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Acknowledgements
A version of this essay was circulated as a background paper for a workshop organised by The International Institute for Strategic Studies on ‘Building a Common Approach to the Iranian Nuclear Problem’ on 27–28 November 2006 at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. The research is part of a programme generously supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Notes
1 Shahram Chubin, Iran's Nuclear Ambitions (Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2006), p. 13.
2 Seymour Hersh, ‘The Next Act: Is a Damaged Administration Less Likely to Attack Iran, or More?’, The New Yorker, 27 November 2006.
3 Mark Fitzpatrick, ‘Assessing Iran's Nuclear Programme’, Survival, vol. 48, no. 3, Autumn 2006, pp. 5–26.
4 Hassan Rohani, ‘Beyond the Challenges Facing Iran and the IAEA Concerning the Nuclear Dossier’, Rahbord, 30 September 2005, pp. 7–38 (in Persian). Translated by FBIS in 2006 (FBIS-IAP20060113336001) and available at www.armscontrolwonk.com/file_download/30.
5 IAEA, ‘Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement in the Islamic Republic of Iran,’ GOV/2006/53, para 13, 31 August 2006.
6 IAEA, ‘Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement in the Islamic Republic of Iran’, GOV/2006/64, para 2, 14 November 2006.
7 Ibid.
8 David Albright and Jacqueline Shire, ‘Latest IAEA Report on Iran: Continued Progress on Cascade Operations, No New Cooperation with the IAEA’, Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), 14 November 2006, http://www.isis-online.org/publications/iran/continuedprogress.pdf.
9 Gareth Smyth, ‘Iran Says it will be “Fully Nuclear” Soon’, Financial Times, 15 November 2006.
10 David Ignatius, ‘Iran's Uranium Glitch; Technical Troubles Offer Time for Diplomacy’, Washington Post, 29 September 2006, p. A21.
11 Council on Foreign Relations, ‘Albright: “Room for Optimism” in Confrontation with Iran’, interview with David Albright, 12 September 2006, http://www.cfr.org/publication/11435/albright.html.
12 Interviews, October 2006.
13 The International Institute for Strategic Studies, Iran's Strategic Weapons Programmes: A Net Assessment (Abingdon: Routledge for the IISS, 2005), p. 54. Other reputable analysts estimate a 3,000-centrifuge facility could produce a bomb's worth of HEU in 4–6 months. See David Albright and Corey Hinderstein, ‘The Clock is Ticking But How Fast?’, Institute for Science and International Security, 27 March 2006, http: //www.isis-online.org/publications/iran/clockticking.pdf.
14 Prospects for US–Iran talks on Iraq appeared to grow in late 2006, when the Iraq Study Group advised opening talks with Iran and Syria about ways to end violence in Iraq. On 5 November 2006, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said Iran would consider talks with the United States over regional issues, including Iraq, if Washington requested. President Bush on 13 November ruled that out, however, unless Iran first suspends its enrichment programme. There is no reason Iran would make trade-offs on its nuclear programme to help the United States repair its position in Iraq. Flynt Leverett, among others, argues that engagement with iran will not work unless the major issues of concern to each side are included. See Flynt Leverett, ‘Dealing with Tehran: Assessing the U.S. Diplomatic Options toward Iran’, The Century Foundation, 4 December 2006, http://www.tcf.org/publications/internationalaffairs/leverett_diplomatic.pdf.
15 Patrick Clawson and Michael Eisenstadt, ‘Forcing Hard Choices on Tehran; Raising the Costs of Iran's Nuclear Program’, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Policy Focus no. 62, November 2006, http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/pubPDFs/PolicyFocus62.pdf.
16 Ibid., p. 16.
17 Richard K. Betts, ‘The Osirak Fallacy’, The National Interest, Spring 2006, pp. 22–5. As Betts explains, Iraq did not have a reprocessing facility to separate out the plutonium that would have been produced once the Osirak reactor went on-line. When it was destroyed, Iraq embarked on a fast-paced effort to produce weapons through the alternate route of enriching uranium.
18 Dan Reiter, ‘Preventive Attacks against Nuclear Programs and the ”Success” at Osiraq’, Nonproliferation Review, vol. 21, no. 2, Summer 2005, p. 263. Before the bombing, Iraq had committed 400 scientists and $400 million to the programme; afterwards the numbers grew to 7,000 personnel and a budget of $10 billion.
19 Tovah Lazaroff, ‘US Official: Israel Won't Bomb Iran’, The Jerusalem Post, 8 December 2006, http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1162378347825&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull.
20 Interview, October 2006.
21 Ibid.
22 Closing the straits would also stop Iran's oil exports and, more importantly, its import of 40% of its consumption of gasoline (refined petroleum), the consumer price of which is heavily state subsidised. Iran would therefore not want to close the straits entirely or for long.
23 Among the many published analyses of the likely consequences of air strikes, one of the best is in Anthony H. Cordesman and Khalid R. Al-Rodha, ‘Iranian Nuclear Weapons? Options for Sanctions and Military Strikes’, Center for Strategic and International Studies, 30 August 2006.
24 Steven Miller, Director of the International Security Program at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, coined this phrase at a 23 June 2006 workshop on Iran hosted by The International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
25 Gareth Smyth, ‘Iran “Ready to Limit Nuclear Programme”’, Financial Times, 18 June 2006.
26 Interviews, October and December 2006.
27 International Crisis Group, ‘Iran: Is there a Way out of the Nuclear Impasse?’, Middle East Report, no. 51, 23 February 2006, http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=3976&CFID=14546738&CFTOKEN=26322303.
28 Elaine Sciolino, ‘Russia Plan for Iran Upsets U.S. and Europe’, New York Times, 7 March 2006.
29 Volker Perthes and Eva Wegner, ‘Enriching the Options: Europe, the United States, and Iran’, discussion paper for the 4th Annual GMF Think Tank Symposium in Vienna, May 2006, p. 9, http://www.swp-berlin.org/en/common/get_document.php?id=1688. The authors source this report to personal communications with an Iranian journalist. Another European source with close dealings with Iranian officials discounts the Rafsanjani story but says an Iranian negotiator claimed Khamenei himself agreed to a ten-year moratorium (interview, December 2006).
30 In April 2006, the IAEA lost continuity of knowledge over one cylinder of UF6 at Esfahan when Iran moved it in the absence of inspectors. The amount involved was is not enough for a weapon but it would be enough for a clandestine research programme if, in fact, the UF6 was diverted. Loss of continuity of knowledge is not proof of diversion. On what basis ElBaradei can assert there has been no diversion, however, is unclear.
31 Pierre Goldschmidt, ‘The Urgent Need to Strengthen the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Regime’, January 2006, http://www.carnegieendowment.org/files/PO25.Goldschmidt.FINAL2.pdf. Goldschmidt expanded on this suggestion at a presentation at Wilton Park on 19 December 2006.
32 IAEA, ‘Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement in the Islamic Republic of Iran,’ GOV/2005/67, para 50, 2 September 2005.