Duplicity undermining NPT: IAEA chief

The major powers are acting contrary to the spirit of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) because they are modernizing their arsenals rather than making efforts to scrap them, International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Mohamed ElBaradei stated on the sidelines of a 145-nation IAEA general assembly meeting.

That's because the underlying intent of the NPT was never to eliminate the nuclear weapons of the nations that have them but to stop non-nuclear nations from acquiring them...

"Ball of fire" if Iran attacked: IAEA chief

"A military strike (against Iran) would in my opinion be worse than anything else... It would transform the Middle East region into a ball of fire," ElBaradei said in an interview with Dubai-based Al-Arabiya television.

It would be pure insanity to even consider attacking Iran. And, that's why the Zionists will probably do it - they are a bunch of blithering idiots playing with, as Ahmedinejad explained, razors blades.

ElBaradei: If you attack Iran, I quit

"IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei says he will step down if major powers launch a military strike against Iran over its nuclear program."

ElBaradei doubts Syrians had ability to develop nuclear facility

"We have no evidence that Syria has the human resources that would allow it to carry out a large nuclear program. We do not see Syria having nuclear fuel," International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Mohamad ElBaradei told Al-Arabiya television Tuesday.

Evidence on Iran doesn't seem to matter

"Apart from the eight nuclear weapons powers (the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China, India, Pakistan and Israel), four other countries already have plants on their territory for "enriching and reprocessing uranium" under IAEA safeguards: Japan, Germany, the Netherlands and Brazil. Argentina, Australia and South Africa are also building or actively considering uranium enrichment facilities, again under IAEA safeguards. So there was some rapid back-pedaling at the White House when a journalist inquired if all these countries are also seeking nuclear weapons."

Developing Countries protest Israeli attacks on IAEA

"Developing nations have protested to the International Atomic Energy Agency's governing board over Israel's accusations that IAEA Director Mohamed ElBaradei was showing complacency over Iran's nuclear ambitions."

Israel: UN nuclear chief should be sacked for failure over Iran

Israel to El Baradi: are you gonna believe us or your lying eyes? If you say Iran is building a bomb we'll let you stay - really!

AFP - Nov 8, 2007

Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz called Thursday for Mohamed ElBaradei to be removed as head of the UN nuclear watchdog, saying he had turned a blind eye to archfoe Iran's nuclear ambitions.

The call for ElBaradei's dismissal comes just days before the International Atomic Energy Agency is due to publish a new report on Iran's nuclear programme, to serve as a key part of further discussions at the United Nations on whether to impose a third set of sanctions on Tehran.

"The policies followed by ElBaradei endanger world peace. His irresponsible attitude of sticking his head in the sand over Iran's nuclear programme should lead to his impeachment," Mofaz told public radio from Washington.

Mofaz, who heads "the strategic dialogue" between Israel and its main ally the United States, held talks on Wednesday with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

ElBaradei raised the ire of many Israeli officials after telling France's Le Monde newspaper that Iran would need "between three and eight years" to develop a nuclear bomb and that there were was no immediate threat.

"I want to get people away from the idea that Iran represents a clear and present danger and that we're now facing the decision whether to bombard Iran or let them have the bomb. We're not in that situation at all," the Egyptian UN nuclear chief said.

Mofaz retorted that there was no excuse for such complacency in the face of intelligence estimates.

"ElBaradei says he has no proof regarding Iran's nuclear programme when he has intelligence reports gathered by several countries and he heads an organisation responsible precisely for that," he said.

Mofaz nevertheless said he believed the Jewish state's archfoe had yet to cross the point of no return in its nuclear programmme.

"The development of the necessary infrastructure for enriching uranium is slower than the Iranians say it is," the former chief of staff said, a day after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad again boasted that Iran had reached a key target of 3,000 centrifuges for uranium enrichment.

Israel, which belongs to the UN nuclear watchdog but is not a signatory to its key Non-Proliferation Treaty, is widely considered to have the Middle East's sole -- if undeclared -- nuclear arsenal.

It considers Iran its chief enemy after repeated statements by Ahmadinejad that the Jewish state should be wiped off the map.

Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said on Wednesday (eds: correct) that "all options remain on the table", including military action, to prevent Iran developing an atomic bomb.

Senior Israeli army intelligence officer Yossi Beidetz told parliament's foreign affairs and defence committee that Iran could acquire the bomb within two years.

"Assuming Iran is not faced with difficulties, the most severe scenario is that Iran could have a nuclear bomb by the end of 2009," committee members quoted Beidetz as saying.

The UN Security Council has imposed two sets of sanctions against Iran over its failure to heed ultimatums to suspend uranium enrichment, the process which makes fuel for nuclear reactors but in highly extended form can also produce the fissile core of an atomic bomb.

Israel and the West fear that Iran's nuclear programme is cover for a drive to develop the bomb but Iran insists it is aimed solely at producing electricity for a growing population once fossil fuels run out.

In 1981, Israel bombed a French-built nuclear reactor in Iraq, which under the rule of now executed dictator Saddam Hussein was then its biggest enemy. The raid was heavily criticised by the United States and UN Security Council.

Déjà vu all over again

The US is smearing IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei for not finding evidence of Iranian nuclear weapons. Sound familiar?

by Ian Williams - Nov 3, 2007

When it comes to Iran's nuclear capabilities, whose word would you rather take: that of a Nobel prize-winning head of an international agency specializing in nuclear issues who was proved triumphantly right about Iraq, or that of a bunch of belligerent neocons who make no secret of their desire to whack Iran at the earliest opportunity and who made such a pigs ear of Iraq?

That is the stark choice facing the sane people of the world, given the smearing of IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei for not joining the hysterical lynch mob building up against Iran. Criticised by Condoleezza Rice and others in the Bush administration, it is uncannily reminiscent of the slurs against him and UN weapons inspector Hans Blix in the run up to the invasion of Iraq - and we should remember that the US vindictively tried to unseat him afterwards for not joining in the lying game.

ElBaradei is hardly acting as cheerleader for the Iranians. He says that his inspectors have not seen "any concrete evidence that there is a parallel military program," though he could not yet swear to its absence. But he does believe that our issues with Iran can be resolved through negotiations - in which it would help if the US were not implicitly threatening war. But it looks as though we have reached a similar stage to when Saddam let in the inspectors. When they found no WMDs Washington cried foul, ordered the UN inspectors out and sent the troops in. The US and its allies will not accept anything short of regime change in Teheran - no matter what ordinary Iranians might want and what the IAEA says.

The only difference from last time is that France has defected, and France's opposition to the war in Iraq was as much because of Saddam's oil contracts with Total and Elf-Aquitaine as any deep attachment to international law. Teheran should sign a contract immediately!

There are, of course, several separate issues here. One is whether Iran has the right to enrich uranium. The second is whether it is abusing the putative right to build nuclear weapons. A third is whether the nuclear issue is not just some sort of White House feint, since we all know that if the shooting starts, it will really be about fighting terrorism, liberating gays and women, restoring democracy and taking down a major rival in the region to both Saudi Arabia and Israel - or any permutation of the above.

On the first question, stupid though it is, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty does not ban countries from reprocessing and purifying uranium. It should have done, and it should have allowed more intrusive inspections, but it doesn't, and one reason for that is that the US, under the influence of the people who now want to cite non-proliferation against Iran, fought against attempts to strengthen the treaty. These are the same people, in fact, who have successfully fought against the senate ratifying the comprehensive test ban treaty.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's maladroit diplomacy led to Iran being outmanoeuvred. His comments on Israel and the Holocaust, no matter whether interpreted correctly or not, have made it difficult for many countries to support him. The US got a resolution against Iran through the IAEA council calling on Iran to stop its uranium reprocessing, largely by promising council member India a free pass for developing nuclear weapons outside the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and with the enthusiastic support of Israel, the only definite nuclear state in the Middle East.

The US then took that IAEA council resolution to the UN security council, whose word, whether Iran likes it or not, is law under the UN charter, even though it is manifestly a political rather than a judicial body. (The law is not always just, and that goes for international law as well). It does not help Iran as much as it should that Washington, a major scofflaw in the international field, is once again talking piously about the need to enforce UN resolutions, with its own interpretation and its own timetable - just as was the case with Iraq.

Iran is playing a dangerous game. Most countries have deep reservations about what the US, France and, to a lesser extent, the UK are up to, but few of them are prepared to go to the wall, diplomatically, let alone militarily, for the ayatollahs.

Iran should accept the additional and more intrusive inspections that it did before, and throw open its program to the IAEA inspectors, but the war talk in Washington and Jerusalem gives it a plausible excuse not to, since it would be tantamount to offering them a list of targets.

Of course it is difficult to support someone like Ahmadinejad, even when he does for once have a point in the nuclear stand-off. But we can support ElBaradei and the IAEA, as the only sane voices around. With enemies such as ElBaradei has marshalling against him, he must be right.

Experts: No evidence of Iranian nuclear-weapons program

by Jonathan S. Landay, McClatchy Newspapers - November 4, 2007

WASHINGTON — Despite President Bush's claims that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons that could trigger "World War III," experts in and out of government say there's no conclusive evidence that Tehran has an active nuclear-weapons program.

Even his own administration appears divided about the immediacy of the threat. While Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney speak of an Iranian weapons program as a fact, Bush's point man on Iran, Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, has attempted to ratchet down the rhetoric.

"Iran is seeking a nuclear capability ... that some people fear might lead to a nuclear-weapons capability," Burns said in an interview Oct. 25 on PBS.

"I don't think that anyone right today thinks they're working on a bomb," said another U.S. official, who requested anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity. Outside experts say the operative words are "right today." They say Iran may have been actively seeking to create a nuclear-weapons capacity in the past and still could break out of its current uranium-enrichment program and start a weapons program. They too lack definitive proof, but cite a great deal of circumstantial evidence. Bush's rhetoric seems hyperbolic compared with the measured statements by his senior aides and outside experts.

"I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them (Iran) from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon," he said Oct. 17 at a news conference.

"Our country, and the entire international community, cannot stand by as a terror-supporting state fulfills its grandest ambitions," Cheney warned on Oct 23. "We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon."

Bush and Cheney's allegations are under especially close scrutiny because their similar allegations about an Iraqi nuclear program proved to be wrong. Nevertheless, there are many reasons to be skeptical of Iran's claims that its nuclear program is intended exclusively for peaceful purposes, including the country's vast petroleum reserves, its dealings with a Pakistani dealer in black-market nuclear technology and the fact that it concealed its uranium-enrichment program from a U.N. watchdog agency for 18 years.

"Many aspects of Iran's past nuclear program and behavior make more sense if this program was set up for military rather than civilian purposes," Pierre Goldschmidt, a former U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency deputy director general, said in a speech Oct. 30 at Harvard University.

If conclusive proof exists, however, Bush hasn't revealed it. Nor have four years of IAEA inspections.

"I have not received any information that there is a concrete active nuclear-weapons program going on right now," IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei asserted in an interview Oct. 31 with CNN.

"There is no smoking-gun proof of work on a nuclear weapon, but there is enough evidence that points in that direction," said Mark Fitzpatrick of the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation controls.

New light may be shed when the IAEA reports this month on whether Iran is fulfilling an August accord to answer all outstanding questions about the nuclear-enrichment program it long concealed from the U.N. watchdog agency.

Its report is expected to focus on Iran's work with devices that spin uranium hexafluoride gas to produce low-enriched uranium for power plants or highly enriched uranium for weapons, depending on the duration of the process.

Iran asserts that it's working only with the P1, an older centrifuge that it admitted buying in 1987 from an international black-market network headed by A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.

But IAEA inspectors determined that Iran failed to reveal that it had obtained blueprints for the P2, a centrifuge twice as efficient as the P1, from the Khan network in 1995.

Iranian officials say they did nothing with the blueprints until 2002, when they were given to a private firm that produced and tested seven modified P2 parts, then abandoned the effort.

IAEA inspectors, however, discovered that Iran sought to buy thousands of specialized magnets for P2s from European suppliers, and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said last year that research on the centrifuges continued.

The IAEA has been stymied in trying to discover the project's scope, fueling suspicions that the Iranian military may be secretly running a P2 development program parallel to the civilian-run P1 program at Natanz.

Other issues driving concerns that Iran may be developing nuclear weapons:

PROJECT 111

The CIA turned over to the IAEA last year thousands of pages of computer simulations and documents — purportedly from a defector's laptop — that indicated that Iranian experts studied mounting a nuclear warhead on a ballistic missile.

The laptop also contained drawings and notes on sophisticated detonators and conventional high explosives arrayed in a ring — the shape used to trigger nuclear weapons — and implicated a firm linked to Iran's military in uranium-enrichment studies.

The documents included drawings of a 1,200-foot-deep underground shaft apparently designed to confine a nuclear test explosion. Iran denounced the materials as "politically motivated and baseless," but promised to cooperate with an IAEA investigation into so-called Project 111 once other questions are settled. U.S., French, German and British intelligence officials think the materials are genuine. "I wouldn't go to war over this, but it's reason for suspicion," Fitzpatrick said. "It hasn't been explained." Muhammad Sahimi, a professor of chemical and petroleum engineering at the University of Southern California who emigrated from Iran in 1978 and has analyzed Iran's nuclear program closely, dismissed the materials as "totally not believable." Noting how carefully Iranian intelligence agencies monitor the program and the borders, he said, "If the laptop did exist, I find it hard to believe that its absence wasn't noticed for so long that somebody could take it out of Iran."

THE 15-PAGE DOCUMENT

ElBaradei revealed in November 2005 that Iran had a document supplied by the Khan network on casting and milling uranium metal into hemispheres. Uranium hemispheres have no application in power plants, but form the explosive cores of nuclear weapons. Iran denied asking for the document or doing anything with it. It barred the IAEA from making copies but agreed to have it placed under seal. IAEA investigators have been interviewing Khan network members to verify Iran's version of how it got the document. They also have been looking into whether Iran received a Chinese warhead design from the Khan network. Libya, which bought the same materials Iran did, had the design.

POLONIUM-210

Iran has failed since 2003 to satisfy IAEA inquiries about experiments it conducted from 1989 to 1993 that produced Polonium-210.

Polonium-210 is a highly radioactive substance that has limited civilian applications but is used in warheads to initiate the fission chain reaction that results in a nuclear blast.

URANIUM MINE

IAEA inspectors want to know why and how the same military-linked company that's been implicated in the laptop materials was able to develop a uranium mine and a milling facility in a year when Iran has said the firm has limited experience in such work.

NUCLEAR POWER VS. OIL AND GAS

Many U.S. and European officials dispute Iran's claim that it needs to enrich uranium for nuclear power plants. They point out that the only Iranian nuclear power plant under construction is being built by Russia, which has an agreement to supply it with low-enriched uranium fuel for 10 years.

Moreover, they contend that Iran doesn't have enough uranium to provide fuel for the lifetimes of the seven to 10 civilian reactors it says it needs to meet the demands of its growing population. It would be far cheaper for Iran to expand domestic consumption of natural gas, of which it has the world's second-largest reserves, and oil, of which it has the world's third-largest reserves, according to a study by the Los Alamos National Laboratory. But Sahimi argued that given the skyrocketing price of oil and natural gas, it makes more sense for Iran to export as much petroleum and natural gas as possible and fill its power needs with nuclear-generated electricity. "The price of uranium since 2001 has increased by 800 percent. Iran's presently known resources can supply enriched uranium for seven reactors for 15 years," he said. "It would be foolish not to go after a domestic uranium facility ... given that, the price of enriched uranium, and the political obstacles and hindrance (Iran faces) if it decides to rely on outside suppliers."

El Baradei: No evidence Tehran is developing nuclear weapons

Associated Press - Oct 28, 2007

The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said Sunday he had no evidence Iran was working actively to build nuclear weapons and expressed concern that escalating rhetoric from the U.S. could bring disaster.

"We have information that there has been maybe some studies about possible weaponization," said Mohamed ElBaradei, who leads the International Atomic Energy Agency. "That's why we have said that we cannot give Iran a pass right now, because there is still a lot of question marks.

"But have we seen Iran having the nuclear material that can readily be used into a weapon? No. Have we seen an active weaponization program? No."

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice accused Iran this month of "lying" about the aim of its nuclear program. She said there is no doubt Tehran wants the capability to produce nuclear weapons and has deceived the IAEA about its intentions.

Vice President Dick Cheney has raised the prospect of "serious consequences" if Iran were found to be working toward developing a nuclear weapon. Last week, the Bush administration announced harsh penalties against the Iranian military and state-owned banking systems in hopes of raising pressure on the world financial system to cut ties with Tehran.

‘We cannot add fuel to the fire’

ElBaradei said he was worried about the growing rhetoric from the U.S., which he noted focused on Iran's alleged intentions to build a nuclear weapon rather than evidence the country was actively doing so. If there is actual evidence, ElBaradei said he would welcome seeing it.

"I'm very much concerned about confrontation, building confrontation, because that would lead absolutely to a disaster. I see no military solution. The only durable solution is through negotiation and inspection," he said.

"My fear is that if we continue to escalate from both sides that we will end up into a precipice, we will end up into an abyss. As I said, the Middle East is in a total mess, to say the least. And we cannot add fuel to the fire," ElBaradei added.

Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, agreed that the current "hot rhetoric" from the U.S. could prove dangerous.

"We ought to make it clear that there's always a military option if Iran goes nuclear, but that we ought to just speak more softly because these hot words that are coming out of the administration, this hot rhetoric plays right into the hands of the fanatics in Iran," said Levin, D-Mich.

IAEA chief: No psywar on Iran

Press TV News - Oct 22, 2007

UN nuclear watchdog boss Mohamed ElBaradei says Washington's psywar to demonize Iran as a nuclear threat to the world should be tossed.

In an interview with Le Monde, the head of International Atomic Energy Agency warned the West against the use of force in a bid to resolve Tehran's nuclear standoff.

ElBaradei said there is plenty of time for diplomacy, sanctions, dialogue, and incentives to bear fruit, urging the international community to be patient with Tehran.

He added that even in a hypothetical situation, that Iran intended 'to acquire a nuclear bomb', Tehran would need between another three and eight years to succeed.

The Islamic Republic has repeatedly stated that it is opposed to nuclear arms; as such weapons have no place in its defense doctrine.

The IAEA chief's remarks come after US Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday Iran would have to suffer 'serious consequences' if it did not suspend its nuclear activities.