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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center and was the Pentagon’s deputy for nonproliferation from 1989-93
Of all the questions America’s bombing of Iran has generated, the one that’s received the least attention is how we got here. The US and Israeli assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities was the predictable result of persistent US and international unwillingness to draw the line properly between safe and dangerous nuclear activities or materials.
If America and like-minded nations continue to condone nuclear fuel-making and allow Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) violators to leave the treaty with impunity, the bombing of Iran won’t change much. Indeed, more countries in war zones may pursue a nuclear weapons option under the guise of peaceful nuclear energy.
As far back as 1946, the Acheson-Lilienthal Report warned the world that certain nuclear materials and activities were so close to bomb-making, inspections could never detect their military diversion in time to allow an outside intervention to block bombs from being built. It also suggested that engaging in these dangerous nuclear activities and possessing related materials was itself an act of war. The nuclear trajectories of India and North Korea should have made this clear. With India, the US allowed New Delhi to make nuclear fuel by recycling plutonium. The US even shared reprocessing plant designs in support of India’s civilian nuclear programme. The result in 1974 was India’s detonation of a “peaceful nuclear explosive” — in other words, a bomb.
The story with North Korea wasn’t much different. In 1993, US Intelligence and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) caught the North Koreans lying about their materials inventories and their plutonium reprocessing activities. Pyongyang resisted special inspections of its nuclear fuel-making activities and stocks and threatened to withdraw from the NPT.
In 1994, in exchange for two civilian US-designed power reactors, Pyongyang promised eventually to allow routine IAEA inspections. That day never came. Instead, North Korea secretly started to make nuclear fuel by enriching uranium, which US intelligence agencies tracked. Yet, when President George W Bush finally called this out, North Korea withdrew from the treaty with impunity in 2003 and exploded its first bomb in 2006.
The troubles with Iran also began with demands to make nuclear fuel. The US had supported enrichment and reprocessing in Japan and Europe since the 1970s. At the time, US diplomats argued nuclear fuel-making was an “inalienable right” under Article IV of the NPT. That opened the door for Iran to insist on similar rights. In the 1970s, the Shah wanted to enrich and to reprocess. In the early 1990s, Tehran finally acted on these ambitions by secretly acquiring Chinese plans for a uranium hexafluoride conversion plant — a critical step towards enriching uranium. Again, the US sat on this information for nearly a decade.
When Iran finally admitted it was enriching uranium, Washington conceded it had a right to do so, but wanted Russia to enrich uranium for Iran instead. Instead, Iran proceeded to enrich, played the international safeguard system, and got to the brink of bomb-making capacity. Last week, the IAEA admitted it does not know where Iran might be storing its 400kg of near-weapons grade material.
As special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff rightly noted, “enrichment enables weaponisation”. Yet, policy has not changed to reflect that realisation. The White House recently directed the Department of Energy to pursue 20 new international civil nuclear deals that would include technologies and materials — including enriched uranium and advanced plutonium fuel cycles — that the US deemed too dangerous for Iran. Similarly, the US has offered to help Saudi Arabia enrich uranium as a part of any civil nuclear deal. That’s a mistake if Washington wants to avoid further proliferation.
Besides saying no to reprocessing and enrichment, the US and like-minded nations should lay down the law on NPT withdrawals. Non-compliant nations should not be allowed to leave the treaty until they’ve come back into full compliance. Automatic sanctions against any such attempts should be laid out now before any non-compliant state attempts such a move. Finally, nuclear-armed nations that left or never joined the NPT — Israel, North Korea, Pakistan and India — should be encouraged to come into full compliance.
Some will argue that in a multi-polar world, tightening the rules is for fools. The stark alternative of a nuclear Wild West suggests otherwise.
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