There’s no sourcing for the claim, as far as I can tell, but “Haaretz reported”:http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1067901.html a little while back that the Obama administration is planning to publish a new U.S. National Intelligence Estimate on Iran soon.
In the “discussions about”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1875/dammit Iran’s centrifuge installation patterns, I haven’t seen much mention of Gholamreza Aqazadeh’s “announcement”:http://www.mehrnews.com/en/NewsDetail.aspx?NewsID=839756 that Iran plans to install a new generation of centrifuges at Natanz:
bq. “*New generation of centrifuges which are technologically more advanced than the previous generation will soon be installed* at Natanz nuclear facility,” Aqazadeh told a joint news conference with Russian nuclear agency chief Sergei Kiriyenko at the site of Bushehr nuclear reactor in southern Iran.
It may be that Iran is content to operate its IR-1 centrifuges until it’s ready to install the new generation. Having said that, lots of Iranian officials’ predictions about the nuclear program have had a troubled relationship with reality, so grain of salt and all that.
The UK has “a list”:http://www.berr.gov.uk/whatwedo/europeandtrade/strategic-export-control/licensing-policy/end-use-control/page29307.html, current as of February.
According to the site,
bq. The entities included on the list are mainly based on the last 3 years’ experience of either invoking the WMD end-use control or refusing licences under it. In addition there are a few other entities for which we have not refused licences or invoked the control, but there is publicly available information indicating their *involvement in WMD programmes of concern.*
One footnote jumped out at me because it states that some of the listed entities “are included solely because they are listed in UN Security Council Resolutions 1737, 1747 or 1803 concerning Iran.”
Not sure if this suggests that UK intel doesn’t have anything on those entities, but I thought it worth noting.
There is a school of thought in the nonproliferation/arms control/U.S. strategic policy debate that I think can be summed up this way:
In the future, the following international actors will pose credible nuclear threats: terrorists, poor countries, the other nuclear-weapon states, and at least some U.S. allies.
The United States, however, will not.
I’ve had internet issues at home, but Verizon suggested a fix that actually worked, so I’m back up.
It has a bit of a ring, if you’re as dorky as a guy who runs an arms control blog.
Anyway, NPEC has had “the text”:http://www.npec-web.org/us-uae/20090115-UsUae-Revised123Agreement.pdf up for a while now, but I thought I’d point out two especially interesting features:
1. Article 12 states that the United States has the right to terminate the agreement if the UAE engages in enrichment or reprocessing or obtains ENR facilities.
2. The last paragraph of the Agreed Minute apparently makes the agreement a minimum standard for other 123 agreements with countries in the region, should the US negotiate them. Here’s the key part:
bq. the fields of cooperation, terms and conditions accorded by the United States of America to the United Arab Emirates for cooperation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy shall be no less favorable in scope and effect than those which may be accorded, from time to time, to any other non-nuclear weapon State in the Middle East in a peaceful nuclear cooperation agreement.
Hey, the geeks shall inherit the earth…
I’ve long thought that Iran may try use its influence over Iraq to extract concessions on its nuclear program. But a “BBC report”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7901101.stm has UN ambassador Sir John Sawers saying that Iran tried to do exactly that before restarting uranium conversion:
“There were various Iranians who would come to London and suggest we had tea in some hotel or other. They’d do the same in Paris, they’d do the same in Berlin, and then we’d compare notes among the three of us,” he told the BBC.
“The Iranians wanted to be able to strike a deal whereby they stopped killing our forces in Iraq in return for them being allowed to carry on with their nuclear programme: *’We stop killing you in Iraq, stop undermining the political process there, you allow us to carry on with our nuclear programme without let or hindrance.’*
Also interesting is this admission from Nicholas Burns:
bq. “We had advocated regime change,” said Mr Burns. “We had a very threatening posture towards Iran for a number of years. It didn’t produce any movement whatsoever.”
The admission is obviously what is of interest, not the information.
A friendly back-and-forth can be found in the comments section of “this post.”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2192/iran-and-syria-reports
After ISIS contended that they had posted the reports first, Jeffrey responded as follows:
Your email to my inbox is time-stamped 10:44 am.
The time stamp on my post is 10:28.
The impressive feat, of course, is that you have actually read the report, which I cannot claim even at 4:20 pm.
“ISIS”:http://www.isisnucleariran.org/assets/pdf/IAEA_Report_Iran_Feb_2009.pdf and the “Wonk”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2192/iran-and-syria-reports have the latest IAEA reports about Iran and Syria. ISIS also has some “analysis”:http://www.isisnucleariran.org/assets/pdf/IAEA_Report_Analysis.pdf of the Iran report.
Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair testified before the SSCI on 12 February about, among other topics, Iran’s nuclear program. He stated that, in essence, the 2007 NIE is still operative:
bq. The assessment that was in our 2007 National Intelligence Estimate about Iran’s nuclear weapons programs are _generally_ still valid today. Tehran, at a minimum, is keeping open the option to develop deliverable nuclear weapons. The halt in the recent past in _some aspects_ of the program was primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure. [Emphasis added].
I’m not sure what, if anything, the italicized portions mean, but I thought it’d be useful to highlight them.
More interesting, however, is a statement that Blair made later during the hearing. To me, it may be in tension with the language cited above.
Blair said
bq. Iran is clearly developing all the components of a deliverable nuclear weapons program — fissionable material, nuclear _weaponizing capability_ and the means to deliver it. Whether they take it all the way to nuclear weapons and become a nuclear power I think will depend on — it will depend a great deal on their own internal decisions. [Emphasis added].
Since the “2007 NIE”:http://www.dni.gov/press_releases/20071203_release.pdf stated that “Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program,” the definition of which included “nuclear weapon design and weaponization work,” one can’t be blamed for wondering what Blair was talking about.