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US Lags on Approving Protocol Demanded of Iran
Carol Giacomo, Reuters
WASHINGTON/TEHRAN, 22 November 2003 —
Even as it pressures Iran to sign a new agreement on nuclear inspections with the UN watchdog agency, the United States is lagging on approving its own similar accord, congressional and arms control sources said yesterday.
While there are important differences in the two cases, President George W. Bush has told Congress the agreement, called an additional protocol, is important because it would “greatly strengthen” International Atomic Energy Agency efforts to root out clandestine nuclear weapons programs.
The United States signed the document in 1998, and in 2002 Bush transmitted it to the US Senate for ratification. But ratification is delayed because the administration has not submitted implementing legislation that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee believes must accompany the protocol. The US Congress is due to go out of session next week, pushing the issue into next year.
Daryl Kimball, head of the Arms Control Association, an activist group, said the Pentagon has raised concerns about the protocol oversight provisions affecting on-site verification of US facilities with nuclear weapons-related material.
A Senate aide told Reuters US inaction assumed added significance in light of the dispute over Iran’s activities.
“It is important that we ratify it, not for itself, but rather so we can persuade non nuclear-weapons states to ratify their protocols and allow the IAEA to come and look,” he said.
“We keep hearing the implementing legislation will be up here next week, but we’ve heard that for weeks,” he said.
The United States and other countries proposed an additional protocol after the 1991 Gulf War when it became clear how little the IAEA knew about Iraq’s weapons programs.
It requires states to provide more transparency about their nuclear activities and expands IAEA access to suspect sites, including through snap inspections. Seventy-eight states signed the protocol but only 38 put it into force.
Bush, in sending the protocol to the Senate, called the agreement “a milestone in US efforts to strengthen the (IAEA) safeguards system ... and thereby reduce the threat posed by clandestine efforts to develop a nuclear weapons capability.”
Bush’s letter to the Senate makes a strong case for the IAEA protocol but the Senate aide said the Pentagon and Commerce Department have taken “a long time to decide if they could live with this.”
The IAEA met in Vienna yesterday on just this issue. Washington says Iran has a secret program to develop atomic bombs and was enraged when a recent IAEA report concluded there was “no evidence” of this.
The report did find that Iran concealed a uranium enrichment program for 18 years and secretly reprocessed plutonium usable in weapons.
The IAEA, with US backing, has pressed Iran to sign the protocol. Tehran, despite promises, has yet to do so.
Under the NPT, non-nuclear weapons states like Iran are required to accept IAEA “safeguards,” including inspections. But the United States and other declared nuclear powers — Britain, France, Russia and China — are not obligated because the safeguards are meant to prevent illegal nuclear programs.
The United States accused the UN nuclear watchdog of damaging its credibility by concluding there was as yet no evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. But IAEA Director General Mohamed El-Baradei rejected the charge by saying that his agency had after all been right in the past when it had said there was no evidence in Iraq of a nuclear weapons program.
US ambassador to the IAEA in Vienna, Ken Brill, told a meeting of the agency’s 35-nation board of governors that “misleading phrasing” in a report from Baradei “moved both government officials and academic experts across the political spectrum to expressions of disbelief that the institution charged by the international community with scrutinizing nuclear proliferation risks was dismissing important facts that had been disclosed by its own investigation.”
Meanwhile, a fire bomb was thrown at the British Embassy compound in central Tehran yesterday afternoon, but no one was hurt and little damage was caused, a British diplomat said.
The attack, which followed suicide bomb attacks against British targets in Istanbul on Thursday that killed 27 people, was not preceded by any warnings and there was no immediate claim of responsibility.
“We’re in touch with the Iranian authorities and we’re reviewing our security arrangements,” the British diplomat told Reuters in Tehran. The incident occurred at 3.30 p.m. (1200 GMT) at the back gate of the embassy’s large walled compound in central Tehran.
“The incendiary device was thrown by an individual who was in a Peykan,” the diplomat said referring to the ubiquitous car based on the Hillman Hunter which is by far the most common vehicle on Iran’s roads. “It struck the gate and caused a small fire on both sides of the gate,” the diplomat said.
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| Earth, a planet hungry for peace |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank, like a Python (Alquds, 1/25/03. |
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