parties involved have an interest in negotiating a settlement to the crisis. In fact, none of them may have an interest in reaching such an outcome.

• The US policy on Iran’s nuclear program is now in effect a one-track policy of  implementing more sanctions and containing Iran; there is no real commitment to being part of a diplomatic solution with the current Iranian regime. Administration officials dedicated to serving the President will make sure that no outside-the-box thinking on Iran will go forward if it puts Obama’s re-election at risk.
• Russia and China may not accomodate US interests during any negotiation of a deal with Iran because of antagonisms with the US over bigger strategic issues, and they may conclude that cooperation with the US on Iran provides them few benefits.
• Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has shown a desire to engage with the West, is losing his grip and a truculent Ayatollah Khamenei will rule out Iran making any concessions over its nuclear program, teaching Iranians that Muammar Qaddafi made a fatal mistake by giving his WMD programs up.
• Israel, contrary to some conventional wisdom, is not bluffing and is prepared to attack nuclear installations in Iran if it concludes that Israel’s nuclear weapons monopoly in the Middle East is in dire jeopardy.What may ultimately hold Israel back is the calculus that doing this would defer any prospect of internally-generated regime change in Iran. A negotiated deal would in its view result in a nuclear weapons capability in the hands of a regime which is hostile to Israel.

Let’s look at these points in a little more detail.

An emerging one-track US approach

Officially, the US follows a two-track course of carrots and sticks on Iran. That’s been the case since 2009 when Obama told Iranians–for example on occasion of the Nawruz holiday–that ”the administration is committed to diplomacy” and a process that “will not be advanced by threats.” In the meantime, Iran appeared to respond to concern about its enrichment program. Ten months after Obama’s inauguration, Iran took up a uranium swap plan meant to deter Iran from raising its enrichment level. No agreement was reached. This fall, Ahmadinejad on three occasions including at the UN General Assembly offered to reduce Iran’s enrichment level from 20% to 5% U-235. My colleague James Acton in October recommended that the US take up this offer but so far that hasn’t happened.

Why not? There are several fundamental reasons, but the bottom line that, since 2009 the US has lost interest in the diplomatic track. In 2010, the US encouraged Brazil and Turkey to offer to negotiate with Iran on a fuel swap deal to remove 1,200 kg of Iranian-enriched LEU in exchange for supply of 20%-enriched uranium for its safeguarded TRR research reactor. At Carnegie this year, Celso Amorim, who was Brazil’s foreign minister when the Brazil-Turkey-Iran diplomacy was happening, related that after the US had prompted Brazil to make this deal with Iran and Iran agreed, the US then backed out. In Amorim’s words the deal would have been an important confidence-builder with Iran, and Amorim quoted then-IAEA Director General Mohammed ElBaradei as remarking on the occasion in Brazil that “If the agreement was not accepted, its because the countries that proposed it cannot take yes for an answer.” I’ve heard nothing so far to convince me that Amorim’s account is fundamentally incorrect. For his part, ElBaradei has gone on record with a tale of repeated lost diplomatic opportunities in Iran for which he apportions a lot of the blame on the US and its allies in the IAEA board of governors and the UN Security Council.

So is anyone in the US administration seriously interested in negotiation with Iran at the close of 2011 and into next year? The name Bob Einhorn comes up in a some conversations. Perhaps a few others in the State Department may be on a short list and who probably don’t want to be named. But US policy on Iran is in the President’s lap, assisted by an interagency process which, as the 2012 election gets more and more attention, will be overshadowed by the designs of people who serve the President, and that means campaigning and strategizing to ensure his re-election. NSC adviser Tom Donilon will be a player. At Brookings a week ago Donilon gave a speech in which he said that Obama’s handshake offer to Iran had been rejected, and he described Iran as a “great nation”–those were also the President’s words in 2009–which had become a “pariah state.” Donilon enumerated US policy in Iran as amounting to having several components intending to isolate and encircle Iran, impose unprecedented sanctions, build up US allies’ defenses in the region, and, lastly, “leaving the door ajar diplomatically” but at the same time underscoring that “no options are off the table.” I don’t see any real diplomacy in this. But Donilon’s message is one that leaves Obama fairly invulnerable to attacks from his Republican opponents during the coming year that the President is soft on Iran. Leading the field on the Iran issue from the right is one candidate who is openly advocating regime change. Based on what Donilon said last week, there won’t be any significant move away from what looks from here to be a de facto one-track containment policy.

And the other Western P-5+1 states? If anything they are even more determined to tighten the noose around Iran next year. Germany’s diplomatic machinery, which was seen in recent years as resisting a US-led escalation of pressure on Iran, under different management is taking what looks like an unprecedented hard line. France and perhaps the U.K. are more hawkish than the U.S.

Russia and China

The Russian offer to Iran was set forth to Iran this summer and is described in a two-page memo which has been shared with the rest of the P-5+1 group. It isn’t clear how Iran has responded. Its initial responses, including from Ahmadinejad, were not committal and left the matter under consideration. As far as I can tell, Washington and the other P-5+1 states have said nothing definitive, but the internal US reaction at this point ranges from lukewarm interest to outright dismissal.

What’s in the Russian offer? It contains the germ of what could become an agreement by Iran to limit enrichment to 5% U-235 [as Ahmadinejad offered at the UN in August following up from meetings between Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Iranian counterparts]; an agreement by Iran to limit enrichment activity in Iran to just one [in some versions of what's on the table two] locations in Iran; and–finally and crucially–an agreement by Iran to afford the IAEA access to sites, personnel, and data to permit it to conclude whether the Iranian nuclear program is in its judgment dedicated to peaceful use only. That means implementation of the Additional Protocol.

When Lavrov announced in August that he had made this offer to Iran, some verification-minded US observers muttered that the Russians were prepared to concede to Iran that the 2007 ”work plan”–agreed to by Iran and the IAEA about the scope of outstanding issues that must be resolved pursuant to the IAEA’s mandate from the board of governors and the UN Security Council to investigate Iran’s nuclear activities–could be declared ”closed.” For both the IAEA and at least the Western P-5, such an agreement would be a non-starter. In a separate meeting held this summer between the IAEA and Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi, Salehi offered to intensify cooperation with the IAEA provided the IAEA agree that the IAEA take off the table its dossier of information on what the IAEA called a “possible military dimension” (PMD) to the nuclear program and what Iran routinely refers to as “alleged studies.

The Salehi offer to the IAEA and the Russian offer to Iran are not necessarily the same, but in fact, if the Russian gambit is ever fleshed out and something like real negotiations on a de-escalation roadmap were to bear fruit, they would, as I’ve condensed into few words at the tail end of this analysis, result in something which would probably never be acceptable to the US Congress, and maybe to any US administration, relying as it would upon a verdict by the IAEA that Iran’s nuclear program is peaceful, and that this Iranian regime would thereafter continue to pile up an inventory of enriched uranium and have done at least some of the homework needed to build nuclear bombs.

There are good reasons I’ve enumerated in the above Carnegie analysis why both China and Russia on Iran in the P-5 group are what the Swiss call unsichere Kantonisten. But my Carnegie colleague Dmitri Trenin has taken it one step beyond, accounting for friction in the IAEA board room last month over the IAEA Iran report as a casualty of the failure of both sides to come to grips with US plans for BMD which he describes here. If he’s right, unless Beijing and Moscow change their calculus or reach an agreement on strategic issues with Washington standing in the way, getting the US, Russia, and China to unite over a diplomatic outcome which would lift Washington’s profile in the Persian Gulf would be tantamount to squaring the circle. Russia and China are also smarting over the Western P-5 states’ role in Qaddafi’s ouster. Then there’s Syria. Some US officials likewise see Russia’s offer to Iran as a purely cynical move to buy time.

Israel’s calculus

Wouldn’t a negotiated resolution of the Iran nuclear crisis be in Israel’s interest? Probably not, the way some strategists there see it. Under the Shah, Israel enjoyed fairly good relations with Iran especially vis-a-vis Arab states in the region. Another Carnegie colleague, Karim Sadjadpour, has explained at length that were Israel to attack Iran, doing that would artificially prolong the life of the current Iranian regime. That’s important because at a time when Israel is bracing for a coming wave of democratic anti-Israeli sentiment from its newly-freed Arab neighbors, Israel will want to invest in a future Iran which–as in the past–was willing to live with Israel in peace.

That logic also would imply that Israel would not be interested in a negotiated solution to the nuclear crisis that would legitimate Iran’s current rulers. Indeed, given the fact that US-Israeli ties will be to a large extent driving Washington’s moves on Iran in 2012, the same goes for the US: If as Donilon says the President has now concluded that Iran is a “pariah state,” then the US won’t be interested in negotiating a nuclear deal that would help assure its survival.

Khamenei’s ultimate logic

And, finally, Iran: The Israeli threats we heard about last month in the run-up to the IAEA report, I was assured, would be leveraged by the P-5+1 to try to convince Iran to negotiate a peaceful resolution of the nuclear conflict. Whether they make any headway is a different matter. Ahmadinejad, the key figure in the P-5′s efforts to engage Iran since 2009, is in deep trouble. When the post-revolutionary regime dusted off the Shah’s nuclear program beginning in the 1980s, after the Iran-Iraq war and under President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani it acquired a potentially strategic dimension which it has retained. With more sanctions underway, Khamenei’s lesson to Iranians will be that the West’s recent experience with North Korea and Libya teaches that Iran’s nuclear assets are not bargaining chips but are ultimate guarantors of the survival of the nation.

Since 2004, the IAEA has obtained a lot of information documenting that military-linked research and procurement organizations were involved in Iran’s nuclear program. Some of that activity was carried out during the presidency of Seyed Mohammad Khatami, from 1997 through 2005. Some individuals the IAEA has identified as having been engaged in this activity were also in the program under Rafsanjani’s presidency, from 1989 through 1997.

ElBaradei met Rafsanjani before the IAEA started compiling that dossier on weapons-related activities. At that time, the IAEA had much broader issues on its plate with Iran, including a discussion of implementation of the Additional Protocol by Iran. The meeting with Rafsanjani was squeezed into an itinerary packed with meetings between ElBaradei and other Iranian political luminaries, including President Khatami, Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi and the Speaker of Iran’s Parliament, Hojjatoleslam Mehdi Karroubi. Diplomacy, courtesy, and confidence-building were the watchwords for these meetings.

Nonetheless, the IAEA’s meeting with Rafsanjani had an extraordinary moment: During the discussion, Rafsanjani at one point became very emotional and nearly broke into tears when he described having witnessed the results of a battlefield poison gas attack on Iranian front soldiers during Iran’s eight-year war with Iraq, ordered by Saddam Hussein. Rafsanjani had described a state of affairs during that war when, after the poison gas attack, and the virtually absent response to it by the rest of the world, as one participant in IAEA-Iran diplomacy related, the very existence of the Iranian state was at stake.

The IAEA never sat down with Rafsanjani again.

About a year later, the IAEA began obtaining an increasing stream of evidence suggesting there is a “possible military dimension” (PMD) in Iran’s nuclear program, and that Iran had taken steps, in procurement and in conducting R&D activities, which would be useful for developing nuclear weapons. The IAEA’s dossier on these activities after 2005 continued to grow–it contains historical information on HE testing, firing systems, neutron research, a nuclear-capable missile reentry vehicle, chemical processing of uranium to metal, procurement of high-speed cameras–which suggests a composite picture of dedicated Iranian interest in this subject. By 2008, the IAEA had been routinely investigating Iran’s program for six years, and the IAEA’s files on Iran’s nuclear program were comprehensive enough for the agency to ask Rafsanjani some questions about nuclear decision making and about what he knew was going on in the nuclear program. Rafsanjani answered these questions, but the IAEA was not satisfied with all of the answers he provided.

As I suggested here way back in June, the IAEA will very shortly provide an assessment of Iran’s nuclear program including its military dimension to the Board of Governors. We hear that an initial version of the report, for Amano, has been drafted and that it is now being amended.

The current mantra from Iran on this is that all the information on PMD in the IAEA’s files is falsified. That wasn’t the Iranian view in the past, as late as 2008, however, because Iran knew that the IAEA had multiple sources for this information. Until around 2008 there was no Iranian idée fixe that the Department of Safeguards was spoon-fed all this stuff by the US and Israel and other governments hostile to Iran, and that the rest of it came from unqualified open-source references. Iran was prepared in fact to discuss some of the information then because it knew that at least some of the IAEA’s information was genuine. But those were different times.

Who decided?

There is some continuity in the IAEA’s composite Iran picture, permitting the agency to establish that certain individuals with links to military-related organizations in Iran appear to have been consistently involved in weaponization-related R&D and procurement activities.

But it is far less clear who key personel in Iran–including Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a leading scientist–are taking orders from. And it would appear that difficulties experienced by the IAEA in assigning personal responsibility or authority for directing nuclear activities in Iran involving military-affiliated personnel and organizations–in particular the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)–may be similar to problems the U.S. government is currently facing in trying to establish a watertight connection between suspects it says were planning to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, and higher-ups at the top of the Iranian government.

The line we heard from the U.S. last week that there was a direct connection between the alleged perpetrators of the foiled assassination plot and Iran’s top leadership has since been qualified by some U.S. officials who acknowledge that that relationship might not be so direct after all. In the IAEA’s nuclear investigation, similar forensic problems have arisen over the last five or six years.

If there is a smoking gun in the US government case against Iran’s leadership in the foiled assassination plot allegations this week, it’s that someone in Iran was prepared to wire across USD 100,000 to pay for services rendered. In the nuclear investigation, the IAEA has some information showing that money was allocated for activities which appear to be military-related in Iran. But there’s no slam-dunk record on file showing that someone at the top of the Iranian regime authorized scientists or procurement agents to go for broke and steer the nuclear program in the direction of nuclear weapons.

The Iranians have been masters in compartmentalizing their nuclear program. Some scientists who have been doing research that looks like it may be related to nuclear weapons development aren’t even aware that they are part of the nuclear program. But it would be a mistake to assume that decisions about these activities are not being made at a very high level.

Was Rafsanjani ever a decision maker in this area? I have no idea. Some people in the VIC over the last couple of years have asked that question, going back to that Tehran meeting with ElBaradei when Rafsanjani conveyed his strong reaction to those Iraqi poison gas attacks.

Before he was elected President of Iran Rafsanjani had a senior military role during the Iran-Iraq war. If this  report is to be believed, in 1988, a year before his election as President, Rafsanjani was appointed by the Ayatollah Khomenei as head of Iran’s armed forces, and that during his tenure he advanced control over the military by the IRGC–a military organization which U.S. officials have asserted again and again since the 1990s was responsible for key parts of Iran’s nuclear program (and is at the center of U.S. assassination allegations now) . But the report also suggests that pro-Rafsanjani personalities in the IRGC were removed after Rafsanjani became President of Iran. During Rafsanjani’s presidency, however, the weight and power of the IRGC in Iranian politics and the economy considerably magnified.

The first Iraqi chemical weapons attack on Iran was in 1983. My understanding is this: Iraqi chemical attacks provoked Iran to mull how to most effectively respond to such an attack in the future. The world was virtually silent when those attacks on Iran were carried out. It would be logical that decision making on Iran’s response would involve the country’s top leadership as well as its military. Decisions were taken–somewhere, by someone–to do nuclear military-related R&D work in specific areas sometime after the Iraqi chemical attacks were carried out.

Rafsanjani has been named as a top-level actor in highly-sensitive decision making before, outside the nuclear realm, involving terrorist attacks on foreign soil which governments say were piloted by Iran. But to my knowledge, these allegations haven’t been substantiated or have been disputed. One such case was in Argentina, where a prosecutor asserted that Rafsanjani was co-responsible for a 1994 attack on a Jewish organization in Buenos Aires. The prosecutor failed however to make those charges stick in Interpol arrest warrants. In another case, in Germany in 1992, prosecutors charged that Iran’s intelligence chief, Ali Fallahian, masterminded a deadly attack on Kurdish opposition figures in a restaurant in Berlin. They also asserted that Rafsanjani was implicated, but some of the testimony from at least one witness who linked Rafsanjani to the attack was based on assumptions, not hard evidence.

Would Rafsanjani be in the position to help the IAEA better understand what’s in that assessment we will likely read in a few weeks? The IAEA might find the man at times described as Iran’s ultimate political survivor difficult to pin down, but he’s no longer in power, and I would hazard the guess that, if he is highly confident that Iran’s uranium enrichment program will survive, Iran’s ex-President might now have some illuminating answers to questions the IAEA first asked him three years before.

It was sponsored by 44 states. Yeoman’s work was done by Canada, and the original sponsoring group included Australia, Japan, ROK, U.K., and the U.S.

Readers might recall that a year ago, a similar resolution introduced under the same agenda item at GC/54 stirred up a hornet’s nest. That didn’t happen today, for a couple of reasons.

• First, unlike last year there was no GC/55 resolution tabled on Israeli nuclear capabilities. Last year there was such a resolution, which prompted a food fight between the Arab NAM and Western states over INC, which spilled over into efforts by the U.S. and others in the advanced nuclear states/Western group to pass the DPRK resolution.
• Second, this year China made sure that the language of Canada’s draft resolution on the DPRK was eviscerated to the point that there wasn’t really too much in the final document for oxygenated NAM states to object to.

The Canadian draft resolution contained language which a few states, and especially China, did firmly contest. China really took a red pencil to the draft. The result was a document which had no references in operative paragraphs to the issue which, in the view of Western states expressing their views in the plenary since Monday, had to a great extent justified the resolution in the first place, namely, the DPRK’s disclosure earlier this year that North Korea had built and apparently was operating a centrifuge uranium enrichment plant at Yongbyon. When all was said and done this morning, perhaps a quarter of the original Canadian draft resolution had been redacted, after Chinese negotiators in Vienna began getting instructions from their colleagues in Beijing who this week were holding talks with North Korean diplomats while the Vienna negotiations on the language of GC(55)/L.5 were underway.

I’m a little ahead of the IAEA conference organization staff at the moment, but the final version of the DPRK resolution should shortly be available here.

As usual for resolutions on touchy safeguards compliance issues like this, the final version of this resolution was a compromise. There were no references in operative paragraphs to the DPRK’s apparent enrichment plant and also no references to continued non-compliance by the DPRK. (That particular issue has to do with how NPT Article X is interpreted, and as it turns out, the IAEA Secretariat has a very different view of the matter than Pyongyang.)

The non-compliance and enrichment issues were instead relegated to the preamble. It recalled that the IAEA Board of Governors had previously found the DPRK in non-compliance, and it also “not[ed] serious concerns” about the DPRK’s “development of enrichment technology.” The preamble also “express[ed] concern regarding the DPRK’s claimed uranium enrichment program and light water reactor construction.”

I pointed out a week ago during the September BOG meeting that several member states had raised some issues with the IAEA Secretariat’s report to the board on the DPRK which was issued on September 2. But it turns out that these questions and objections in fact developed from some very strong opinions that had been expressed inside the boardroom way back in June, when a few states–led primarily by the ROK and supported by Japan–made clear that they wanted a report from the IAEA Secretariat on the nuclear program in the DPRK, regardless of the absence of any IAEA inspection activity in that country for about three years.

China and Russia object in BOG

Specifically, both China and Russia then voiced objections to the board asking Director General Yukiya Amano to prepare a lengthy report on the DPRK’s nuclear program for this month’s board meeting. Nonetheless, and encouraged by both the ROK and Japan, Amano did just that and he filed that DPRK report to the BOG on September 2.

The Chinese and Russian heartburn over the Amano report to the board rippled through at this week’s General Conference.

Accordingly, neither China nor Russia was very happy about certain bits in the draft DPRK resolution. To pass by consensus, the final compromise on this text had to satisfy them, of course, as it had to satisfy the ROK, which had sought firmer language and which was urged by the U.S. to support the final result.

The discontent of Russian and Chinese diplomats was considerable enough (the Russians were a little irritated that they were not credited in the resolution for launching any diplomatic initiatives in the DPRK’s direction)  to warrant concern today that these two states might even try to get the GC, soon after the final text of the resolution was agreed upon, to switch the order of the agenda items, permitting the DPRK resolution to be tabled for approval in the plenary after the NAM group got a chance to raise the temperture by weighing in on other resolutions dear to their heart, such as the resolution on safeguards and another on the Middle East. But that didn’t happen. (When the resolution came to a head in the plenary on Thursday morning, the group of, let’s say, highly motivated NAM states–Algeria, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Syria, Venezuela–was only warming up in that drafting working group.) So the DPRK resolution was approved in the plenary with only a murmur uttered by Cuba objecting to the slow process on disarmament and referring to the NAM’s quixotic goal of eliminating nuclear weapons by 2025. Some Western delegations breathed a sigh of relief that the Cuban intervention on the floor before the vote did not prompt leading statements by either Russia or China which might have triggered a feeding frenzy in the plenary.

So maybe the drafters of the DPRK resolution knew what they were doing when they decided to close on the final text in an informal group outside the Committee of the Whole. But when we consider the broader issue of NPT non-compliance, we’re looking at Iran down the road, and this modest DPRK resolution, following on the one on Syria in June, could be considered just a little curtain-raiser.

Business before pleasure, however.

DPRK and Israel: A Preludium

IAEA aficionados generally consider the BOG and the GC as discrete and separate events, and so they are, so they are. But this time the relationship between the two meetings is even a little noteworthy.

There’s a double whammy on the DPRK: The BOG tabled the item “Application of Safeguards in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” as item 6c of GOV/2011/46. This being Tuesday, that might come up tomorrow Wednesday. Next week, we’ll see the same agenda item as item 19 GC/55/1 and GC/55/1/Add.1.

The GC first. The DPRK item is on this year’s agenda because of operative paragraph 10 of this resolution from GC/54.

For this year’s meeting, Director General Yukiya Amano has prepared this report. It was provided to the BOG and the GC a couple of weeks ago.

This report is not without interest. Look, for instance, at Paragraphs 33 and 34. These describe accounts of information which the DPRK provided a Stanford University scholar and ex-LANL director and a private citizen, Sig Hecker, who traveled to the DPRK on non-official business and was briefed by the DPRK on the status of its uranium enrichment programme, including a peek at what Hecker thereafter described as a full-blown and apparently operating centrifuge enrichment plant.

The length of this report on the DPRK might appear to the casual observer as rather unusual, especially given the fact that IAEA safeguards personnel have not been to the DPRK to do inspection-related work since 2008. During the last three years or thereabouts, the agency has received no new first-hand information from its verification activities in that country to report to member states.

Let’s recall that over two years ago, when IAEA Arab states asked Amano to report to the 2010 GC on “Israel’s nuclear capabilities,” which they included on the agenda of GC/54, Amano likewise had little to report back because, as IAEA secretariat officials then pointed out, outside of a very limited number of nuclear activities which are covered under an Infcirc/66 safeguards agreement between Israel and the IAEA, the IAEA has no official information from Israel about its other nuclear activities–the ones that the Arab states are really interested in–because these are not subject to IAEA safeguards. Amano’s report to GC/54 was accordingly extremely perfunctory. Arab states were disappointed, but in fact Amano had little to tell them.

And the DPRK? Amano’s report on September 2 provided the board and the GC an extensive wheeze through North Korean nuclear history. We may hear later this week or next week during the GC about some member states’ misgivings about including the details of Hecker’s trip report from his visit to the nuclear research center in Yongbyon. According to some people at the VIC the last couple of weeks, including this information in the Amano report to the board was unusual, because the Hecker account could not be construed to be “official information” provided by an IAEA member state to the IAEA but was third-party information unverified by the IAEA and therefore might in a legal sense even qualify as hearsay. (Again, think about how the IAEA handled the Arabs’ request for information on Israel’s nuclear weapons activities–the Secretariat wouldn’t touch unverified or unofficial third-party claims about Israel’s nuclear weapons capabilities with a 10-foot pole.)

Shortly after Amano provided his DPRK report to board members and circulated it to member states preparing for the GC, the IAEA Department of Safeguards as usual held a closed-door technical briefing at the VIC for IAEA missions and staff about the contents of its findings reported to the BOG (this time, in addition to DPRK, also Iran).

During that briefing, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran’s IAEA ambassador–who usually has a lot to say about what the IAEA presents during these briefings–raised questions about the procedure by which the Director General reports findings to the BOG on member states’ nuclear activities. The Iranian Ambassador didn’t specifically raise any problems with the Hecker material being included in the DPRK report. But Soltanieh’s remarks in the view of some observers appeared to suggest that Amano’s decision at this time to provide the BOG an extensive overview on North Korea’s nuclear programme was irregular and served a hidden agenda.

Iran and GOV/INF/500/Rev 1

In fact, another IAEA document–there really are no end to these, in this case GOV/INF/500/Rev.1, a.k.a. “Provisional Rules of Procedure of the Board of Governors as Amended up to 23 February 1989″–spells out that it is largely at the discretion of the Director General to decide whether he will report anything to the BOG at or in advance of a board meeting.

• Rule 8a: “The Director General shall… bring to the Board’s notice as a matter of urgency any fact which may require its intervention, in order to enable it to take any necessary action within the scope of its functions.”
• Rule 10: “Under the direction of the Director General, the Secretariat shall prepare papers on any matter submitted to it by the board… and generally perform all other work which the board, its committees and other subsidiary bodies may require.”

Then there’s the agenda of the board meetings themselves:

• Rule 15: “The Director General shall prepare, inconsultation with the Chairman, or, in his absence of disability, the Vice-Chairman  acting as Chairman, the provisional agenda for meetings of the board. The provisional agenda shall include:… (b) all items referred to the board by the General Conference… (c) All items the inclusion of which is requested by any member of the agency … (e) reports of the Director General, including reports concerning action taken on decisions and recommendations of the board.”

Now,  Ambassador Soltanieh appeared to suggest in his remarks during that internal briefing this month that the IAEA secretariat was about to depart from established procedures by permitting any member state from requesting a report on a state’s nuclear activities. Rule 15c however might suggest that Amano could decide to report to the BOG on the DPRK on the basis that just one member state may have requested such a report.

In theory, it would appear that Rule 15c would permit any member state on the  board to clog up the agenda of the board meetings with agenda items or reports which could result in a filibuster of the BOG.  In practice, over the years it has been the practice that a consensus rule has been applied to prevent that from happening. In recent years, as we know, however, that consensus has been abandoned on a lot of important issues.

In any case, under GOV/INF/500/Rev.1 it would appear there is nothing to prevent–let’s just assume my hunch may be right about this–that, say, maybe the ambassadors from the Republic of Korea and Japan have a chat with Amano and encourage him to provide a helpful comprehensive and historical overview of the DPRK’s nuclear activities. (A pundit last week suggested to me more than just a little facetiously that maybe Japan might remind the DG that Japan pays about 18% of the IAEA’s budget in this regard… I’m not saying that anything like that happened, mind you, but, as one IAEA lawyer once told me, “All IAEA states are equal, but some are more equal than others…”)

So why a detailed account of DPRK’s nuclear history right now? On this issue I can’t confess to know what makes the board tick, but I was informed at the last board meeting that the BOG’s Syria resolution, which cited Damascus for non-compliance following a report to the board on Syria which had been requested by governors, was seen as a dry run for pending non-compliance resolutions on the DPRK, first, and then Iran.

And my hunch is that Iran is a little concerned about that possible outcome, and may well make some diplomatic moves before the next board meeting to try to deter it.

We can be sure there won’t be any such resolutions served up by the time this week’s BOG ends, probably on Thursday. But that could happen in November, or if not then, then in early 2012. As in the case of Syria in June, whether that happens may depend on Amano’s future course of action, as I argued here.

The Director General’s Next Move

What are the Director General’s options, should he decide to go that route? Well, as I see it off the bat there are two possible options:

• OPTION A: AN ASSESSMENT OF PMD IN IRAN. Amano could provide an assessment of Iran’s nuclear program, including the information which the IAEA has compiled on the topic of a “posssible military dimension” in that program. On the basis of such a report, the board could rule Iran in non-compliance and report that finding to the UN Security Council.
• OPTION B: AN AMANO CITATION OF IRAN FOR NON-COMPLIANCE. Amano could go further and on behalf of the IAEA Secretariat cite Iran as in non-compliance with its safeguards obligations. The IAEA board could then in effect rubber-stamp that finding in a consensus resolution and report that finding to the Security Council.

Let’s look a little closer at each of these two options.

AMANO’S ASSESSMENT OPTION:

The IAEA has in its Iran safeguards portfolio a dossier of information concerning the PMD issue. As in the case of the information it had on allegations that Syria had built a clandestine plutonium production reactor–allegations which were the backbone of the BOG’s June determination that Damascus was in non-compliance–in the case of Iran the IAEA likewise has two sets of information: one set comprising information it has been provided by member states, and a second set of information which the IAEA itself compiled–as in the case of Syria, including in the field and on the ground.

How good and how credible is that information? Iran asserts that it is all fabricated. The IAEA doesn’t share that view. Now, in the Syria case, Amano and the Secretariat applied a “credibility scale” recently derived by the Deparment of Safeguards to categorize information it has obtained which potentially point to significant and undeclared activities in a member state. The scale is similar to a scale used by intelligence analysts at US national laboratories. In the case of Syria, Amano reported to the board that the cumulative information suggesting that Syria had built a reactor at Al-Kibar was “very likely.”  “Very likely” is at the top of the IAEA scale, and means that the IAEA Department of Safeguards is highly confident that its conclusion is accurate and correct.

How credible is the IAEA’s information that it would prompt the conclusion that Iran has carried out activities to develop a nuclear weapon? If it is good enough for the IAEA to deem it “very likely,”  that’s actionable by the board and could be cited as non-compliance by Iran, if as in the case of Syria in June, the board strongly takes into consideration that Iran has refused to discuss with the IAEA the PMD allegations in any detail. (For both Iran and Syria, the non-cooperation with the IAEA on these matters extended for three years.)

Obviously, if the information isn’t that credible, and the IAEA instead classifies it as likely, less likely, or unlikely, then the governors–if they know what is good for them–won’t take the risk that a non-compliance finding would be based on bad and politically motivated information.

AMANO’S NON-COMPLIANCE CITATION OPTION:

Let’s suppose Amano is as confident about his data on PMD in Iran as he was about the Syrian reactor construction. In other words, that the Department of Safeguards is highly confident that Iran has pursued activities or is pursuing activities for the development of a nuclear weapons capability.  Amano might then simply declare Iran in non-compliance with safeguards. In that case, doing this would provide some definite advantages:

• It would give the  board, 151 member states, and the rest of us a solid imprimatur from the IAEA that Iran is not in compliance with its legal obligations under international law.
• It would in that case (as John Carlson argued in that recently leaked cable) deprive Iran of legitimacy for its nuclear program under its NPT safeguards agreement.
• A technical finding by the IAEA Secretariat (as opposed to a politically contentious determination by the board of governors) would be less likely to be interpreted as a subjective and motivated judgment.
• It would also make it more likely that, in response to the citation, the board would act in something like or close to consensus, since the determination that Iran was out of compliance was made by the IAEA Secretariat and not by the board of governors representing member states.

Could Amano do this?

In principle, yes. Keep in mind that on March 30 1993–as my colleague Pierre Goldschmidt reminded me last week–former Director General Hans Blix cited the DPRK for non-compliance with its safeguards obligations, one day before the BOG then confirmed that finding in a resolution. Considerably before that, Blix had warned the DPRK in a report that if the DPRK refused to permit a special inspection, Blix would have no alternative than to declare the DPRK in non-compliance.

Hans Blix was well-informed. This in fact is the procedure called for under Article XII C. of the IAEA Statute. It specifically states: IAEA “inspectors shall report any non-compliance to the Director General who shall thereupon transmit the report to the Board of Governors.”  Thereafter, it would be up to the board to “remedy forthwith any non-compliance” and if that doesn’t happen “within a reasonable time” then the board can suspend assistance to the state, and the IAEA can under Article XIX of the statute “suspend any non-complying member from the exercise of the privileges and rights of membership.”

There you have it.

In all 5 subsequent citations of non-compliance by member states since 1993, including on Iran in 2006 and on Syria this June, it was the board–not the DG–which took that action.

Will Yukiya Amano take this step on Iran as Hans Blix did on North Korea? So far, the IAEA’s governors and member states are fairly confident that the answer is no. But an IAEA assessment for the board on Iran including PMD? Stay tuned.

Additional Protocol, Iran, and the Board

There is no firm consensus about what constitutes non-compliance with NPT safeguards agreements. That will certainly play out over how the IAEA and the board handle Iran in coming months.

The BOG in June cited Syria for non-compliance on the basis of Syria’s failure to notify the IAEA of the construction of the facility at Al-Kibar, deemed a reactor by the IAEA secretariat and, thereafter the board. Notification would have been required by Code 3.1 in Syria’s safeguards agreement.

In the case of Iran, it isn’t spelled out clearly for all to see that the Secretariat or the board could arrive at a non-compliance finding alone on the basis of determinations that Iran has carried out weapons-related R&D and even the design and development of a nuclear warhead, according to officials from some board member states. They assert that for a postive finding on PMD to be actionable by the IAEA or the BOG, Iran would have to have an Additional Protocol, which of course Iran claims that it doesn’t have since there was no formal ratification process in Iran for the AP.

If this is true, it raises some interesting questions and possible conclusions:

• If without an AP in Iran neither the IAEA nor the board can cite Iran for non-compliance related to PMD-related activities (assuming these are positively determined by the IAEA to be for real or confirmed), then why should references to PMD be included in the IAEA’s reports to the board on Iran’s safeguards compliance?
• It might be argued that the IAEA could nonetheless use the PMD information it has collected in the process of forming a “broader conclusion” about the nature of Iran’s nuclear activities, and the IAEA could make an assessment as to whether it believes that Iran’s nuclear program is indeed all for peaceful use.
• The IAEA could perhaps invoke special inspection language to hunt for evidence or confirmation of PMD-related activities in Iran, but given the nature of these kinds of activities, the chances of finding them or confirming that they took place is very risky, including for practical considerations.
• Remaining is the issue whether, as some argue, “non-cooperation equals non-compliance.” Syria failed to respond to IAEA requests to explain the reactor allegations for three years. Iran also has not responded to the PMD issues for the same amount of time.

If board members aim to prepare a non-compliance resolution on Iran, they will have to sort all this out in advance.

If they want to do that in November, they don’t have a lot of time.

Particularly interesting is what Germany had to say about China’s plans to export two power reactors to Pakistan as Chashma-3 and -4.

As many blog readers know, I have focused a certain amount of my attention on this issue since we were able in March 2010 to get confirmation from China that this transaction was for real. Because Pakistan does not apply IAEA full-scope safeguards to its nuclear activities, barring further information substantiating that China had made previous commercial arrangements with Pakistan for the export of these two reactors, many NSG members last year considered that, if China supplied the two reactors, that would violate NSG guidelines.

During the 2010 NSG plenary meeting held in New Zealand last June, the U.S. government expressed the view that, based on its information, China could not claim that the new exports to Pakistan could be “grandfathered” under previous agreements binding China and Pakistan. Instead, the U.S. elaborated last spring, China should seek an exemption from NSG trade rules conditioning exports of trigger list items to states without FSS, should it want to export more PWRs to Pakistan. (China had exported Chashma-1 and -2 before it joined NSG in 2004)

Assuming that what the German government told lawmakers represents the whole truth and nothing but the truth, the new German statement to parliament on NSG-related issues would suggest that the U.S. government last year and as early as 2004 had been grossly misinformed about the status of China’s pending export to Pakistan.

That’s what I would conclude from Germany’s answer to question 8, which asks: “Does the federal government share the Chinese view that supply [of Chashma-3 and -4] is covered (grandfathered) by a bilateral trade agreement concluded before [sic] China’s entry in the NSG in 2004?”

Germany’s answer:

There was a “Chinese government declaration” on September 21, 2010 which stated that a “bilateral agreement” in 2003 between Pakistan and China covered the export of Chashma-3 and -4 to Pakistan. For this reason, Germany told MPs, the export of the new reactors to Pakistan by China represents an “old case” and that “China can therefore supply [the reactors] without violating NSG guidelines.”

Really?

Was Germany not aware of what transpired during closed-door NSG meetings in 2004 when, on the occasion of China joining the NSG, NSG participating governments requested clarification from China about the contents of China’s pre-2004 bilateral nuclear cooperation agreement with Pakistan?

Germany was aware of this. In answering question 10, the German government last month told lawmakers that “when it joined the NSG, China made a statement regarding existing supply contracts” with Pakistan. “In this matter—as in all NSG matters—it was agreed that this would be held confidential.”

Confidential or not, I’m now a little confused by Germany’s answer, since then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice specified to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee back in April, 2005—about a year after the U.S. government during NSG consultations requested clarification from China about its Pakistan trade—precisely that existing agreements between China and Pakistan did not include the export of two more PWRs from China.

I’ve talked to people who were on hand during that interaction between NSG PGs and China back in 2004. They told me the same story that Ms Rice told the U.S. Senate.

Condi said namely:

“We are not aware at this time of any plans on the part of China to seek additional reactor exports to Pakistan… As part of its joining NSG in 2004, China disclosed its intention to continue its cooperation with Pakistan under the grandfathering to the NSG guideline provisions requiring FSS as a condition of nuclear supply.”

What did the Secretary of State say that China had told NSG participating governments was actually covered by the Sino-Pakistan nuclear agreement?

“This cooperation would include lifetime support and fuel supply for the safeguarded Chashma-1 and -2 power plants, supply of heavy water and operational safety service for the safeguarded Karachi nuclear power plant, and supply of fuel and operational safety service to the two safeguarded research reactors at PINSTECH.”

The bottom line:

“China has pledged—and is expected—to abide by the NSG guidelines on the transfers of nuclear equipment, technology, and material…If China did seek to provide additional reactors to Pakistan, it would need NSG accommodation… We do not believe that the 45 member states of the NSG would agree to such an accommodation…”

During last month’s 2011 NSG plenary meeting, the NSG’s participating governments did not agree on whether China’s export to Pakistan should be permitted to be grandfathered. It wasn’t even close.

With all due consideration for Germany’s resolve to keep secret China’s statement from 2004, what gives? If China’s explanation was watertight and substantiated—and if Condi Rice was wrong—China’s assertion that the commerce with Pakistan should be grandfathered should have been compelling for all PGs at last month’s NSG annual meeting. But it wasn’t.

Thanks to Jeffrey having posted Carlson’s remarks about my article, I was able to read them, and afterward I modified the offending sentence in paragraph three of that article: “The board reported [IAEA safeguards conclusions] as noncompliance—and it did so without IAEA inspectors verifying the findings first hand in Syria” to conclude “since June 2008.”

That should take care of the issue at hand.

Did I not know about that June, 2008 visit to Syria? Of course I did. In 2008 and 2009 I published in Nuclear Fuel and Nucleonics Week a half-dozen articles about it. In drafting the Carnegie piece, which was intended as a very short “Commentary” on our website, I didn’t explicitly refer to that early and never-repeated IAEA visit to Dair Alzour for reasons of editorial brevity.

In retrospect, I realize that not mentioning it was a mistake. That’s because—as Carlson’s response made clear—anything I write on the subject of Syria’s safeguards compliance following the passing of GOV/40 can put me in the crossfire of competing narratives about the resolution which began unfolding even before it was passed last month, and which may well continue playing out through the end of this year.

One of those narratives–Carlson’s–asserts that GOV/40 represented nothing really departing from previous noncompliance findings. (May we assume that that implies that there’s no real strategy innovation on the part of the sponsors of the Syria issue?) There is a second take which was circulating among its advocates at the time the resolution was under consideration that asserted that GOV/40 was a new departure for dealing with noncompliance.

Carlson wrongly attributed to me the view that GOV/40 “sets a ‘new paradigm’ for noncompliance” with IAEA safeguards. That’s the second narrative.

I never said or “suggested” that I endorsed that interpretation.

Consistent with the question mark in the title of my article, and the text which specifically states that the matter is unresolved, I wrote:

“Some advocates of the successful resolution… claimed that [GOV/40] offers a new paradigm for dealing with countries that refuse to cooperate with the IAEA in addressing weighty allegations that they are secretly proliferating.”

The “new paradigm” thesis is not, as Carlson wrote, the view “according to Hibbs.” I would argue, however, that the fact that people in the  resolution sponsoring camp argued that GOV/40 was a new departure is not insignificant. There is method in this.

The “new paradigm” narrative goes like this:

After Syria beginning in mid-2008 barred the IAEA from Dair Alzour and other related sites, the IAEA then called on member states to corroborate its initial but inconclusive findings suggesting that the site could have hosted a reactor. Most was provided by the U.S. The IAEA then looked for other sources—especially open sources—to corroborate the secret data, and it succeeded. After three years, the IAEA was prepared to bite the bullet and declare that in its view Dair Alzour was a reactor, regardless of the fact that it hadn’t been able to actually verify that conclusion in Syria because Syria had refused to cooperate for over three years.

But is this really a new development? Were not other, previous noncompliance cases similar, I asked? Well, not exactly, those holding the “new paradigm” view said. They argued, for example, that Iraq was called out of compliance after IAEA inspectors themselves unearthed a clandestine nuclear program; that Iran was cited for non-compliance after it acknowledged to the IAEA that it failed to report specific nuclear activities and IAEA inspectors in Iran then independently verified that; and that Romania and Libya were found to be out of compliance after they themselves had disclosed specific activities to the IAEA.

There is another narrative on GOV/40–Carlson’s–which asserts that “this non-compliance finding is consistent with previous findings where the lack of cooperation with the IAEA has been a major factor, i.e., Iraq, North Korea, and Iran.” No new approach or paradigm.

So which version of GOV/40 is true?

Now, if I were a country that co-sponsored GOV/40 and if I were trying to convince other board member countries to join, or thereafter to get them to see GOV/40 as a kind of template for pursuing future cases, Carlson’s argument is the one I would make.

Why? As I have written in previous posts and in the above Carnegie article, GOV/40 last month encountered a lot of resistance and in fact was passed by fewer than half the board’s 35 members. In particular, members of the Non-Aligned Movement, which in Vienna increasingly since 2003 have taken their cues on key verification issues from Iran, have been on the lookout for anything that looks like the IAEA or the board are departing from standard verification procedures.  Anything that suggests that GOV/40 represents a novel approach to noncompliance would therefore represent a political challenge for its sponsors and advocates.

Whether GOV/40 will change the tilt of the playing field is ultimately what this interchange is about—including in coming months and perhaps beyond.

On to DPRK and Iran

If this were only about GOV/40 and Syria I don’t think there would be any debate over this on this blog site; I don’t believe Carlson would spend his valuable time writing  Jeffrey a carefully-drafted response to an article that I wrote; and I wouldn’t waste my time writing this post because GOV/40 will be dead-ended at the UN Security Council in New York.

But as I said in the Carnegie article, according to what you hear from those who argue that GOV/40 represents a new departure on noncompliance, board member states which sponsored and supported GOV/40 want to go further and in coming months raise outstanding compliance issues in North Korea and Iran.

We’ll see if that develops.

If so, the DPRK might be next in line. The Republic of Korea (ROK) or Japan, for example, might in advance request Director General Yukiya Amano to prepare a report on safeguards compliance in the DPRK. The ROK (which co-sponsored GOV/40) and other like-minded states on the board might then float a resolution citing the DPRK for noncompliance with its safeguards obligations. How this would play out isn’t exactly clear, since in fact for a long time the IAEA has had no access to the DPRK and, accordingly, if judged by Amano’s own yardsticks, the IAEA may have very little if anything in the way of new official information on the DPRK to report to the board. (Don’t forget that, two years ago, Amano had been asked by the IAEA General Conference to report on Israel’s nuclear capability, and the DG complied by submitting a one-page statement which testified that because the IAEA had no official information beyond what Israel was obliged to provide to the IAEA to fulfill Israel’s Infcirc-66 agreement, he had in fact virtually nothing to say).

More interesting and significant will be how the board of governors deals with Iran in the aftermath of GOV/40.

Again, according to those who say that GOV/40 is a template for a new way forward, the board could request a report from Amano on outstanding safeguards issues with Iran, and in particular, concerning the allegations of nuclear weapons-related experiments and R&D, which the IAEA Department of Safeguards has compiled in its dossier and which Iran—like Syria on Dair Alzour—has claimed are fabrications and therefore has refused to discuss with the IAEA for three years. The board might ask Amano to make a judgment as to whether the IAEA is satisfied that the allegations are supported by evidence, perhaps permitting the IAEA to conclude—as in the Syrian case concerning the reactor—that Iran “very likely” was engaged in weaponization-related activities. As in the case of the reactor allegations concerning Syria, the allegations of Iranian weaponization activities currently are based primarly upon member state intelligence information and, to a lesser extent, upon some corroborative findings that the IAEA has made in the field. As in the case of Syria, were Amano to tell the board that the IAEA deems it likely that Iran conducted weaponization activities, if the current state of affairs persists Amano would report that conclusion regardless of Iran having refused to discuss these allegations with the IAEA.

Since Carlson incorrectly associated me with the view that GOV/40 is a “new paradigm,” I feel obligated to outline what is, in fact, my modest take on this.

Every new noncompliance case contains new and unprecedented facets. None of them are alike. It would appear that the Syria dossier is a composite of different kinds of information. Some of it was obtained in the field early, in June 2008, by the IAEA during the initial stage of its probe from Dair Alzour. It was inconclusive. The IAEA then got other information which, in its view, was consistent with the thesis that Dair Alzour was a reactor. The IAEA also took the trouble of trying to get third-party information, including open source data, to quality control the intelligence data it received from the U.S. and other member states. Some sought-for aerial reconnaissance data was missing. There were questions raised about why the building at DairAlzour was so much smaller, maybe 40% smaller, than its apparent prototype in the DPRK. So in the end it was a judgment call by the IAEA.

I never said GOV/40 is a “new paradigm.” Thirty-five members of the board may decide that during the next six months.

One of these listed projects was construction of two new PWRs at the Chashma site in Pakistan. That was interesting because until then there had been only rumors and unconfirmed assertions by officials in Islamabad that this deal was in the bag. Here in a drafty corner of a Chinese nuclear industry exhibition, where bussed-in Chinese reactor engineers took their furtive cigarette breaks, we had something in black and white which looked like an official Chinese confirmation that CNNC was in fact about to build more power reactors in Pakistan.

During the rest of 2010 I raised this issue in a modest spate of articles and media interventions, before, during, and after the Nuclear Suppliers Group held its annual meeting, in Christchurch last June. Carnegie flagged this because, of course, in 2008, the U.S. persuaded the NSG to award India an exemption to its nuclear trade sanctions, which were in fact triggered by India’s post-1968 nuclear explosive test and subsequent absence of full-scope safeguards on all its nuclear activities. By 2010, China, which had acquiesced at the NSG to the US request for the India exemption—while making known to the group it favored this to happen on the principle of “non-discrimination”—had joined  the US, Russia, and France in preparing to export nuclear reactors to non-NPT states on behalf of its ally Pakistan.

The problem at hand was, however, that under NSG guidelines which China pledged to adhere to when it joined the group in 2004, China agreed not to export nuclear reactors to Pakistan. Before China joined the NSG, it signed contracts to set up two PWRs at Pakistan’s Chashma site, as provided by a pre-NSG Sino-Pak cooperation agreement. According to people who were on hand when China joined the NSG in 2004, Beijing then even spelled out to NSG participating governments that it had no intention to sell any more power reactors to Pakistan beyond Chashma-1 and -2, and that China enumerated what was on its list of goods that it had committed itself to export to Pakistan under that old trade agreement.

The NSG’s other 45 members last year did not have a common response to China’s resolve in exporting two more reactors to Pakistan. During the 2010 NSG plenary meeting, a number of states—including the U.S.—requested clarification from China about its intentions. Chinese officials provided only vague assurances that all current and future Chinese exports would follow NSG guidelines—suggesting to many at the meeting that China tacitly implied that the new exports to Pakistan were “grandfathered” under the old trade deal. Last spring, the US Department of State spelled out it would certainly take issue with that version of events.

It’s now a year later. The NSG this week is meeting again, in Noordwijk, and that meeting is set to conclude on Friday, June 24.

In the meantime,  Pakistan has continued beating the drum that it should be accorded nuclear trade rights on par with India’s,  China and Pakistan have been going forward in preparing to build the reactors (Pakistan officials told me in Islamabad a couple of months ago that they were beginning civil construction for the foundation of Chashma-3) and the NSG braced for another testy tete-a-tete with China during its forthcoming annual closed-door conclave.

At Carnegie, we were working on this.

Yesterday, Toby Dalton, I, and George Perkovich published this Policy Outlook on our website in an effort to focus international attention on the Sino-Pak-NSG conundrum.

We have been watching what is happening in China and elsewhere in response to Fukushima. We think there is an opportunity for China, Pakistan, and the NSG to rethink this issue.

The politically correct status quo course of inaction—which appears to be veering toward a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy of tacitly accepting Chinese grandfathering of its trade with Pakistan—won’t work. It will further erode the NSG’s credibility in the shadow of the US-India deal. It will permit China and Pakistan to brush off NSG rules. Pakistan would get old reactors from China which won’t seriously address its real-time energy deficit, and won’t comply with safety standards which after Fukushima the world will demand for new nuclear projects.

Instead, moving forward on the basis of what we propose for NSG to think about would give the NSG, Pakistan, and China an opportunity. The NSG can establish criteria and a roadmap for other countries without full-scope safeguards to qualify for civilian nuclear cooperation; it can put the group in the position of raising the nonproliferation bar for future NSG membership; and it can incentivize China and Pakistan to make their nuclear trade legitimate in an NSG process acceptable to all NSG members.

We’re not naïve. We know there will be fierce opposition to this from those who will argue that the NPT—and its 1968 nuclear test cut-off date—is set in stone. But the alternative to what we propose is that China and Pakistan will proceed without conditions. To them, the US-India deal was a game changer.

More broadly, India, Israel, and Pakistan are nuclear-armed states. These are facts on the ground. The next step for India would be full membership.  The Obama administration is advocating this. Many NSG states—more than the number which resisted the US-India deal from 2005-2008—are not prepared to roll over. They can now set the crossbar for future membership. While the approach we recommend for China and Pakistan is about nuclear cooperation, not NSG membership, there could be a carryover. In either case, NPT states outside the NSG should also be brought into this process to understand that a criteria-based approach can result in a modern and robust benchmark which will provide the world greater security against the threat of nuclear weapons proliferation.

The board meeting opened that day with a few fairly ho-hum items–the IAEA’s annual report on the technical cooperation programme, and some doings concerning preparation for a pending ministerial meeting on Fukushima (which doesn’t look likely to be very ministerial)–and the board members on Wednesday walzed into serious verification matters beginning with Iran. We got into Syria late on Thursday morning and what transpired was duly recorded by my friends at Reuters.

But I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

When I arrived in Vienna at the beginning of the week I saw a draft resolution–GOV/2011/40–which had been sponsored by 13 countries–a bunch of Euros plus Australia, Canada, South Korea, and the U.S.–which on the face of it looked pretty straightforward.

On Tuesday evening our time in Vienna, Jeffrey posted the resolution here.

The bottom line is right there in operative paragraph 1.: Syria’s construction of a covert nuclear reactor at Dair Alzour and its clear breach of its Code 3.1 obligation in not submitting the design information to the IAEA in advance of that fact “constitute non-compliance with its obligations under its Safeguards Agreement with the Agency in the context of  Article XII.C of the Agency’s Statute”

Open and shut case–right?

It might have been had the road been exceedingly carefully prepared and had things gone well. That wasn’t out of the question because we began the week with a very hard fact that should have supported passage of the resolution by a wide margin: an IAEA investigation that arrived at no resolution for nearly four years because Syria didn’t cooperate. Basta. Sounds like shooting fish in a barrel. Well, it wasn’t.

The U.S. gave the IAEA a bunch of intelligence information which backed its claim that the site was a construction site of a plutonium production reaction that was virtually finished when Israel bombed it in August 2007. The data, we hear, looks pretty good. There are some procedural quibbles regarding some of the environmental sample data. But concerning the task of establishing something like a one-to-one spatial correlation between what was at Dair Alzour and what we know a North Korean plutonium production reactor looks like, the IAEA may have been onto something that looks like a smoking gun at least. Over the last couple of years, before the IAEA reported its findings last month, it had a satchel full of extremely close-resolution photographs of the site taken over time.

DG Yukiya Amano agrees that the data looks solid but he has got to be more than a little careful. We’ve been there before: In 2002, his predecessor Mohamed Elbaradei had reaffirmed the IAEA’s conclusion that, Iraq, in the crosshairs then, had given up on trying to acquire nuclear weapons. President Bush and General Powell claimed they had intelligence to the contrary and went to war with Iraq. They were wrong. Before that, more generally, back in the 1990s and after the first Gulf War, the safeguards buzz in Vienna was all about empowering the IAEA to use intelligence data to look for non-declared, hidden activities. A bunch of member states–including a few important US allies–then kicked up a ruckus about how the IAEA could become hooked on data provided by big powerful countries like the United States with so-called “national technical means” to collect intelligence. So there’s a little sensitivity in the VIC about intelligence information. As there should be.

So what does Amano do after he succeeds ElBaradei in late 2009 ? Two things at once. The first is, he gives Syria about a year to decide to clear the air over Dair Alzour. That’s a lot of time in this business. But he’s willing to give it to them because he narrowly escaped a defeat in the election to the Director-Generalship at the hands of G-77 states. At least a few of these were spoiling for a fight after South African Ambassador Abdul Minty lost the election at the hands of the same states who now want to turn up the heat on Damascus.

While Amano is giving Syria time, he’s also collecting and sifting through the U.S. intelligence data which is beginning to accumulate. But he’s also hunting for, and getting, data from other sources to validate findings of the super-secret stuff. For instance, the Department of Safeguards found some pretty interesting and unclassified French satellite radar information.  At the end of last month, Amano tells the board the IAEA thinks that building at Dair Alzour was a reactor. The U.S. and the others then put forth a draft resolution making note of that fact, calling Syria out of compliance, and bringing the matter to the attention of the UN Security Council, which is what the IAEA Statute says is supposed to happen in such a case.

So on Monday, we see a resolution with 13 sponsors. For it to pass, according to the IAEA Statute, it needed a simple majority. I was told on Monday that, by all accounts, the simple majority was there. When it came to a vote on Thursday afternoon around 4 p.m., that turned out to be the case. The sponsors had their majority. As U.S. Ambassador Glyn Davies explained to the Vienna press corps after the vote, in fact the resolution’s sponsors did better than that, because “we got a result of nearly three-to-one in favor.” In fact they recorded 17 votes in favor against just six opposed. That meant that, beyond the 13 sponsors, they picked up a few more supporters. Singapore, in nuclear matters a member of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) with a difference; Cameroon–for reasons that escape me; the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which is working hand in glove with key resolution drafting states to set up its nuclear power program; and, finally, Japan, which didn’t get on to the resolution bandwagon until late because it is understandibly beset with other more immediate nuclear problems these days. The nay-sayers were Azerbaijan, China, Ecuador, Pakistan, Russia, and Venezuela.

That’s where things get a little complicated. There are a bunch of wrinkles. What are they? For now I’ll just list ‘em, because I’m about to walk out the door and down the street and get on a bus at Schwedenplatz to take me to the Vienna airport.

• To begin with, there are 35 countries on the board. The resolution referring Syria to the UNSC passed with fewer than half the members supporting it.
• The resolution passed with just three of the P-5 countries on the board signing on. Russia and China opposed it. That wasn’t a surprise, especially after NATO took a strong interest in the future of Muammar Qaddafi.
• Then there are all those abstentions–11 of them: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, India, Jordan, Kenya, Niger, Peru, South Africa, Tunesia, and Ukraine. Mongolia was absent.
• The resolution reported Syria to the UNSC without the benefit of a firm judgment from the IAEA Department of Safeguards and the DG that that thing at Dair Alzour was a reactor. Amano told the board it was “very likely” a reactor, but to some people in NAM delegations, that ain’t the same as saying you know its a reactor.
• Amano appears to have discounted for good the idea of calling a special inspection in Syria to get access to Dair Alzour and other sites. I asked a  number of people in the board meeting this week whether a non-compliance citation would have had more credibility if Amano had beforehand requested a special inspection which was rejected by Syria. Some of the answers to this question, and especially after reading Ambassador Davies’ lips late on Friday afternoon, seem to have been ”yes.”
• The preambular language in GOV/40 also presented a problem. It’s reference to “concerns regarding the maintenance of international peace and security” is clearly aimed at the UNSC with a wink at Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, authorizing the UNSC to use non-military and military means to ”restore international peace and security”  Until now, a lot of IAEA member states have doubted whether the nuclear situation in Syria represents such a threat, since the installation in question at Dair Alzour has been destroyed.
• And that issue raised among a number of board members the concern that the Syria resolution–on the eve of a UNSC resolution brought forth by France and the U.K. concerning Syria’s action in brutally suppressing domestic dissent–was “meant to further the goal of regime change,” as one NAM country ambassador told me in the middle of the board discussion on Thursday.

It certainly wasn’t the case that, inside the closeted board meeting, Syria made an intellectually brilliant,  stunning case for its shopworn claim that the facility Israel destroyed wasn’t a reactor. The Syrian ambassador in fact came close to putting a few delegates to sleep with a dirge that lasted about 50 minutes and that basically informed the board that ”we don’t see the reason why we should have had to cooperate with you for the last three years and so therefore there is no reason for tabling this resolution.”

The NAM group likewise missed a golden opportunity to raise the above objections in my bullet points. Instead, it disingenuously ignored the fact that there is a serious non-compliance issue here, and instead droned on and on in the room about its outrage in the aftermath of Israel’s air raid which in 2007 destroyed the building. And instead of getting after the indeed weighty and real issues raised by the veiled reference in the resolution to Chapter VII and the issues of consensus-formation, the Egyptian Ambassador waxed on in the boardroom about his objections about what the IAEA told or didn’t tell Syria about its findings, about Syria’s airy offer in late May to “fully cooperate” with the IAEA, and expressing solace in the–largely irrelevant–conclusion by the IAEA that particles of anthropogenic uranium found at the MNSR facility under safeguards would be further considered as a routine safeguards issue.

A few of the states making interventions and statements to the board on Thursday–South Africa, for instance–did their homework, and they got it. You don’t have to agree with their conclusions, but they raised some sticky problems on Thursday after lunch.

All in all, this resolution had its virtues. I may try to explain them on the Carnegie site over the next few days. The resolution also has its problems. Because of these, there are some people who were in the boardroom in Vienna–by no means all of them among the abstainers and that Mongolia delegation that didn’t show up to vote–who will breathe a sigh of relief that this resolution won’t fly in New York because the Russians and the Chinese will assure that outcome.

Lastly, questions will be asked about what the resolution’s’ sponsors’ expectations were this week. GOV/40 was left open for amendments until the vote was taken on Thursday afternoon. I had figured that implied that the sponsors would along the road this week decide whether it would be better off in the final analysis to put to a vote a weaker resolution, warning Syria to get on the stick in a hurry or face the collective wrath of the board in September. That might have gotten a bigger majority. Astoundingly, however, on Thursday afternoon the text of GOV/40 was more or less the same text we saw at the top of the week. The U.S. group really wanted a non-compliance resolution from the outset, was the word from people in the boardroom. Washington was prepared to lower the pressure just a notch–by considering a text that might cite Syria for non-compliance without an immediate referral to New York–so went the explanation in some quarters–but the U.S. and others gave up on that option when it turned out after canvassing delegations that just one more country was prepared to switch its abstention into a yes vote.