Disarmament Diplomacy

Editorial

Intelligence on Nuclear Weapons

Rebecca Johnson

Shock News from America's National Intelligence Council: Iran doesn't have an active nuclear weapon programme! Let's hope that Cheney's warhorses are reined in and any plans for US or Israeli airstrikes on Iran's nuclear facilities are mothballed forthwith. But we also need to keep up support for the IAEA inspectors and maintain pressure on Iran to ratify the Additional Protocol, for we cannot sleep easy quite yet.

The world may heave a great sigh of relief - not only that Tehran is not poised to build and deploy nuclear weapons next year, but that the US's own intelligence services have undermined the neocons' main justification for bombing Iran and compounding the terrible mistakes they made with Iraq. Quite apart from the devastation that airstrikes would cause to Iranian civilians, since many of the nuclear facilities are near towns, US attempts to coerce Iran with threats and sanctions have already been proving politically counter-productive. Every time the Bush administration rattled their bombs, they recruited thousands more supporters for Iran's hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Their clumsy threats just served to divert attention away from Ahmadinejad's economic and domestic failings and strengthen his hand in silencing opponents and suppressing human and civil rights in Iran.

Though the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran's nuclear intentions and capabilities vindicates those counselling diplomacy over military force, we should not make the mistake of behaving as if Iran were a completely innocent victim that has been wrongly accused. The NIE states that though "Iranian military entities were working under government direction to develop nuclear weapons" until autumn 2003, this programme was halted. If true - and it meshes in important respects with evidence turned up by the IAEA - this means that despite being party to the NPT, Iran was pursuing a nuclear weapons option. Did it stop because of international pressure as suggested by the NIE, because it now knows enough to make a bomb, or because Iraq no longer poses a direct threat?

Iran is not the first to hide behind the NPT in order to chase the elusive insurance policy of a nuclear 'deterrent' or the exciting notion of punching above their weight with the 'ultimate' weapons. Nor are they likely to be the last (or, let's face it, to take the option entirely off their own agenda, particularly now they have mastered uranium enrichment) as long as nuclear weapons are treated as high value assets instead of being outlawed, as the international WMD Commission recommended.

The contradictions were amply demonstrated in the latest report on Iran by the Director General of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, published on November 15. Commended for providing access to all its declared facilities and a more coherent history of its nuclear programme since 1972, Iran claimed it has been vindicated by the IAEA. Not so.

In one section that begs more questions, the report noted that Iran had handed over a 15-page document on casting uranium metal into hemispheres. This, according to Tehran, came un-requested with a job lot of nuclear technology from - presumed but unnamed - the infamous Khan network presided over by the godfather of Pakistan's bomb. Dr Elbaradei also confirmed that contrary to demands by the UN Security Council, Iran has accelerated its uranium enrichment programme and installed 18 cascades of 164 uranium enrichment centrifuges. So Tehran now has an industrial capability in uranium enrichment to levels of over 4 percent U235. From this, bomb grade uranium enrichment would not be difficult to accomplish.

Currently permitted under Article IV of the NPT, Iran's enrichment programme is under safeguards. Yet the report lamented that there was still inadequate transparency and concluded that "the Agency is not in a position to provide credible assurances about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran without full implementation of the Additional Protocol". As a consequence, the IAEA's "knowledge about Iran's current nuclear programme is diminishing".

'Intelligence' is an odd word, simultaneously meaning information and the intellectual abilities to process, understand and turn it into knowledge. In intelligence, what you don't see (or fail to recognize) may be as vital as the mass of information that you do pick up. The ability to pluck salience from clutter is a mark of the intelligent person. Now we hear analysts talking about 'smart proliferation', distinguishable from 'dumb proliferation' by how cleverly a state manipulates the NPT to develop its nuclear weapons. So breaking the law and cheating on treaties is now regarded as 'smart'? Does that make the rest - the law-abiding parties - dumb?

The heart of the matter is this: nuclear weapons might take intelligence to make; using them would only require dumb brutality or passive obedience - and a lack of imagination. As with suicide bombers, there's nothing smart about blowing up a bus or a city. Or putting our planet at risk. Those with real intelligence on nuclear weapons know they must be outlawed and abolished, without exception.

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© 2007 The Acronym Institute.