Plan Released by Iran and U.N. Atomic Agency Is Faulted

New York Times

An agreement between Iran and the United Nations nuclear agency aimed at allaying suspicions about Tehran’s past nuclear activities is inadequate and is likely to delay further international sanctions against the country, some Western governments and nuclear experts say.

On Monday, Iran and the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency released a plan laying out a step-by-step timetable of cooperation with the goal of resolving by December issues that have been under investigation for four years. Agency officials have praised the timetable as a breakthrough and Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on Tuesday said the investigation into his country’s nuclear activities was now closed.

“Not one member of the International Atomic Energy Agency has cooperated as well as Iran,” Mr. Ahmadinejad said at a news conference in Tehran, according to The Associated Press. He added: “So from our point of view, Iran’s nuclear case is closed. Iran is a nuclear nation and has the nuclear fuel cycle.”

Mr. Ahmadinejad repeated his stance that Iran would not buckle under international pressure to curb its nuclear projects, which Iran insists are for peaceful purposes, and the United States and some European nations believe are to make nuclear weapons.

But a number of Western governments, including the United States and France, as well as leading arms control experts, fault the plan as evidence of a new and dangerous strategy by Iran to drag out the process and answer questions about its past treaty violations bit by bit to avoid further punishment by the United Nations Security Council.

“There is no way to verify any of Iran’s claims — the agency doesn’t get access to people, documents, sites,” said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a private Washinton research organization. “The agency loses its right to ask follow-up questions in the future, a really strange development that sets a bad precedent. You’re left wondering whether the I.A.E.A. was tricked because it was so eager for a deal.”

In its plan, the agency announced that Iran had resolved questions about its past experiments with plutonium, a material that can be used to make nuclear weapons, although it offered no explanation of how Tehran had done so. It also said Iran was finally prepared to clear up other issues, including explaining a document Iran probably received from Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani nuclear engineer, showing how to make uranium into hemispheres, a shape suitable for use in a weapon.

Although officials at the International Atomic Energy Agency have not commented since the plan was released, the agency’s deputy director, Olli Heinonen, praised it as “an important milestone” during a visit to Iran last week in which the plan was finalized. While saying the process “will take time,” he added: “We have in front of us an agreed work plan. We agreed on modalities on how to implement it. We have a timeline for the implementation.”

But Mark Fitzpatrick, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, called the document “superficial,” noting that it “drags negotiations on for many months and runs the risk that the agency will be left with incomplete and misleading answers from Iran.”

The agreement also makes it easier for Russia and China to oppose new sanctions in the Security Council, because they can claim that Iran is showing some cooperation with the international watchdog agency. The United States and some European governments find that development worrying, because Iran is continuing to produce enriched uranium, which can be used to make electricity or a bomb, in violation of past Council resolutions.

“We are at a crucial moment in diplomacy and the international community could very well lose its unity of purpose,” said one senior French official, who spoke anonymously because he is involved in negotiations on potential new sanctions. “Meanwhile, Iran is gaining time.”

The United States, which with France and Britain is pushing for a third round of sanctions against Iran, has expressed its displeasure with the plan.

Gregory L. Schulte, the American envoy to the atomic agency, told reporters in Vienna last week that the timetable had “real limitations.” He faulted Iran for refusing the Council’s demand that it freeze its uranium enrichment program and for failing to carry out the “additional protocol” to Iran’s nuclear agreement with the agency. That protocol gives the agency’s inspectors the right to ask for wider access to Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Iran agreed last June to draw up a plan within 60 days to give the agency’s nuclear inspectors more access to its nuclear sites and to answer outstanding questions about its nuclear program.

Details of the timetable will be included in a report for the agency’s 35-country governing board that could be released Wednesday. The report is expected to be more detailed than the timetable, and answer some criticisms.

Iran has threatened to curb cooperation with the agency if the Council does not delay a drive for new sanctions. “If they make an irrational move, then Iran’s cooperation” with the agency “will be sterile,” Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, said.