Reactions Split on Iranian Nuclear Tour Offer

Western governments and independent analysts voiced strong doubts this week over Iran's motivation for welcoming delegates from specific countries and organizations to tour some of its nuclear facilities ahead of this month's planned multilateral talks on Iranian atomic activities, Reuters reported yesterday.

The specific recipients of the invitations remained unclear. China confirmed it had been offered the tour, and a diplomat in Vienna said Russia had also been included.

"We are still trying to determine who is on Iran's invite list. We aren't," U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said.

Iran has not extended invitations to France, Germany, the United States or the United Kingdom, according to one U.S. official. The four Western powers have pressed the Middle Eastern nation to curb its uranium enrichment program, which they suspect is geared toward weapons development. Iran has defended its nuclear ambitions as strictly peaceful and steadfastly rejected calls to suspend its enrichment effort.

Egyptian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hossam Zaki said his country would participate in the planned tour, apparently making Cairo the first government to accept Iran's proposal.

"A fair number of invitations have been issued. The pattern is clearer regarding who is not invited ... than who is invited," the official said. "Hungary, invited as the EU presidency, has already declined." Neither Hungary nor the European Union have yet confirmed the nation's rejection of the invitation (Amiri/Dahl, Reuters I, Jan. 4).

"We haven't answered the letter," a European Commission spokesman told reporters yesterday.

"But what we want to underline is that there is a process going on and it is for the [International Atomic Energy Agency] to inspect the Iranian nuclear facilities," the official added. "They have people to inspect them."

Hungary said EU member states would together deliver a response to the offer, Reuters reported (Justyna Pawlak, Reuters II, Jan. 5).

The Obama administration remained skeptical of Iran's intentions. "Acts such as Iran’s invitation to several countries to tour its facilities are not a substitute for Iran fulfilling its obligations to cooperate with the IAEA and will not divert attention away from the core issues regarding Iran’s nuclear program," the Christian Science Monitor quoted State Department spokesman Mark Toner as saying (Scott Peterson, Christian Science Monitor I, Jan. 4).

Iran's tour offer was an example of "pretend transparency," said George Perkovich, an expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Taking a bunch of diplomats ... to see what you want them to see is not meaningful transparency," he said

The United Kingdom expressed a similar view in an official statement: "A tightly controlled visit of selected facilities was unlikely to provide the assurances needed by the international community" on Iran's nuclear program (Amiri/Dahl, Reuters I).

Shahram Chubin, another Carnegie Endowment analyst, suggested the invitations were aimed at fostering division among Germany and the five permanent U.N. Security Council members -- China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States -- ahead of their anticipated meeting with Iran this month in Istanbul, Turkey. The Security Council has adopted four sanctions resolutions to date aimed at pressuring Iran to curb its disputed atomic work.

"The Iranians are always trying to divide the coalition, and I think the point of the meetings (for the Iranians) is not to resolve the problem, but to deflect pressure for more sanctions, by demonstrating that Iran is not recalcitrant,” Chubin told the Monitor.

“The Russians and the Chinese like to have any excuse not to go to the next step, or indeed to implement the current steps, and the Iranians play on that,” he said. Tehran is seeking to “delay and prevaricate and divide, and it's always in response to pressure, despite what it says. Of course, that (pressure) is exactly the only way you can get the Iranians to focus,” he said (Peterson, Christian Science Monitor I).

Former State Department nonproliferation official Mark Fitzpatrick called the invitations "a propaganda ploy, intended to deepen divisions among the IAEA member states."

"If Iran were serious about openness, there are many other ways that sincerity could be demonstrated," he said. "Among other things, Iran should answer the IAEA's questions about nuclear weapons development work, allow suspect scientists to be interviewed, stop rejecting IAEA inspectors, and provide advance design information about new nuclear facilities, as required by the IAEA rules that apply to every other member state."

Other analysts, though, saw more benign intentions behind Iran's offer.

"This invitation is to be welcomed," said Paul Ingram, who heads the British American Security Information Council. "Whilst no big breakthrough in openness in itself ... it is a goodwill gesture and does mark a shift in approach toward engagement, and recognition that the international community has a legitimate interest in Iran's nuclear program."

University of Qatar expert Mahjoob Zweiri suggested Iran was "trying to show it is flexible, that we don't have any problem to show our facilities to diplomats who they know will report back to their governments."

"They also want to show that the Stuxnet virus which attacked [Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant] a few months ago was not effective, that all its facilities are working properly," he added (see GSN, Dec. 15, 2010). Tehran initially acknowledged the computer worm infected computers at its Bushehr facility, but said the cyber attack caused no damage.

"This was a decision taken at a high level. These sorts of decisions cannot be taken by the foreign minister or the president," Zweiri noted (Reuters III, Jan. 4).

Meanwhile, Turkey's top diplomat more than one year ago suggested conservative elements of Iran's government were opposing a bid by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to reach a uranium exchange deal with world powers, says a State Department communication made public yesterday by the transparency organization WikiLeaks.

Under a 2009 proposal put forward by the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran would have exchanged 1,200 kilograms of low-enriched uranium for material to fuel a medical isotope production reactor in Tehran. The Middle Eastern state ultimately rejected the plan worked out with France, Russia and the United States, which was aimed in part at deferring Iran's ability to produce sufficient weapon material for a bomb long enough to more fully address U.S. and European concerns about Iranian enrichment activities.

Ahmadinejad was under "huge" domestic pressure over the proposal, which was “interpreted by some circles in Iran as a virtual defeat,” the classified document quoted Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu as telling U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Philip Gordon.

Asked by Turkish delegates whether "the core of the issue is psychological rather than substance, ... Ahmadinejad had said ‘yes,' that the Iranians agree to the proposal but need to manage the public perception,” according to the document. Officials in Ankara believed the Iranian president was “more flexible than others who are inside the Iranian government,” the Associated Press reported quoted the cable as saying.

Tehran has "more trust" in U.S. negotiators than their British counterparts, and "the Iranians would also prefer to get fuel from the U.S. rather than the Russians," the cable says (Brian Murphy, Associated Press/Globe and Mail, Jan. 4).

Elsewhere, the Stuxnet computer worm might have rendered unusable up to 1,000 Iranian uranium enrichment centrifuges from the end of 2009 to the beginning of 2010, says an analysis by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security.

Although the machines routinely have technical problems, the breakdown rate "exceeded expectations and occurred during an extended period of relatively poor centrifuge performance," says the report. "The crashing of such a large number of centrifuges over a relatively short period of time could have resulted from an infection of the Stuxnet malware."

"If its goal was to quickly destroy all the centrifuges ... Stuxnet failed," the analysis determined. "But if the goal was to destroy a more limited number of centrifuges and set back Iran’s progress in operating the (enrichment facility) while making detection difficult, it may have succeeded, at least temporarily" (Mark Clayton, Christian Science Monitor II, Jan. 3).