N. Korea to Conduct Nuke Test in October?
Grand National Party Lawmaker Park Jin, who is currently attending the U.S. Republic Party national convention, said Thursday that North Korea may conduct a nuclear experiment in October, and this intelligence was quietly making its way around Washington political circles. Moreover, a high-ranking U.S. government official recently met with a North Korean diplomatic official in New York and official conveyed concerns over this intelligence, Park said.
While he was visiting the headquarters of the New York-based Wall Street Journal on Thursday, too, Park was asked by a high-ranking member of the paper's editorial staff whether he knew of the "October Surprise." The editor said that talk of a North Korean nuclear test in October was going around Washington political circles and high-ranking government officials, and such talk had even made it to the New York media.
Park said that through inquiries to high-ranking U.S. Defense Department officials and White House beat reporters from major media companies, he was able to reconfirm that such talk was, in fact, going around.
Park did not reveal who conveyed U.S. concerns to North Korea through New York diplomatic channels, but he did say that a high-ranking U.S. government official officially expressed concern over a possible "October Surprise," and North Korea showed no response.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200409/200409030023.html
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IAEA Inspection Finds Nothing Unusual
As an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspection team is conducting a weeklong investigation on the uranium enrichment experiment, it was confirmed Friday that the IAEA had actually visited Korea last year.
"IAEA had requested cooperation in visiting the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute last year, and we affirmed the request," said Cho Chung-won, director-general of Nuclear Energy Cooperation in the Science and Technology Ministry on Friday. "However, I cannot share the specific content of the inspection because of the pact between IAEA and the government," he added. Only one inspector came last year.
Cho said, "This incident was first reported to the Ministry of Science and Technology in June, and the Korean government reported it to the IAEA on Aug. 17... The IAEA inspection team is here to confirm the report we have sent in August."
The IAEA inspection team will leave the country Saturday, a day before the scheduled departure date.
Cho said, "the IAEA inspection team has been probing the uranium experiment from last Sunday, and has confirmed that there were no discrepancies in our report. They will leave Korea on Saturday." The IAEA had prescheduled to continue the inspection through Saturday.
(englishnews@chosun.com )



Gov't Explains Nuclear Experiments
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Science and Technology Ministry Atomic Power Bureau chief Cho Chung-won said Thursday, "In January and February of 2000, during research on separating radioactive materials at Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute, 0.2g of enriched uranium was separated from natural uranium... We reported this to the IAEA on Aug. 17." Accordingly, an IAEA inspection team has been in Korea since Aug. 27 conducting inspections; it will continue its work until Saturday.
The Science and Technology Ministry said, "The uranium enrichment occurred incidentally during the course of an experiment to separate gadolinium, a material used to slow down nuclear reactions in nuclear power stations. As gadolinium separation proved uneconomical, the equipment related to the experiment was dismantled and the experiment suspended."
About this, U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said in a regular briefing Thursday, " I would say that South Korea has voluntarily reported this activity. [What happened shouldn't have occurred, but] they are cooperating fully and proactively in order to demonstrate that the activity has been eliminated and it is no longer cause for concern." He added that he didn't believe the matter would influence the fourth round of six-party talks on the North Korean nuclear issue scheduled for late September.
(Kang In-sun, insun@chosun.com )



Gov't Must Quickly Eliminate Uranium Suspicions
Following the revelation that the Korea Atomic Energy Research (KAER) conducted experiments to enrich uranium four years ago, some foreign press agencies have raised suspicions that Korea attempted to develop nuclear weapons.
Many countries, however, possess the technology to concentrate radioactive isotope material using lasers. The KAER also did the experiment to separate materials for medical purposes, but found out that it was uneconomical and thus suspended the experiment. About this, the research team said that just before dismantling the equipment related to the experiment, it experimented out of an investigative mind to see whether it was possible to enrich uranium using lasers like it was in theory.
It requires 15 kg of uranium to build nuclear weapons, but the amount of enriched uranium produced in the KAER's experiment was only 0.2 kg. This means that it needs to repeat the same experiment hundreds of thousands of times to build a single nuclear weapon. Then, it is preposterous to escalate the issue to suspect that Korea might develop nuclear weapons.
Moreover, Korea voluntarily reported the experiment. At the time of the experiment, the facilities of the KAER were not on the list of the inspection of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the KAER was not obliged to report its activity. Then this February, Korea rectified an additional protocol on safety measures by IAEA, which requires experiments for research purposes to be reported as well. Thus, the government came to report the experiment conducted four years ago. In addition, the U.S. State Department spokesman said about the issue, "Korea is cooperating fully and proactively in order to demonstrate that the activity has been eliminated and it is no longer cause for concern."
The most worrying thing is that using the issue as an excuse, North Korea may refuse to hold six-way talks to resolve its nuclear issue. If Korea had attempted to develop nuclear weapon technology, the KAER would not have dismantled the equipment after experimenting only once. The government should try to resolve suspicion raised by the international community as soon as possible by clearly explaining the issue in detail to the IAEA inspection team. The longer such an issue remains unresolved, the more unnecessary speculation will be raised.



Gov't Decries Foreign Press Exaggerations of Nuke Fuel Experiments
The government is cautioning against a possible stir caused by foreign press "exaggerations" concerning experiments that resulted in the extraction of a minute quantity of uranium.
This is because after the government announced Thursday that some scientists had separating a minute amount of uranium during the course of research in January and February 2002, major foreign press agencies like Reuters, AP and AFP focused on trying to ascertain the government's intention and involvement rather than purely reporting the facts. The government also pointed out that the level of suspicion raising had crossed a line.
Reuters emphasized that the government may have been involved, saying that while the amount of uranium produced was small, its enrichment was "very close" to weapons-grade, and while the Korean government was saying it didn't know what was going on at the time of the experiments, the scientists were government employees working at a government-run research center. AP went as far as to quote Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, as saying, "We cannot afford to have another whitewash... This incident should lead to a reevaluation of U.S. export control laws on nuclear technology," while AFP reported, "The United States called for a thorough probe into ally South Korea." Their attitude seemed like one looking to escalate the issue into a source of tension between the U.S. and Korea.
About this, a government official, failing to repress his displeasure, said, "We received a belated report about an experiment to separate a minute quantity of uranium that took place four years ago, and to avoid any unnecessary misunderstandings, we reported it immediately to the IAEA and even publicly pledged to prevent such an incident from recurring, but some foreign press agencies are driving the story in a provocative way."
It required 15kg of uranium to build the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, but with current technology, it's known one could produce a weapon with only 5-6kg of uranium. Accordingly, Korean nuclear experts say 0.2g wouldn't be enough for even a test sample.

(englishnews@chosun.com )


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Foreign Press Raise Concerns About Nuke Experiments
In connection with Korean scientists' uranium enrichment experiment, the Japanese media has shown the most sensitive response. The Asahi Shimbun extensively covered Korea's uranium test on the first, second and third page. The Yomiuri Shimbun also reported it on the first page on a large scale.
The Asahi Shimbun harshly criticized the South Korean government in its editorial entitled "Surely Not in South Korea?" saying that the experiment goes against the nonproliferation declaration on which North Korea agreed and South Korea has lost a justification to require North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons development. The newspaper raised a doubt, saying it could not understand the South Korean government announcement that it did not know about the nuclear test. Recent nationalistic tendencies in Korea might be behind the nuclear experiment, analyzed the Asahi Shimbun.
Major U.S. media companies like the New York Times and the Washington Post raised a suspicion that the South Korean government might have been involved in the nuclear experiment, saying that the uranium extraction using lasers was used mainly in weapons development programs driven by governments because it was very difficult and took a huge amount of money.
The U.S. media said that this case in which a U.S ally had violated the nonproliferation treaty with confidential nuclear-related activities was embarrassing to the Bush administration, which was attempting to strengthen international pressure on the secret nuclear development of North Korea and Iran.
The Asian Wall Street Journal analyzed that North Korean leader Kim Jong-il is certainly smiling while calculating what benefit he would gain though the South Korean nuclear test. It raised a suspicion over the possible involvement of the South Korean government by quoting a U.S. official as saying that South Korea's moderate leftist former government and incumbent government might have approved the nuclear test.
The British Financial Times analyzed that the nuclear test might be caused by situational factors, saying that there were similarities between the situation in the 1970s when South Korea had embarked on nuclear development and the current situation in which the number of U.S. troops stationed in Korea were reduced and Korean-U.S relations were strained.
Concerning the South Korean government's voluntary report, international media companies refuted the South Korean government's argument that it had voluntarily reported the test to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), saying that IAEA inspectors had been banned from entering the institute and South Korea had admitted the test only after inspectors had raised questions concretely pointing at equipment in the institute.
(englishnews@chosun.com )




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South Koreans Say Secret Work Refined Uranium
By DAVID E. SANGER and WILLIAM J. BROAD
The South Korean government has admitted to the International Atomic Energy Agency that a group of the country's scientists secretly produced a small amount of near-weapons grade uranium, raising suspicions that South Korea may have attempted a secret program to counter North Korea's nuclear arsenal.
The revelation, made 11 days ago and disclosed by the agency yesterday, could greatly complicate the confrontation with North Korea over its own nuclear weapons program. President Bush regularly calls for a "nuclear-free Korean peninsula," and those calls have been endorsed by South Korea, one of Washington's closest Asian allies.
In a statement, the South Korean government said the highly enriched uranium was produced by a group of rogue scientists in 2000, without the knowledge of the government. But many details of the effort, which was an apparent violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, remain murky, and the method the scientists used was so expensive that it is normally associated with government-directed weapons programs. Richard A. Boucher, the State Department spokesman, said yesterday that it "is important that all such activity be investigated," adding that after the I.A.E.A. completed a review the United States "will be able to draw the appropriate conclusions."
According to international diplomats with knowledge of the South Korean disclosure, the government admitted to the experiment only after energy agency inspectors began asking pointed questions about a piece of equipment in a building in Taejon, a South Korean scientific center, that they had been barred from visiting. It was unclear how they had learned of the existence of the equipment. "It became clear to the South Koreans that there would be environmental samples taken, and the truth would be discovered," one of the diplomats said. "So they decided they better disclose it first, themselves." That disclosure took place on Aug. 23. The South Korean government has not yet explained how it learned of the work of the scientists.
While the amount of uranium that South Korea has admitted to enriching was very small, about two-tenths of a gram, it was enriched to nearly 80 percent - a level so high that experts said it was difficult to imagine that it would be useful for anything other than making nuclear weapons. It would take several kilograms to make even a crude nuclear weapon. When it was disclosed last year that Iran used a similar method to try to enrich uranium - though with significantly larger quantities - the Bush administration said that effort was clear evidence that Tehran was seeking to build a nuclear weapon.
Mr. Boucher declined to draw that conclusion on Thursday about South Korea, noting that it had disclosed its own violation. But a team from the International Atomic Energy Agency was rushed to the country last week, and is now conducting tests to determine if the country has fully disclosed what it produced.
South Korea recently agreed to a set of more intensive inspections by the agency, and the inspectors were in the country to perform them.
It was unclear whether the scientists who were involved in what South Korea called a "laboratory experiment" were government employees or workers for the country's civilian nuclear industry. A South Korean government statement said the experiment was intended for research on civilian fuel production, but outside experts said that seemed improbable.
There was no response yet from North Korea, and Mr. Boucher said it was not clear that the discovery would hinder the diplomatic effort to pressure the North to disarm. But several other administration officials disagreed, saying the disclosure would probably have significant propaganda value for the North, which withdrew from the nonproliferation treaty 18 months ago. It can now claim that the South had also introduced weapons-grade material to the Korean peninsula.
North Korea is estimated to have enough plutonium to produce two to eight nuclear weapons, and Washington has accused it of having a second, secret uranium enrichment program of its own. North Korea denies it has such a program.
At the time of the South Korea experiment in the year 2000 - which Seoul insists was never repeated - the country was led by President Kim Dae Jung. Mr. Kim was known for his "sunshine policy" of seeking increased engagement with the North, and traveled to North Korea the same year that the enrichment experimentation reportedly took place. "I would doubt it is anything that Kim Dae Jung condoned," said Donald P. Gregg, a former American ambassador to South Korea. "But that doesn't mean it hadn't been condoned by some previous government" or parts of the military.
The method chosen by South Korean scientists to enrich uranium, through the use of lasers, is considered easy to hide. Though pioneered by the United States and pursued for decades around the globe, laser enrichment appears to have remained a laboratory curiosity. "None of the big players use lasers," said Thomas B. Cochran, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, a private group that tracks nuclear arms. "They all use centrifuges, " referring to the devices that concentrate uranium by spinning it at high speed. Low levels of enrichment are necessary for electricity production; high levels can be used for weapons.
To date, the laser technique has been so expensive that experts assume its only usefulness would be for a military program where costs are no obstacle. It uses different colors of laser light to separate different forms of the same element, like uranium 238 from uranium 235, which in atomic reactions easily splits in two in bursts of energy.
"Given its lack of commercial application, the only conclusion you can reach is that any nation pursuing this technology is doing it for military uses," said Paul Leventhal, president of the Nuclear Control Institute, a private group in Washington that has campaigned against nuclear facilities whose waste could be used for weapons.
Last year, the International Atomic Energy Agency revealed that Iran had worked in secret for 12 years to develop lasers for purifying uranium. In a report, it said Iran established a pilot plant for laser enrichment in 2000 and used it from October 2002 to January 2003 to conduct experiments. The Iranian authorities said they disassembled the plant in May 2003.
Mr. Leventhal of the Nuclear Control Institute said the laser technology was so costly and difficult that only governments had the means to try to exploit it, undermining South Korea's disavowals about unsupervised scientists doing the experiments on their own.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |
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Beijing pressing pro-China buttons in Bush's NSC
China is stepping up pressure on the Bush administration to block all sales of arms to Taiwan until after the November presidential elections. Beijing's position has covert allies in Douglas Paal, the U.S. government representative in Taiwan, and Dennis Wilder, a pro-China CIA analyst recently named to the White House National Security Council staff...

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China takes delivery of 24 Sukhoi fighters
China's People's Liberation Army-Navy has now gotten 178 Sukhoi fighter jets from Russia in 10 years...

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Japan documents 28 recent incursions of PRC ships into territorial waters...

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Secret life and death of Kim's Japanese-born wife/mistress starts power struggle for communist throne...
Pyongyang to expel NGOs suspected of spying, using Christianity to subvert regime...

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The Latin Americanization of China?
GEORGE J. GILBOY AND ERIC HEGINBOTHAM
256
Wide-ranging liberal market reforms have produced rapid gains in China's overall economic growth over the past two decades. Yet rural policy since 1978 has been rent by opposing influences: the state recognizes the growing plight of farmers facing market reforms, but it refuses to accept rural migrants as full members of urban communities. Today, however, China's leaders are deepening land reform programs in the countryside. Reformers hope this will spur consolidation of land into larger, more efficient agricultural holdings while encouraging inefficient farmers to divest their land, leave the countryside, and help fuel healthy industrial growth by selling their labor in China's burgeoning cities.
As Karl Polanyi, the author of the 1944 study, The Great Transformation, could have predicted, this process is not going smoothly. Although Polanyi was describing the enclosure movement and subsequent social, economic, and political crises in eighteenth-century England, many common themes are now being played out in China's own great transformation, including worsening inequality, rising expectations, and increasing conflict and violence in the countryside. Yet the current crisis in the countryside is only a precursor to the deeper and more fraught crisis that is growing in China's cities. China's economic reforms have created what Sun Liping of Tsinghua University calls a "cloven society." The new richand powerful now live in walled, guarded villas and modern apartment complexes, enjoying vast differences in wealth, power, and rights from the swelling ranks of the rural poor and urban dispossessed. The latter are composed of millions of migrant workers living in shantytowns, alongside the growing numbers of urban unemployed and low-income residents who are being forcibly removed from the city center to make way for new real estate development. This second, developing crisis is not only a crisis of infrastructure and incomes--the hardware of urban life. As millions of peasants seek a permanent home in China's cities, it is also a battle for identity and entitlements--the critical software that makes urban society workable. These "urban rights" include legal status and accompanying access to jobs, education, health services, insurance, and social welfare benefits.
The outcome of this second crisis, though it will certainly involve increasing scope and intensity of conflict and confrontation, need not be endless discord or regime collapse. China's tumultuous reform process could see the creation of new, more liberal legal and social institutions. Transforming migrants into urban citizens with equal rights and allowing social groups to organize and articulate their own interests would both improve the ability of the government to govern effectively and minimize longterm threats to stability and economic development. But other outcomes are also possible. The state could refuse to allow liberal institutional innovation and slip into a modern form of authoritarian corporatism in which political leaders might seek to channel social energies toward nationalist ends-- the "revolution from above" about which Barrington Moore warned. Or alternatively, China could catch the Latin American disease, characterized by a polarized urban society, intensifying urban conflict, and failed economic promise. Indeed, despite aggressive efforts to make the state more responsive and adaptive, the speed with which social cleavages and conflicts are growing today arguably makes this last outcome easier to imagine than the others.
GEORGE J. GILBOY is a research affiliate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for International Studies. ERIC HEGINBOTHAM is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
THE SUFFERING COUNTRYSIDE
China's rural areas are now deep in crisis, with sluggish income growth, peasants burdened by excessive taxes and fees, and local governments overstaffed, in debt, and unable to provide adequate services for peasant families. Rampant corruption among local officials has combined with these factors to incite increasing levels of peasant organization, protest, and violence. This crisis is not new, but it is reaching a new scale and intensity. In a 2004 Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) survey of 109 of China's top sociologists, economists, managers, and legal experts, 73 percent of the respondents identified the "three rural problems" (san nong wenti) of agriculture, peasants, and rural areas asChina's most urgent challenge. Combined with other issues such as corruption, the intensity of the rural turmoil led more than half of the respondents to see a systemic crisis as "possible" or "very possible" within the next 5 to 10 years.
Small-scale inefficient agriculture and the relative decline of township and village enterprises are contributing to a widening rural-urban income gap. Average annual rural income stands at just $317 today, and the gap between urban and rural income has grown from 1.8:1 in the mid-1980s to 3:1 in 2003. Between 2000 and 2002, incomes fell in 42 percent of rural households in absolute terms. And according to a July 2004 government report, the number of farmers living under the official poverty line of about $75 per year increased by 800,000 in 2003, the first net annual increase in absolute rural poverty since economic reforms began in 1978. At the same time, farmers suffer from a disproportionate tax burden while receiving fewer services; according to the State Council's Development Research Center, the urban-rural income disparity soars to between 5:1 and 6:1 when entitlements, services, and taxes are included in the calculation. Unsurprisingly, organized rural protest is on the rise. Actions range from tax evasion and blocking roads and railways to the assault or kidnapping of officials and even to riots that have involved hundreds or thousands of people. Even so, the nature of rural protest and of the state's response to it limits the possibility that rural conflict alone could threaten regime stability. As Yu Jinrong of CASS notes, when rural residents do engage in collective action and protest, they often seek alliances with central government officials against local officials, rather thanseeking broad-based systemic change. Yu argues that today's peasants are not the revolutionary "peasants of Mao." They are seeking legitimate political organization to defend legitimate economic interests, and, he warns, suppressing their aspirations and organization carries significant political risks.
Beijing has been highly attuned to rural problems for the past several years, and has taken steps to address them. In particular, the central government has had some short-term success in reducing the peasant tax burden by cracking down on illegal local fees and converting fees to more transparent taxes. It also has moved to share a larger amount of central revenue with local governments. The central government has created more safety valves for expressions of rural discontent, clamped down on abuses by local officials, explained policies to peasants, paid out monies to mollify protesters, and allowed village elections (although it has also simultaneously removed considerable tax and fiscal power to the higher township level, not subject to elections). These measures are, however, also creating a strong sense among Chinese citizens that they have "legal rights." Rural residents increasingly refer to these "rights" in their protests--a potentially significant development for the future of Chinese politics. And, despite the government's success in localizing, suppressing, or conciliating potential rural threats, the leadership does not believe that such measures represent a real long-term solution to the san nong wenti.
THE GREAT ENCLOSURE
Many key Chinese policymakers and social scientists believe the solution to the rural crisis lies in amore radical approach: a combination of land reform, industrialization, and urbanization. Wang Mengkui, the director general of the State Council Development Research Center, argues, "Too many people and too little land makes large-scale production difficult and is therefore the greatest problem for farmers to increase their incomes." The consolidation of larger farms and the movement of farmers to the cities will go far toward solving the rural problem, he asserts, and as an additional benefit of urbanization, "large numbers of migrant workers [will] supply cheap labor, thus helping to enhance the international competitiveness of Chinese industries." Pan Wei, an influential government adviser and Beijing University professor, also argues that Beijing should encourage a rapid acceleration of peasant migration to urban centers, proposing that China should develop an additional 100 cities of 5 million people or more over the next 30 years, either by building new cities or expanding existing ones. The migration from country to city, already massive,is accelerating. In part, this is being driven by The Latin Americanization of China? * 257
illegal land seizures and the conversion of farmland to industrial and recreational use. In November 2003 the Ministry of Land and Resources reported more than 168,000 cases of illegal land seizure, twice as many as in the entire previous year. According to the State Statistics Bureau, China lost 6.7 million hectares of farmland between 1996 and 2003--three and a half times as much as the 1.9 million lost between 1986 and 1995. The trend continues to accelerate, with some 2.53 million hectares, or 2 percent of total farmland, lost in 2003 alone. According to the 2004 Green Book of China's Rural Economy, for every mu of land (approximately 0.07 hectares) that is transferred to nonagricultural use, about 1 to 1.5 farmers lose their land. According to official statistics, some 34 million farmers have either lost their land entirely since 1987 or own less than 0.3 mu, and the new surge in land transfers almost certainly indicates acceleration of that process.
The government has met with some success in curbing the transfer of farmland for nonagricultural purposes during 2004, but a more sustained, legal, and probably larger-scale shift in rural land tenure patterns is in the offing, in this case driven by the central government's efforts to rationalize agriculture and raise rural incomes. The landmark Rural Land Contracting Law (RLCL), which took effect in March 2003, is the latest means toward that end. Under the post-1978 household responsibility system, land remains owned by the village,with use rights allotted by village leaders to individual households. The lack of secure land tenure periods and the frequent use of "readjustments" by village leaders (that is, reapportioning land between households) inhibited improvements to the land, transfer of land-use rights between farmers, and the emergence of commercial-scale agriculture. The RLCL mandates written contracts between farmers and villages, and sets the period of land tenure at 30 years. It includes clear provisions for the farmer's right to transfer land rights to others. And, to give potential buyers confidence that their land-use rights will be respected, it prohibits "readjustments" except in extreme cases (for example, natural disasters). No doubt, enforcement of the RLCL will be inconsistent. But the central government appears committed to the task and will almost certainly continue to sharpen land-use legislation. Indeed, the agenda may be expanded to ease rules on mortgages and to push the household-based tenure system toward an individual- based system, two measures that would substantially speed the transfer of land-use rights.
If successful, land reform will accelerate China's internal mass migration. But the impact of both illegal seizures and land reform will not be limited to an increased rate of migration. The compositionof the "floating population" also will be affected. Many of those who previously crowded onto trains for the cities went in search of higher incomes and were, in fact, adding one income to the family effort since their wives, husbands, or parents continued to work the farm in their absence. Today, an increasing number of people are moving with families in tow, no land or homes behind them, and no guarantees ahead.
China's best-known business and economics magazine, Caijing, has called the recent spate of rural and urban land seizures by alliances of local officials and real estate developers a new "enclosure" (quandi) movement, consciously echoing the process that sped urbanization and was so disruptive and violent ineighteenth-century England. But for many peasant families, legal transfers under the RLCL will have a similarly dislocating effect. Rural reform is incomplete without also guaranteeing the assimilation of China's migrants as full, productive members of urban society.
A BIGGER CRISIS TOMORROW
Speeding China's urbanization trades one social and political problem for another that is potentiallymore severe. The problem of poor farmers working small plots becomes that of poor migrants working dangerous jobs with few rights and virtually no social security safety net. The scale of China's urbanlandscape is already daunting: 166 cities of more than 1 million people (the United States has 9) and500 million official (that is, without counting migrants) urban residents. Urban population growth is already at 2.5 percent per year (versus 0.8 percent for India), and the government expects 300million people to move to China's cities and towns between 2004 and 2020. Because most of China's migrant workers retain their shenfen, or personal status, as farmers in their home locality, they are cut off from access to urban services, social security, and effective legal protection. This problem could worsen unless the next generation of migrants who
258 * CURRENT HISTORY * September 2004
Among well-heeled urban young people, the phrase "You're so farmer!" (Ni zhen nongmin!) has gained currency as a playful expression of disgust. have lost their land--either through illegal seizures or through the legal operation of a land-use rights trading system--are granted rights and benefits that will allow them to fully join urban society. The current plight of China's migrant workers offers a glimpse of the obstacles that must be overcome. Migrant workers without municipal hukou (registration) cannot participate in regular job markets. When they do find work, their rights under Chinese labor law are frequently violated. Their wages are withheld for months or years. The government estimates that China's 100 million migrant workers are owed $12 billion in back pay. Mandatory safety conditions often go unmet. According to The China Youth Daily, in one urban area alone--Shenzhen and the surrounding Pearl River Delta region--industrial accidents claim more than 30,000 fingers from workers each year. The standard payout for such injuries is $60 per finger, but many employers refuseto pay any compensation. According to government officials, nearly 70 percent of migrant workers have no form of insurance. And most live in shantytowns outside the cities, where whole neighborhoods aresubject to clearance and destruction on little notice and with little or no compensation.
The impact of this ambiguous, floating status falls disproportionately on children and other weak dependents who travel with workers. Currently, the floating population includes an estimated 3 million children aged 14 and under. According to a 2004 government report, pregnant migrant women and their children suffer mortality rates between 1.4 and 3.6 times the national average. Of migrant children between the ages of 8 and 14, some 15 percent do not attend school. Most of those who do attend pay high fees (often $100 or more) to enroll in improvised, substandard private schools. Pressures associated with payment--and shouldering an entire family's hopes for the future--have prompted a rash of student suicides and even murders. Although problems associated with migrant workers have been apparent for some time, the rapidly accelerating trend toward landlessness and the consequent growth in whole families on the move make specific problems associated with dependents new in magnitude if not in nature. And, while services in the countryside were also poor, China's underclass in the cities will perceive injustice more keenly as they see the benefits that the new rich enjoy every day. In theory, even urbanization advocates understand that, as Wang Mengkui, the State Council official, put it, "urbanization requires institutional innovation." To date, efforts have been limited to protecting migrants against some of the worst abuses. In a major government work report in March 2004, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao declared that the government would "basically solve the problem of default on construction costs and wage arrears for migrant rural workers in the construction industry within three years." The Ministry of Labor and Social Security said this year that it will oblige construction and manufacturing firms to provide health and life insurance to millions of migrant workers. And the central government has encouraged municipalities to give migrants greater and cheaper access to public schooling, though, as with most measures, no central funds are earmarked. In the first sign of state and party support for a broader defense of rights for the urban poor, reformers in the National People's Congress are now drafting a law that amounts to a "Bill of Welfare Rights" for China's internal migrants.
OBSTACLES TO REFORM
Despite the rhetoric and regulations, real progress has been limited, and the gap between rising consciousness of rights and the ability to act on and realize these rights is growing. The most obvious problem is money, or, as a group of Chinese scholars noted in a major new book, China's Urban Development Report, the question of "who will pay the bill for China's urbanization." The scholars' answer is simple: urban industry. But the construction industry, which is most relevant to the migrant economy, has resisted paying its existing obligations on time, much less shouldering additional costs. With local governments profiting from the constructionindustry and officials making their reputations based on building and development--not to mention widespread bribery and corruption--the incentives to overlook violations remain powerful. Nanjing University's Pan Zequan, writing in Strategy and Management, argues that pervasive discrimination against migrants is not simply an inherited evil now being attacked and reversed; rather, it is built on consciously erected systems and policies and is regularly "produced" and "reproduced." Although progress has been made in some areas, Pan's contention that a dynamic struggle is under way rings true. Certainly, discrimination against migrants works to the advantage of--and is convenient for--those who already hold entitlements in the cities. Material interests are reinforced by strong local identities and prejudice against rural "outsiders" (waidiren)--a phrase invariably used in reference to migrants. Eastern The Latin Americanization of China? * 259 urbanites frequently explain to Western visitors that waidiren are of "low quality" (suzhi di) and say they feel less in common with domestic migrants than they do with foreigners. Among well-heeled urban young people, the phrase "You're so farmer!" (Ni zhen nongmin!) has gained currency as a playful expression of disgust.
Given hostile interests and culture, it is not surprising
that measures to lessen the hardships of migrants often meet with obstruction. Despite Beijing city officials' recent order to public schools to admit the children of migrant workers and to cut discriminatory tuition fees imposed on them, many schools continue to exclude migrants by claiming to be filled to capacity when, in fact, a survey by the Beijing Education Department showed 35,000 vacancies. Members of the floating population face discrimination even in death. In a recent incident in Luzhou, an explosion in a city gas pipeline killed several people. The families of city residents were compensated with $17,000--those of migrantworkers were given $5,000. Although they lived and worked and died in the city, the migrants were still classified as peasants. An official justified the difference with the claim that "the cost of living in the countryside is lower."
Although China's leaders continue to view the rural problem as the nation's greatest threat, a 2004 survey by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences singles out migrants as the great economic loser of the post-1978 era. When askedwhich of eight groups had benefited most from China's economic reforms, a distinguished panel of experts was unanimous on only one item: "migrant workers" were worse off than any other group. The least fortunate of them join what a leading government researcher, Zhang Xiaoshan, has described as a new class, the "three havenots": people with no land, no jobs, and no access to national income insurance.
THE FUTURE: LIBERAL, FASCIST, OR DICKENSIAN?
Broadly speaking, three possible 15-year outcomes to the dual rural-urban crises are possible:liberal, authoritarian corporatist (or fascist), and botched. None of these outcomes is preordained.We would argue, nevertheless, that China is now groping its way at least tentatively toward the first, though the pace of social change and the difficulty of overcoming entrenched interests may ultimately make the third most likely.
Progress toward a liberal outcome would see the village election system strengthened and expanded at least to the township level. Land reform would proceed but with land reforms matched by commensurate and simultaneous urban reforms that protect new arrivals in cities and second-generation migrants, and that permit employment beyond construction and road sweeping. In urban areas, the hukou system (already being revised) would be eliminated and public services made equally available to all people living and working in a given region. An awareness of legal rights would develop, along with the means to actualize them. Ultimately, individuals, regardless of their status, would be allowed to organize in groups free from direct state control to defend their interests. Movement can be seen in most of these areas.
Village-level democracy--imperfect as it is--is bringing greater accountability to the countryside. Nationally, progress in building legal institutions and, especially, fostering a "rights and accountability" culture has been made on a broader front. Although the road ahead is still much longer than that already traveled, the state seems prepared to countenance a judicial system that will be used to mediate interests as part of the local political process, not simply to administer justice. Legal awarenesshas been aided by the central government's emphasis on "rule of law" in its own battles to control provincial and municipal governments. And peasants are responding. The State Council Development Research Center reports that an increasing proportion of official petition and protest letters cite legal rights and protections as the basis for the complaints.
In the cities, the state has tolerated, if not encouraged, the rise of a few new independent social organizations. Writing in The China Journal in January 2003, Benjamin Read analyzed the development of urban housing associations focused on gaining control of management and improving service quality in upscale real estate developments. These groups capitalize on the government's recent promotion of notions of certain "rights" to property and consumer protection. They have fended off attempts at government co-optation and are promoting a sense of common identity among their members in addition to pursuing claims against negligent or corrupt real estate developers. While Read cautions that it remains to be seen whether these groups can sustain their current autonomy, they offer tantalizing evidence of the kind of ad hoc, innovative interest-intermediation groups that could become the basis for more permanent social and political institutions. Yet, by their very nature, these new associations highlight the disparities in
260 * CURRENT HISTORY * September 2004
income and social rights between China's haves and have-nots--such open organization and representation are not tolerated in migrant shantytowns. Nor have they successfully emerged among poor city residents who are forced to move from older downtown buildings demolished to make way for new developments. Despite the caveats, however, all this adds up to substantial progress toward a more liberal future.
Unfortunately, other social and political possibilities are also readily apparent. Observers such as Michael Leeden and Jasper Becker have argued that China, far from becoming more liberal, has moved in the opposite direction, toward fascism. Benchmarks for movement in this direction would include the consolidation of society into state-dominated and controlled hierarchical organizations; administrative, rather than judicial, mechanisms for social conflict resolution; the strategic use of anticapitalist and anti-foreign rhetoric; and the heavy involvement of the military in propaganda and social work.
In fact, this largely describes elements of China today. Yet all of these features are becoming less true of the Chinese state, rather than more. Private industry is growing relatively faster than state industry. New self-organized groups are cropping up faster than the state can effectively co-opt orsuppress them. The media are more robust, independent, and commercial, with ever-shrinking restrictions on what can be reported. The legal system is growing stronger. And the military is distancing itself from its socioeconomic functions as it has been reduced in size and professionalized. In most key dimensions, China is currently headed away from authoritarian corporatism, not toward it. There is, however, a third possible trajectory: a "Latin Americanization" of China in which the state could fail to develop institutions capable of adequately addressing China's new social crisis. The speed of social change and the explosive growth of social conflict may outstrip the state's ability to respond. Political leaders could settle into a collusive relationship with business and social elites. A semipermanent have-not class might engage in a constant and economically costly low-level war with the entitled minority. For many Chinese scholars and government officials, Latin American-style social and political problems are now an explicit frame of reference for what China might face if it fails to reverse social trends in the near future. Despite movement toward a more adaptive, liberal future, the downward spiral toward failure may in fact be just as likely in the mid-term. Some indicators already point toward this outcome. The 2004 report of the Politics and Law Commission of the Communist Party found that the number of incidents of "social unrest" or "mass incidents" rose 14.4 percent in 2003, to 58,000 nationwide. The number of people involved rose 6.6 percent, to 3 million. In the cities, the "floating population" accounted for "up to 80 percent of all crime." Evidence from numerous urban areas suggests that avoiding the Latin Americanization of Chinese society and a descent into low-level class warfare will require more than partial measures designed to mitigate the worst suffering of migrants--it will require making them full citizens.
THE NEED FOR SPEED
China's leaders are intently focused on the nation's rural crisis and the growing gap between urban and rural quality of life. Their proposed solution to these problems--land reforms aimed at promoting mass migration and rapid urbanization--is likely to speed the arrival of a second crisis, pitting migrant families against entrenched urban interests in a struggle for rights and entitlements. Those urban interests are themselves powerful forces, including alliances of municipal officials, real estate developers, and construction industries, alongside a new wealthy urban class and existing ranks of urban poor and unemployed. Yet many migrant farmers, some accustomed to voting for their village leaders, and now promised new protections by the government, bring a new "rights consciousness" with them when they move to the cities. Their expectations of fair treatment and access to benefits such as insurance and health care can only be ignored at the government's peril. While it is struggling with difficult but familiar rural conflict, China's leadership is less well endowed to deal with the coming urban social challenge. The Chinese system does have remarkable strengths, not least the practice of conducting pragmatic economic and political experiments in individual locations and then embracing successful methods nationwide. It is entirely possible that liberalizing interim solutions could become more permanent institutions, as they did in the England that Polanyi described. But with government plans calling for the market-based"enclosure" of China's rural areas, and several hundred million migrants likely to move to the cities over the next two decades, Beijing is in a race against time.
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Oil Could Help Japan Resolve Territorial Fight With Russia
By JAMES BROOKE
NOSAPPU, Japan, Sept. 2 - Wearing a white windbreaker to protect him from the Siberian wind, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi stood on the bridge of a Japanese Coast Guard patrol boat on Thursday, scanning the treeless shores of islands occupied by Russia since September 1945. Following close behind was an uninvited escort: a Russian Coast Guard patrol boat.
The moment on the Sea of Okhotsk seemed frozen in time. Nearly six decades after Soviet troops swept down the Kuriles, seizing the Japanese islands, there is no peace treaty between Russia and Japan.
But the rapidly changing geopolitics of Asia's energy industry could break a logjam that has endured since World War II.
About 350 miles northeast of here, offshore of Sakhalin Island, part of Russia, Japanese companies are participating in the first $10 billion slice of what could be a $100 billion development of oil and gas reserves believed to rival the North Slope of Alaska.
About 700 miles east of here, at Vladivostok, Japanese and Russian officials met this summer to outline a plan for a 2,500-mile, $12 billion pipeline to bring Siberian oil to the Sea of Japan. A decision on the pipeline is expected this fall.
Behind Japan's drive to lock in access to Russian oil and gas are forecasts that over the next 15 years China's oil imports will double and its gas imports will increase fivefold. Japan's energy use, meanwhile, is far from stagnant. In July, Japan, which imports 88 percent of its oil from the Middle East, experienced a 9 percent jump in the volume of its oil imports.
"Japan finds itself very much like before World War II," Alexander Losyukov, Russia's ambassador to Japan, said in a recent interview. "It needs resources and markets, and those two things can combine to lead to a very dangerous situation."
Japan has quietly become the largest foreign investor in Russia's energy-rich Far East region. With Russia's president, Vladimir V. Putin, expected to visit Tokyo in six months, many analysts feel the time is nearing for both sides to negotiate a truce over the four disputed islands. Both sides have said they would like to announce a formula for a bilateral peace treaty during Mr. Putin's visit, which will coincide with the 150th anniversary of the first trade treaty signed by the countries, in 1855.
"Prime Minister Koizumi is very much interested in getting this bilateral relationship to move," Takashi Inoguchi, professor of international politics at the University of Tokyo, said. "Something has to be done to get the two countries closer."
The Toyota Motor Corporation, Japan's largest carmaker, is expected to take advantage of Mr. Putin's visit to announce the opening of its first assembly plant in Russia, probably in the Volga region east of Moscow. Last year, Toyota tripled its new car sales in the country to 25,000, making it the most popular imported brand in Russia.
Despite the signs of a thawing relationship, however, Moscow frowned on Mr. Koizumi's boat trip around the islands - the first by a Japanese prime minister.
"Such actions, let alone their demonstrative timing with the anniversary of the end of World War II, not only fail to give a positive impetus to the peace treaty negotiations, but will only complicate the negotiations once again," Russia's foreign ministry warned Monday after Mr. Koizumi announced he would take the trip. "As far as we understand, these plans are primarily based on internal political considerations."
Indeed, Mr. Koizumi's tour here on Thursday might have been calculated to neutralize conservative opposition before serious talks start.
That would fit a pattern of such steps by his administration. On Aug. 15, the anniversary of Japan's World War II surrender, Shoichi Nakagawa, Japan's powerful minister of economy, trade and industry, was one of four members of Mr. Koizumi's cabinet to visit a Tokyo war memorial shrine venerated by conservatives. The next day, Mr. Nakagawa flew to Sakhalin, becoming the first Japanese minister to visit the island, which was partly controlled by Japan until the end of World War II.
During a five-day tour, he visited the site of the construction of Russia's first plant to liquefy natural gas. Several of Japan's largest utilities have signed long-term contracts to import the Sakhalin gas.
With Japan expected to win rights to the Siberian oil pipeline, Russia is moving to mollify China. On a visit to Beijing last week, Russia's energy minister, Viktor Khristenko, told journalists that Russian oil sales to China would increase fivefold by 2010. Russia is China's fifth-largest source of oil.
With gas emerging as an equally valuable energy source, China and Japan are shadowing each other in the East China Sea. With China laying a 300-mile gas line to offshore deposits, Japan has complained that China will tap into a 246 billion cubic meter gas field that is partly Japanese. With each country's exclusive economic zone in dispute, China's moves to develop the gas have been met by a Japanese survey ship, exploring the contested area in the southern tip of Okinawa Prefecture.
Americans restored Okinawa to Japanese rule in 1972. Now, people here say that the time has come for Russia to give up its war booty as well - the four disputed islands, which the Japanese call the Northern Territories and the Russian call the Southern Kuriles. The islands' total landmass is larger than Okinawa's.
"Without restoration of the four islands, we will not have a Japan-Russia peace treaty," Mr. Koizumi said here in a meeting with representatives of the 8,000 former inhabitants of the islands who are still alive. "Restoration of the four islands will not only benefit Japan, but it will benefit Russia."
With billions of dollars of Japanese investments about to start flowing, Mr. Losyukov, the Russian ambassador, fretted that Japan might link the island issue with the rate of investment. "Every time we talk about that, we hear from the Japanese side, 'We want simultaneous action on economic and territorial issues; if you take this approach you are braking everything,' " Mr. Losyukov said. "Blocking everything by that way, unfortunately, is linkage."



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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U.S. Links S.Africa Nuclear Suspect to Libya, AQ Khan
Fri Sep 3, 2004 12:09 PM ET
By Gershwin Wanneburg
VANDERBIJLPARK, South Africa (Reuters) - The United States Friday linked a South African charged under weapons of mass destruction laws with Libya's clandestine nuclear program and Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan's nuclear black market.
Johan Andries Muller Meyer, 53, appeared in court Friday on charges of manufacturing nuclear-related material and exporting goods that could be used in developing weapons of mass destruction. Meyer was remanded in custody until Sept. 8.
Within hours the United States embassy in Pretoria issued a statement linking him to Libya's nuclear program, which the north African country disclosed in December 2003 before agreeing earlier this year to a disarmament process.
Libya began its quest for nuclear arms in 1980 and decided in 1997 to seek centrifuge equipment via the atomic black market, established in the 1980s by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb.
"South African government agencies worked long and hard with various partners to monitor sensitive materials that were integral to the AQ Khan network's efforts to supply Libya's clandestine nuclear program," the embassy said.
"We understand that South African investigators successfully seized the materials in recent days and have made an initial arrest related to the illegal activities. South Africa's decisive action adds vital information to the worldwide investigation into the network's reach and sends the right signal to proliferators everywhere," it added.
SOUTH AFRICAN IN CUSTODY
Charges against Meyers, who appeared in court in Vanderbijlpark, 60 km (35 miles) southwest of Johannesburg where he was arrested Thursday, did not mention Libya.
The charge sheet said Meyer was accused of offences between 2000 and 2001 relating to the import and export of regulated goods "which could contribute to the design, development, manufacture and deployment" of weapons of mass destruction.
Meyer, the director of a local engineering company, was also accused of "unlawfully and willfully possessing and manufacturing nuclear-related equipment and material" between 2002 and 2004.
Defense attorney Heinrich Badenhorst told national news agency SAPA his client was accused of manufacturing the banned goods at his engineering works, but denied the charges.
His lawyers said contraventions of the country's anti-proliferation laws could result in anything from a fine to a 15-year jail sentence.
Government officials have said they know of no link between the inquiry and al Qaeda or international terrorism, and Foreign Affairs spokesman Ronnie Mamoepa said simply that the government had "taken note" of the U.S. statement.
South Africa voluntarily dismantled its nuclear arms before apartheid ended in 1994 -- the only nuclear-armed state to do so -- and has been eager to show support for international efforts to limit nuclear know-how with a series of new laws since 1993.
Khan's network spanned the globe and included suppliers, often unwittingly, from Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
U.N. atomic weapons experts say more than 20 countries were involved, though it is trying to grasp the full extent of what International Atomic Energy Agency Director Mohamed ElBaradei called a global supermarket for countries interesting in getting nuclear weapons.
South African police said in February this year Washington had asked for their help in investigating possible associates of Asher Karni, a former Israeli army officer accused by the U.S. government of conspiring to export 200 U.S.-made nuclear weapons detonators to Pakistan via South Africa.




South African Held on Nuclear-related Weapons Charges
Delia Robertson
Johannesburg
03 Sep 2004, 16:07 UTC
Listen to Delia Robertson's report (RealAudio)
Robertson report - Download 224k (RealAudio)
A South African businessman has appeared in court on charges of importing materials which could be used in the manufacture of nuclear products.
Johan Andries Muller Meyer faces three charges of illegally importing and possessing materials and equipment that could lead to the development, manufacture, or maintenance of weapons of mass destruction.
The equipment allegedly found in his possession can be used in the production of enriched uranium, which is used in the manufacture of nuclear weapons.
Mr. Meyer's attorney, Heinrich Badenhorst, earlier told a local news agency that he was accused of manufacturing weapons at his engineering firm in Vanderbijlpark, an industrial area 90 kilometers south of Johannesburg. Mr. Badenhorst said his client denies the charges.
The South African Council for the Non-Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction said in a statement that Mr. Meyer was arrested following an investigation of several companies and individuals. Council Chairman Abdul Minty said the investigation had been conducted with the cooperation of officials in other countries and with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
South Africa's apartheid government developed a nuclear weapons capability in the 1970s in defiance of international treaties. But the program was unilaterally dismantled before 1993 and subsequently verified by the IAEA.
In his statement, Mr. Minty said South Africa has since followed a strict policy of disarmament and non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
Mr. Meyer was ordered jailed until Wednesday when he will face a bail hearing.
Foreign intelligence activities reach alarming level: Ryamizard
MEDAN, North Sumatra (Antara): Indonesian Army chief Gen. Ryamizard Ryacudu expressed concern here on Friday over the alarming level of foreign intelligence activities in the country.
Such an alarming level has put the country's unity and cohesion at stake, he said.
"There have been so many foreign intelligence officers here. They have created an unstable condition under all kinds of pretexts," he said.
Ryamizard said foreign intelligence operatives have donated substantial funds to rebel movements in various parts of the country to create internal conflicts.
He said uprisings in Aceh and Papua bore hallmarks of outside interference as did communal conflict in the district of Poso and on Maluku island.
Indonesia's military last year launched a major operation to crush a decades-old separatist movement in Aceh province, on the northern tip of Sumatra island. It has also been battling low-level rebellion in remote Papua.
Violence between Muslims and Christians on Maluku and Poso has claimed thousands of lives in recent years. (**)




Man held in Gauteng over nuclear weapons
September 3, 2004
http://www.thestar.co.za/index.php?fSectionId=128&fArticleId=2211089
By Graeme Hosken and Sapa
A South African man has been arrested for allegedly contravening the law on weapons of mass destruction and nuclear energy.
The Star has established that yesterday's arrest came after an international investigation involving South African, United States and Israeli intelligence agencies into the alleged smuggling of nuclear weapons to "Asian countries", specifically Pakistan.
The suspect was due to appear in the Vanderbijlpark Magistrate's Court today.
It is believed that a senior Israeli army officer had planned to sell nuclear arms - or parts of nuclear weapons and computer software - to Pakistan, using South African parastatal arms companies that had previously been involved in the now-defunct nuclear weapons programme.
The Foreign Affairs Department announced last night that an arrest had been made concerning "items alleged to have been used in the contraventions".
Abdul Minty, the chairperson of the South African Council for the Non-Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction, said inquiries were being made into the activities of "some companies and individuals who may be involved".
"In the context of these investigations, the South African authorities have co-operated with their counterparts in other countries as well as with the International Atomic Energy Agency."
Since 1994, Minty said, the government had adopted a strict policy of disarmament and non-proliferation with regard to weapons of mass destruction.
NIA spokesperson Lorna Daniels said last night: "The NIA (National Intelligence Agency) has been involved in investigations for some time relating to today's arrest, and it's been an intensive investigation with several law enforcement agencies."
She said more arrests were expected soon, but declined to comment further.



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The Kissinger Myths
By Thomas Donnelly
Posted: Thursday, September 2, 2004
BOOK REVIEWS
New York Sun
Publication Date: August 31, 2004
The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy
By Jussi Hanhimaki
Oxford University Press, 554 pages, $35
Henry Kissinger so bestrides the American foreign policy of the past 50 years that any biography of the man, at this moment and for many years to come, is an act of great intellectual bravery. Indeed, it may be bravery to the point of foolhardiness. For there is not just one Kissinger Myth, but many.
One version, winked at by the man himself, has it that Mr. Kissinger is an American Metternich, Talleyrand, and Bismarck rolled into one. The other extreme makes him out to be a war criminal, personally responsible for the death of millions and the misery of nations on every continent. Whatever the truth, it's a good bet neither of these myths bears much resemblance to it.
Both man and myth loom so large they obscure an even more important phenomenon, which might be called "Kissingerism": The application of Continental "realpolitik" to American strategy-making during the middle and late Cold War. Far more than Mr. Kissinger's actions or policies, this habit of mind is now almost hardwired into the conventional wisdom of the United States policy-making elite. It even has eerie echoes in the policy prescriptions of Senator Kerry, who sometimes sounds as though he favors a kind of detente with the autocrats and terrorists of the greater Middle East. Kissingerism will be with us for decades to come, long after the man himself is gone.
By its title, Jussi Hanhimaki's new book The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy (Oxford University Press, 554 pages, $35) seems to promise an appraisal of the great man's larger influence. But the passage from which the book takes its title--concluding that Mr. Kissinger's failure to "seriously challenge" the "conventional wisdom" of the Cold War "does not make him a war criminal. It makes Henry Kissinger a flawed architect"--shows both the scope of the author's analysis and his political agenda.
The perspective of Mr. Hanhimaki, a Finnish academic who has taught at the London School of Economics and now is at the Graduate Institute of International Studies, is standard-issue European leftist - which means that the American victory in the Cold War is primarily a nuisance to be ignored. Our ultimate victory does not justify every mistake or cruelty of American policy during five decades, but any critique that fails to take the larger strategic picture into account is itself deeply flawed.
Perhaps even more importantly, Mr. Hanhimaki's arguments take no account of the post-Cold War effects of Mr. Kissinger's statesmanship. This makes his account of Mr. Kissinger's secret diplomacy, the opening to China, and the "triangular" strategy for containing the Soviet Union highly unsatisfactory: We get a highly detailed account of who met with whom, when, and where, but no real understanding of whether the policy was a wise one or whether it has had unfortunate consequences under quite different strategic circumstances.
A final complaint is that Mr. Hanhimaki has very little to say about Mr. Kissinger's formative years and writings or his success as a senior statesman. Thus the reader is left with very little understanding about the foundations of Mr. Kissinger's thought or how he has remained influential after leaving office, both through the professional success of his acolytes, such as Brent Scowcroft or Lawrence Eagleberger, and by the exercise of his own pen and public presence. The phenomenon of "Kissingerism" would be a complete surprise to a reader who came to know the man only through "The Flawed Architect."
Nonetheless, the book does give us clues to Mr. Kissinger's diplomacy through sheer accumulation of detail. One pattern that emerges, almost despite the author, is that Mr. Kissinger is better understood as a tactician than as a strategist. The opening to China, Mr. Hanhimaki reminds us, was driven as much by the desperate need to get out of Vietnam as any larger strategic view of the Soviets. North Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho clearly had the advantage of the American Bismarck in the Paris peace talks.
Mr. Hanhimaki has plowed through newly released materials from the Nixon and Ford years to work relative ly barren soil on several points, in particular the question of prolonging the war in Vietnam. In these passages, Mr. Hanhimaki's bare-bones narrative is an effective way of conveying the tragedy of the United States' exit from Vietnam. "In 1972-73 Kissinger had gradually given in ... to North Vietnamese demands," Mr. Hanhimaki writes, in a simple, elegant paragraph worth quoting at length:
Through a series of communications with the Chinese and Soviets he had made it clear that soon after the return of American personnel the United States was ready to abandon Southeast Asia to its own devices. He was not searching for a peace with honor but an exit strategy and a decent interval before South Vietnam's political future was determined. Pressed in part by domestic political considerations, Kissinger's complicated diplomacy thus managed to produce a remark able role reversal: in 1972 it was South Vietnam's President Thieu, rather than Le Duc Tho or the North Vietnamese, who became the chief villain for refusing to accept an agreement negotiated over his head. Over the next two years the once steadfast allies would bear the bur den of the end of America's "Indochinese nightmare." In 1973, the South Vietnamese would suffer more battle-deaths than they had in any year since 1968. The decent interval was covered in blood.
This bitter requiem for South Vietnam is a reminder of the price of realpolitik and the sanctification of "stability" in international politics, and is all the more ironic for being written by a European, leftist academic. It also serves, perhaps, as a reminder of what the consequences might be of American withdrawal from the greater Middle East.
The final chapters in the Kissinger story remain to be written. In recent years, Mr. Kissinger himself has seemed to renounce the amoral practice of realpolitik - as though the great architect does appreciate his own past flaws. Mr. Hanhimaki's work is not the deeply considered assessment of Mr. Kissinger and his lasting influence on U.S. foreign policy and strategy I might have hoped, but it points the way toward a larger, more comprehensive study.
Mr. Donnelly is resident fellow in defense and national security studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

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'Secrets' Perplex Panel
Classified Data Growing to Include 'Comically Irrelevant'
By Michael J. Sniffen
Associated Press
Friday, September 3, 2004; Page A17
A former dictator's cocktail preferences and a facetious plot against Santa Claus were classified by the government to prevent public disclosure.
Also stamped "secret" for six years was a study concluding that 40 percent of Army chemical warfare masks leaked.
These, as well as other examples of classification were cited last week by members of Congress and witnesses at a House subcommittee hearing into the Sept. 11 commission's conclusion that secrecy is undermining efforts to thwart terrorists.
Some classifications were made in error or to save face.
The CIA deleted the amount Iraqi agents paid for aluminum tubes from Page 96 of a Senate report on prewar intelligence. The report quoted the CIA as concluding that "their willingness to pay such costs suggests the tubes are intended for a special project of national interest."
That price turned out to be not so high. On Page 105 of the same Senate report, the same security reviewers let the CIA's figure -- as much as $17.50 each -- be printed along with other estimates that the Iraqis paid as little as $10 apiece.
"There are too many secrets" and maybe too many secret-makers, said Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.), chairman of the House Government Reform Committee's national security panel.
There are 3,978 officials who can stamp a document "top secret," "secret" or "confidential" under multiple sets of complex rules.
No one knows how much is classified, he said, and the system "often does not distinguish between the critically important and comically irrelevant."
The problem is growing, said J. William Leonard, director of the National Archives' Information Security Oversight Office, which monitors federal practices. Officials decided to classify documents 8 percent more often in 2003 than in 2002. Total classification decisions -- including upgrading or downgrading -- reached 14 million.
"The tone is set at the top," Shays said.
"This administration believes the less known, the better," added the Connecticut Republican, noting sadly he was speaking of a GOP administration. "I believe the more known, the better."
The panel's ranking Democrat, Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio, noted that former President Bill Clinton directed that in cases of doubt, the lowest or no classification be used. But in 2003, President Bush ordered officials to use the more restrictive level.
Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' project on secrecy, said some classification was designed to conceal illegality or avoid embarrassment, even though that is forbidden.
Aftergood cited the "secret" stamp on Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba's report of "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" inflicted on Iraqi inmates at the Abu Ghraib prison.
Carol A. Haave, deputy undersecretary of defense for counterintelligence and security, said most misclassification was unintentional, resulting from misunderstanding or failure to declassify data that are no longer sensitive. She said a weakness, particularly for anti-terrorism efforts, was that those who collect intelligence determine its classification.
"Collectors of information can never know how it could best be used," Haave said. "We have to move to a user-driven environment."
Leonard, the Archives official, said another obstacle to sharing anti-terrorist data as the Sept. 11 commission envisioned was that federal law divides the authority for writing the rules that govern secrets. The CIA director has authority to protect intelligence sources and methods, the Energy Department has power to write regulations to shield nuclear secrets, the Pentagon has control over classifying NATO data and the National Security Agency can define eavesdropping communications secrets.
"All these variations have nuances that impede cooperation," Leonard said.
Aftergood, who is fighting in court to declassify the overall budget for intelligence agencies, argued that declassifying that total "could break the logjam" of overclassification. That was also recommended by the Sept. 11 commission.
Leonard said a 2000 law created a public interest declassification board to recommend release of secrets in important cases, but the president and Congress never appointed members.
For the curious: The CIA classified for 20 years longtime Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet's preference for pisco sours, according to subcommittee staff members citing previously classified documents published by the National Security Archive, a private anti-secrecy institute at George Washington University.
And a CIA employee made up a story of a terrorist plot to hijack Santa Claus and inserted it into classified traffic. "So, apparently, the fact that CIA had a sense of humor was classified," said subcommittee counsel Lawrence J. Halloran.
? 2004 The Washington Post Company
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Symposium: Atomic Ayatollahs
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | September 3, 2004
Does Iran already have nuclear weapons? Is it on the verge of acquiring them? Will the U.S. have to initiate regime change unilaterally?
To discuss these and other questions with us today, Frontpage Symposium has assembled a distinguished panel:
Jed Babbin, the former deputy undersecretary of defense in the administration of President George H. W. Bush. A contributing editor of The American Spectator Magazine and a contributor to National Review Online, he is the author of the new book Inside the Asylum: Why the United Nations and Old Europe Are Worse Than You Think;
John Loftus, a former Justice Department prosecutor with code word clearances whose 1982 expose of Nazis working for western intelligence won the Emmy Award for Mike Wallace. He is the author of several books on the Middle East and the director of INTELCON.US, the upcoming National Intelligence Conference and Exposition. At 10:30 every weeknight, the Loftus Report is a featured segment of ABC national radio, and Fox Television's "Inside Scoop with John Loftus" airs at 11 am Sundays. His website is John-Loftus.com;
and
Reza Bayegan, a commentator on Iranian politics who was born in Iran and currently works for the British Council in Paris. His weekly columns appear on many publications including Iran va Jahan website. He is a regular guest on exile Iranian radio shows.
FP: Jed Babbin, John Loftus and Reza Bayegan, welcome to Frontpage Symposium.
Mr. Bayegan let me begin with you. What exactly is the threat we face? Does Iran already have WMDs? Or is it on the verge of having them? What is the threat here?
Bayegan: The Islamic Republic already has stockpiles of chemical weapons and has told the EU three (Britain, Germany and France) 'that it could possess nuclear weapons within three years. The real time limit the mullahs need to obtain a nuclear bomb however is less than 11 months.
The danger we face from the regime in Tehran acquiring the nuclear bomb cannot be exaggerated. Our democratic values and the very survival of Western civilization are at stake. In particular such an eventuality would be the worst nightmare scenario for the state of Israel and an unprecedented blow to peace and liberty throughout the world.
Since September 11, we have seen how terrorists are able to strike anywhere they choose and hijack Western democratic processes by intimidating the public as they did during the recent Spanish election. With a nuclear bomb at their disposal they can do this without risking their own lives and by pushing -- or just threatening to push -- a button.
With or without WMDs, the danger the clerical regime poses is far greater than the other members of the 'axis of evil' i.e. Iraq during Saddam Hussein and North Korea. This danger is rooted in a ruthless anti-Western ideology that manipulates the religious belief of the masses and justifies any means for reaching its deadly objectives. If the mullahs get their hands on a nuclear bomb we might as well assume that Hamas and other terrorist organizations have access to it also.
On August 15 2004, the military chief of the Islamic Republic declared that the entire Zionist territory 'is within the range of Iran's new advanced ballistic missiles'. The mullahs are counting the days until they can arm these missiles with nuclear or biological warheads. Experts believe that although due to their inherent inaccuracy the Iranian Shahb-3 and the planned for Shahab-4 missiles make no military sense if armed with conventional warheads, they can become immensely effective as terror weapons against civilian targets.
In other words, the dictators in Tehran gaining weapons of mass destruction would impose the same or worse state of terror on the rest of the world as they have imposed on the Iranian people for the last quarter of a century.
FP: Mr. Babbin, what Mr. Bayegan is describing here is terrifying. Do you agree that the danger the clerical regime poses is far greater than the other members of the Axis of Evil?What is your view of this threat? Are we going to have to pursue regime change asap?
Babbin: I agree that Iran is, by far, the most dangerous terrorist nation. Their nuclear ambitions and their unarguable involvement in global terrorism make them our number one problem. The threat from Iran is threefold:
[1] they are supporters of the conventional terrorists such as Hizballah, al-Queda and many others that have American blood on their hands.
[2] they are funding, supplying and operating the al-Sadr insurgents in Iraq. The Iranian regime has decided to make a stand against democracy in Iraq, and we must find a way to end their interference or Iraq will never be free or stable.
[3] their nuclear ambitions are close to being achieved. If they are, the whole Middle East and even parts of Europe will be threatened, as will American interests everywhere.
We should be pursuing regime change in Iran now, through covert operations, support for Iranian opposition groups (such as the Mujahideen e Khalq, which we wrongly labeled a terrorist group at Tehran's request) and by preparing what may be an inevitable military strike against their nuclear program.
FP: Mr. Loftus, what do you make of the two gentlemen's comments?
Loftus: If anything, they understate the threat. Let us put Iran's nuclear development in context. During the 1990's the Peoples Liberation Army of China made a strategic decision to trade the components of the Islamic Bomb in return for greater access to Arab oil, necessary for China's growth.
The PLA used its proxy state, North Korea, to carry out the nuclear proliferation deal. Iranian nuclear engineers were frequently observed flying to North Korea and Pakistan.
For short term diplomatic reasons, the US is going along with the fiction that the A.Q. Khan network in Pakistan was merely a private criminal enterprise. Supposedly, this "private" network arranged to provide North Korean missiles to the Pakistan army in exchange for advanced nuclear centrifuges. Several of these P-2 centrifuges were discovered in Iran by the IAEA inspectors.
The Pakistani government has refused to cooperate with the IAEA's investigation of Iran. Access to uranium stain samples has been denied. This denial is critical for the IAEA to prove that Iran has its own nuclear track, which cannot be explained by the nuclear stains found on the Pakistani centrifuges. Without the Pakistani evidence, the IAEA is denied the smoking gun to prove that Iran is still lying about its nuclear program.
At some point, the Bush administration will have to stop sitting on its intelligence evidence if it wants to make its case to the UN that the Iran-North Korean-Chinese partnership is the single greatest threat to world peace.
FP: Thanks Mr. Loftus. This is very terrifying because what exactly can we really do about this? Make a case to the U.N.? This is a joke. What's the U.N. gonna do? It's pretty evident by now, isn't it, that the U.N. is a body that works against the interests of the U.S., democracy and freedom? The U.N. should have acted on this long ago.
Mr. Loftus do you agree? And so what do? Do we wait for the U.N. to take action or is the U.S. gonna have to do something drastic unilaterally?
Loftus: I think the whole mess is about to erupt this fall. My bet: after the U.S. elections are over.
FP: You want to expand a bit?
Loftus: Not yet. October surprises come in October.
FP: Ok then. Well we'll talk in November about this with you then. Mr. Bayegan, your view on the U.S. supporting Iran's opposition?
Bayegan: I agree with Mr. Babbin that Iranian opposition groups should be supported. I would like however to put in a caveat here about groups such as Mujahedin e Khalgh. This group is abhorred by the majority of Iranians for its opportunistic stance during the Iran-Iraq war and its ideological hodgepodge of Islamic Marxism. The track record of the group as far as ethical and moral integrity is concerned is also quite bleak. It has been in cahoots with Saddam Hussein, the PLO and many other brutal terrorist organizations around the globe.
If there is a group with a more shattered popular base than the mullahs it is the Mujahedin e Khalgh. Having said that, one cannot deny that they have high organizational and disciplinary skills which could be useful for overthrowing the mullahs. If support is to be provided to this group and similar organizations it should be made conditional on their acceptance of democratic principles and civilized political norms.
Iranians have no affinity for Marxism or Islamic obscurantism dished out by the mullahs for the past twenty-five years, but can feel at home in their ancient traditions of respect for human rights and tolerance. Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late Shah of Iran who lives in exile in the U.S., is the only Iranian political figure whose voice rings true for Iranians. His political agenda of separation of Mosque and state (see his book Winds of Change) and his crusade for holding a national referendum to let Iranians freely decide about their national future (a Republic, Monarchy, etc.) is the most solid ground for bringing about political transformation in Iran. His campaign, which is the only force that can unite all Iranians, should be supported with our wholehearted effort and the maximum commitment the democratic world can muster.
I would like to give the highest emphasis here to the fact that we cannot achieve a sustainable democratic transformation in Iran without the trust and blessing of the Iranian public. We have to use all possible means to isolate the regime and at the same time never for a minute lose sight of the legitimate aspirations of the Iranian people for peace, national dignity and democracy. This can be done by encouraging Iranian political groups to come together under the umbrella of calling for a free and democratic national referendum.
Regarding Jamie's remark about the UN, I would like to say that the United Nations, IAEA and for that matter efforts of the three European powers to coax Iran to convert to a trustworthy regime and keep its nuclear program peaceful will not work because the mullahs policy of acquiring nuclear bomb is part of an overall strategy to defeat Western democratic values and annihilate the state of Israel. It is a betrayal of peace and human liberty to make concessions to a government which will use any possible means to secure its deadly objectives. The weakening and disintegration of the clerical regime can be achieved by concerted international effort and application of the highest possible pressure in all fields.
FP: Mr. Babbin, what do you make of Mr. Bayegan's emphasis on democratic principles as an ingredient for U.S. support of Iranian opposition groups?
Babbin: Mr. Bayegan takes this as a sort of academic exercise. I don't want us to condition our support of Iranian opposition groups on some ephemeral affirmation of democratic principals and "civilized political norms" -- whatever that means. We can, and should, choose to support those groups that are proving that they are neither Islamic jihadists nor terrorists of any other stripe, and those which demonstrate their commitment to democracy by agreeing -- now, not later -- to some sort of provisional government for Iran when the mullahs are removed.
To do this, we need what we failed to establish in Iraq: a government in exile, governed by an agreed-on draft constitution that contains provision for basic rights and provides for free elections within a year of the mullahs' fall. We should be proclaiming -- long, hard and continuously -- that regime change in Tehran is our policy, and using every other means we can to increase the pressure on the mullahs, short of military action at this time. Military action may be needed as early as next year if the situation doesn't change dramatically.
I think the MEK is imperfect; maybe it has fewer adherents than other groups. But for us -- or for anyone such as Mr. Bayegan -- to say that no one other than their pal (in his case, the late shah's son) has allegiance of the Iranian people is simply silly. No one -- not the MEK, not Reza Pahlavi, no one - has allegiance among the people of Iran. They have been enslaved for 25 years by the mullahs. I hate to say it, but proclaiming Reza Pahlavi the only accepted voice that "rings true for Iranians" is the same sort of claim we heard from the INC three years ago about Ahmed Chalabi. It wasn't true about Chalabi then, and I don't expect it's true now of Mr. Pahlavi. The Iranian people will decide for themselves in due course. Anyone who claims his guy is the ONLY guy to trust now diminishes his own credibility enormously.
Having said that, I see no reason to not support Mr. Pahlavi or to not rearm and reactivate the MEK. There likely are other groups that can also be activated, supplied and encouraged. The issue, I say emphatically, is not to pick the next government of Iran now. The issue is to ensure that we place enough pressure on the current kakistocracy in Iran to prevent them from obtaining -- by development or purchase -- nuclear weapons. Whether we do it perfectly or not isn't the issue. Results count here, and although there are lines we can't and shouldn't cross, I'm not too picky on how we reach that goal.
I think Mr. Loftus has it right, or at least mostly. The Iranian nuclear issue will be on the front burner by early next year. In the UN we hope -- faint hope that it is -- that the IAEA will do what it is promising now, and report the Iranian nuclear program to the Security Council as a violation of international law and treaty. But to expect the Security Council to do anything serious about Iran is to hope too much. Iran is backed at least by Russia and France (both veto-holding permanent members) and other Security Council members such as Algeria, which like Iran is a supporter of terrorists. We lack the votes to get the Security Council to do anything that will prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power.
Having said that, we must plan for the next steps to be taken, because they will need to be accomplished before the end of 2005. By then, if not sooner, Iran will have possession of, and/or the ability to manufacture, nuclear weapons. (I should note that more than one source has told me that Iran already has three nuclear weapons it has bought on the black market). We will not have to act unilaterally. Other nations -- especially including Israel -- see Iran as an existential threat. Iraq, though not yet able to defend itself against the Iranian-funded insurgency of Moqtada al-Sadr, has an equal stake in preventing a nuclear Iran. So do all those nations -- from Turkey to Britain - who will soon be in range of Iranian missiles. The UN will fail with respect to Iran just as it has failed in every other challenge in the war on terrorists and the nations that support them. We won't act alone. But we will have to act militarily, and soon.



To continue reading this symposium, Click Here.

Atomic Ayatollahs (Continued)
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | September 3, 2004
Loftus: The short term goal is to prevent Iran from having nuclear weapons, the medium term goal is to stop its funding of terrorism, the long term goal is regime change. Lets take them in order:
Short term: IAEA wants (secretly) to refer Iran to the UN for sanctions but lacks the smoking gun. Libya, Pakistan, North Korea or China could easily incriminate Iran, but that would mean outing the entire Arab nuclear game, There are lots of guilty parties: Saudi funding, Egyptian support, Syrian centrifuges, Iraqi nuclear scientists working in Libya, etc. There are a lot of threads to pull apart the tapestry of the Iranian nuclear cover-up.
BUT even if the smoking gun emerges, the big obstacle is the price of oil. Europe imports 90% of its oil from the Arabian peninsula. Arab sanctions are the ones with real teeth. A US naval blockade could easily shut Iran's economy in weeks or months, but in the interim oil prices would skyrocket to $100 per barrel. The US can sit out the price hike with our petroleum reserves, Europe cannot.
Bottom line: if we are to go against Iran, we go alone as usual. My intel friends tell me that the new oddly shaped warhead on the Shahab 3d missile is an exact duplicate of the North Korean nuclear warhead. I think Iran already has one to four nuclear weapons, and is prepared to obliterate Israel in response to any blockade or pre-emptive strike. I see little consensus for a short term strategy to blockade Iran, let alone to launch a primitive attack.
The middle term goal: to stop Iranian support for terrorism. Here there is some hope. The Iraqis have caught Iran by the short hairs in funding Sadr's rebellion. The Iranian Consul General in Karbala has been kidnapped by "unknown forces" and has been talking like a waterfall. The Iranian spies disguised ad journalists and chamber of commerce types have been rounded up. The confessions have been videotaped, the secret codes broken. The new Iraqi government has grounds to say that Iran has declared war, and to call on the Arab states to issue their own sanctions. This has a glimmer of hope. Iran's weak points are its European dependent trade economy, and its fear of geopolitical isolation. They can be hit in the pocketbook. If the Arabs insist, Europe will follow.
Long term: Wait them out. It took 70 years, but the Soviet Union crumbled without a nuclear war. It won't take anywhere near that long for Iran. Iran has a fragile economy, with massive unemployment among the young urban populations. The Mullahs will be swallowed by their own demographics within a decade. Instead of funding the MEK or SAVAK or yet another Shah, let the American Persian community increase their highly effective TV and radio broadcasts to Iran. 75% of the Iranian population is under 25, and they hate the Mullahs with a passion.
These three strategies are not inconsistent. If the Arab states want to avoid exposure for their criminal conspiracy to develop the Islamic Bomb, then the price is Iran. If the Arabs isolate the Persians in punishment for their attack on Iraq, then the Europeans may execute a volte face rather than risk an Arab boycott. Some oil is better than none. Let the deal making begin. We have 36 months before Iran can manufacture an indigenous nuclear stockpile. After that point, they could defeat America.
Bayegan: What Mr.Babbin calls an academic exercise, I call doing one's homework before a headlong plunge into another quagmire in the Middle East. I am surprised at that "whatever that means" cynical tone Mr. Babbin uses to refer to "democratic principles" and "civilized political norms". For thousands of Iranians who have been subject to torture, humiliation and murder by religious tyrants for the past quarter of a century, those values are of infinite and invaluable importance.
Mr. Babbin speaks in the same breath of support for Mr. Pahlavi and re-arming/reactivating MKO. The problem with that argument is that unlike MKO, Reza Pahlavi is advocating a non-violent resistance to the Mullahs and calls for the toppling of the clerical regime through civil disobedience, economic sanctions and political isolation. Mr. Pahlavi has never once promoted a military attack on Iranian soil. Accordingly, any comparison made between him and the leaders of Iraqi National Congress is jejune or outright calumnious. Those Iranians who are supporting his campaign are doing so for his peaceful and democratic approach, and not because they are his pal as Mr. Babbin is suggesting about myself.
I reiterate here that the non-violent political solution and the call for a national referendum are the ONLY acceptable means of a regime change for the majority of Iranians. That is why Americans like Mr. Babbin do well to cultivate the capacity of listening to the Iranian people and spending time to study their true sentiments and aspirations.
For instance, does Mr. Babbin have any idea that his argument that "we have to act militarily and soon" cannot be received with anything except utter repugnance by Iranians and credible leaders of the Iranian opposition? No Iranian opposition leader worth his salt is suggesting (As Ahmed Chalabi did) that the invading armies will be greeted with flowers in the streets of Tehran. An Iraqi style invasion of Iran is what the mullahs need to rally Iranians behind them and further delay the collapse of their hated theocracy.
I agree with Mr. Loftus that Iranians do not need any funding to liberate their country. He also points out an important factor against the survival of the clerical regime when he remarks that "75 percent of the Iranian population is under 25, and they hate the Mullahs with a passion".
This passion is a noble human resistance to oppression and tyranny. It is a laudable, moral fervor that deserves the support and solidarity of every member of international community.
What is toted by the Kerry camp as the 'grand bargain' to dissuade the Islamic Republic from moving towards its WMD objectives is a prime example of a betrayal of the hope and aspirations of Iranian people.
As a matter of fact, the regime in Tehran which felt extremely vulnerable after the ouster of Saddam Hussein has been using the nuclear card to win concessions from the West and continue its reign of terror with impunity. John Edwards' recent overture to Iran that amounts to showering the mullahs with presents and offering them a list of incentives shows that the Democrats have not learned anything from their past mistakes. The war on terror cannot be won as long as the clerical regime continues to rule Iran. The Democrats paid the price of their vacillating policies towards the Mullahs during the presidency of Jimmy Carter. A future President John Kerry cannot expect to fare any better.
Babbin: Before Mr. Bayegan can accuse me of calumniating, he must first prove his assertion that Reza Pahlavi is the anointed future leader of a moderate Iran. That he has not even attempted to do. I repeat: he sounds almost exactly the same as those who asserted that Iraqis would flock around Chalabi as their accepted leader. Having not been in Iran in twenty-five years, Mr. Pahlavi has to prove to have a large and democratically-oriented following before his advocates are taken seriously. That he patently cannot. I have met Mr. Pahlavi, and find him a highly intelligent and engaging man. I have read one of his books, and believe that he is inclined to a new, free and democratic Iran. But that is not enough. Mr. Bayegan's assertions may prove true. I hope they do. But his assertions are merely that: unsupported and not yet susceptible of being taken seriously.
Mr. Bayegan also accuses me of cynicism. He confuses cynicism with realism. I think that those -- such as he -- who ask us to choose between Iranian opposition groups merely on their say so -- have a lot to learn about America. We are learning as we go in this war, and we have learned in Iraq to not believe unsubstantiated claims of broad support by those who aren't in-country. Am I suggesting a "headlong plunge" into the Middle East? My dear chap, the Middle East has taken a headlong plunge into America. We are responding, and not in kind.
We must remove the regime of the mullahs in Tehran. We can and should do so. We have no quarrel with the people of Iran but -- and this is the biggest "but" in the world today -- we must remove that regime soon, on our time table, with or without the acceptance by the Iranian people of the time or means we choose. If they disagree, they should take their grievances out on the repressive regime that holds them in thrall and seeks to do the same with the rest of the world. Mr. Bayegan and others don't have standing to argue with us about how we do what we must do. Our ONLY obligation is to remove the threat of the central terrorist regime in the world in as humane a way as we can.
We wish no harm to the Iranian people, and hope that they will understand that we cannot await their blessing before we act. Mr. Bayegan seems to be saying that we are under some obligation to ourselves, our posterity, or to the Iranians to wait until they say we are doing what they might accept. That reasoning is perfectly circular. If the Iranians had a legitimate voice through which their government spoke, they would already be democratic and not a terrorist threat. But they do not. There is no voice of the moderate Iran that can speak for anyone inside the nation. Both Mr. Loftus and Mr. Bayegan apparently wish to wait for some diplomatic or Iranian-generated action to change what the facts on the ground are now. I believe the time to wait is rapidly running out.
Just Wednesday, the mullahs announced that they are beginning to enrich tons of uranium in defiance of the IAEA and the UN. Mr. Loftus is dreaming if he thinks IAEA "secretly" wants to do something. Even if it were, IAEA's secret dreams can't and won't disarm Iran. We must do it, and very soon. With our allies if some choose to join, alone if we must. And I reiterate, we need not and should not invade Iran. Destruction of the nuclear program is sufficient for now, and can be done from the air. By so doing, we may provide the impetus for a revolution that the Iranian people can mount themselves. If it does, we should support it with money, arms and communication assets. Then, and only then, can a new leader of a free Iran emerge.
FP: Mr. Loftus, last word goes to you. Please comment on the disagreement between Mr. Babbin and Mr. Bayegan and where you stand. And, as a final word, let us assume that President Bush called you today and said: "Mr. Loftus, Iran has become my #1 priority now. I need your advice on what to do." What do you tell the President?
Loftus: I think that perhaps you have seriously underestimated the Kerry strategy. It is a given that Iran will never accept a grand strategy, no matter how many enticements are spread before them. The reason is simple: the bottom line for Kerry's plan is that Iran must dismantle their centrifuge arrays, give up the indigenous mining of yellow cake, and end all enrichment experiments. Even if we offer, as Mr. Kerry has hinted, to provide uranium fuel for free, Iran will still turn the bargain down. Iran needs the enrichment cycle to build nuclear weapons, all else is pretense.
Mr. Kerry knows this, and anticipates the rejection of his Grand Bargain. So why bother? Because we are linking the Grand Bargain to a firm committment from the EU and other Arab states that rejection means an automatic vote for sanctions in the UN. Since 90% of Iran's economy is dependent on oil exports, this is one of the few countries in the world where sanctions have teeth. Shut down the pipelines, blockade the shipping lanes, and Iran's economy collapses in short order. That may be enough to start the revolution from within.
As to bombing from the air, it is not an option. A) we do not know where all the enrichment facilities are located, B) many of the sites are underground beneath civilian areas, and C) the much taunted nuclear bunker buster technology simply will not work after thorough study. Bombing will rally the Iranian people around the Pasdaran, the new SS, and accelerate spending on nuclear weapons. Land invasion is not an option, as Saddam learned.
My advice to the President is that we most go through the motions of offering a Grand Bargain for diplomatic reasons, but plan on its rejection. Several of the Mullahs have already denounced Kerry's proposal, so it is a safe bet to lose. We must get the votes for sanctions against Iran or consider a naval blockade on our own. 90% of Iran's trade is with the EU, and most of that cargo comes by sea. What will the Mullahs do for their people when the foodstocks run out? Let them eat yellowcake?
FP: Jed Babbin, John Loftus and Reza Bayegan, our time is up. Thank you for joining us. We'll see you again soon.


Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's managing editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Soviet Studies. He edited and wrote the introduction to David Horowitz's new book Left Illusions. He is also the co-editor (with David Horowitz) of the new book The Hate America Left and the author of Canadian Policy Toward Khrushchev's Soviet Union (McGill-Queens University Press, 2002) and 15 Tips on How to be a Good Leftist. To see his previous symposiums, interviews and articles Click Here. Email him at jglazov@rogers.com.


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Rejecting International Pressure, Iran to Process Uranium
By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 2, 2004; Page A13
Iran, in a fresh rebuff of demands that it abandon its nuclear ambitions, has decided to process a large quantity of uranium into a precursor ingredient used in making both commercial nuclear fuel and nuclear weapons, the U.N. atomic watchdog agency said yesterday.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, in a confidential report, said Iran intends to convert more than 40 tons of uranium into uranium hexafluoride (UF 6 ) gas, an intermediate step in the complex process of making enriched uranium. The plan, if carried out, would represent a significant step forward for Iran's nuclear program and -- in the view of Bush administration officials -- a growing threat. In theory, that much uranium could yield as many as five crude nuclear bombs.
Administration officials reacted strongly to the revelation, vowing to launch a new effort this month to bring Iran before the U.N. Security Council for international censure. "The United States will continue to urge others . . . to join us in the effort to deal with the Iranian threat to international peace and security," said John R. Bolton, the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security.
Iran emphatically denies seeking nuclear weapons, but it insists it will assert its legal right to develop a commercial nuclear power industry. Although international inspectors have found no hard evidence linking Iran to a nuclear weapons program, its credibility has been battered by numerous disclosures of past attempts to conceal sensitive nuclear research.
Iran has also angered key U.S. allies in Europe by backing away from commitments to freeze components of its nuclear program, including the production of centrifuge machines used in enriching uranium. In an agreement reached last fall with Britain, France and Germany, Iran promised to suspend the production of enriched uranium in return for trade and technical assistance.
Iran's decision to begin the conversion of 37 metric tons (40.8 tons) of raw yellowcake uranium into UF 6 is seen by U.S. officials and many weapons experts as a further flouting of Iran's commitments. Several experts described the quantity as surprising and disturbing.
The revelation was contained in an IAEA report that otherwise contained much favorable news for Iran. The document -- one in a series of periodic updates on the findings of a U.N. investigation of Iran's nuclear program -- gave the Iranians high marks for cooperating with international inspectors. Unlike past reports, it featured no bombshells about past Iranian nuclear activity. It concluded that Iran had "plausibly" explained the existence of some particles of enriched uranium found in several nuclear facilities -- particles that now appear to have entered the country on contaminated equipment purchased on the black market.
With the new report, the Bush administration faces diminishing prospects for finding "smoking gun" evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program -- and also, perhaps, for rounding up international support for tough action against Iran, said Jon Wolfsthal, deputy director for nonproliferation studies at the Carnegie Institute for International Peace. "Iran has answered the questions about its past while moving ahead with its enrichment program -- and we don't have a process in place to convince them to give it up," Wolfsthal said. "There's an open stretch of highway leading up to nuclear capability for Iran, and not a roadblock in sight."
? 2004 The Washington Post Company
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International Atomic Energy Agency Board of Governors

GOV/2004/60Date: 1 September 2004 Restricted DistributionOriginal: English

For official use only Item 8(d) of the provisional agenda (GOV/2004/51)
Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement in the Islamic Republic of Iran Report by the Director General

1. At its meeting in June 2004, the Board of Governors considered the report submitted by the Director General on the implementation of the Agreement between the Islamic Republic of Iran (hereinafter referred to as Iran) and the Agency for the Application of Safeguards in Connection with the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (the Safeguards Agreement)1. That report, published as GOV/2004/34 (1 June 2004) and Corr.1 (18 June 2004), provided a chronology from March 2004, summaries of the outstanding issues, next steps and assessments, and an annex on the Agency's verification activities. 2. On 18 June 2004, the Board of Governors adopted resolution GOV/2004/49, in which it: * acknowledged that Iranian cooperation had resulted in Agency access to all requested locations, including four workshops belonging to the Defence Industries Organisation; * deplored, at the same time, the fact that, overall, as indicated by the Director General's written and oral reports, Iran's cooperation had not been as full, timely and proactive as it should have been, and, in particular, that Iran had postponed until mid-April visits originally scheduled for mid-March -- including visits of Agency centrifuge experts to a number of locations involved in Iran's P-2 centrifuge enrichment programme -- resulting in some cases in a delay in the taking of environmental samples and their analysis; * underlined that, with the passage of time, it was becoming ever more important that Iran work proactively to enable the Agency to gain a full understanding of Iran's enrichment programme by providing all relevant information, as well as by providing prompt access to all relevant places, data and persons; and called on Iran to continue and intensify its cooperation so that the Agency may provide the international community with required assurances about Iran's nuclear activities;
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1 INFCIRC/214.
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* called on Iran to take all necessary steps on an urgent basis to help resolve all outstanding questions, especially that of low enriched uranium (LEU) and high enriched uranium (HEU) contamination found at various locations in Iran, including by providing additional relevant information about the origin of the components in question and explanations about the presence of a cluster of 36% HEU particles; and also the question of the nature and scope of Iran's P-2 centrifuge programme, including by providing full documentation and explanations at the request of the Agency; * welcomed Iran's submission of the declarations under Articles 2 and 3 of its Additional Protocol; and stressed the importance of Iran complying with the deadlines for further declarations required by Articles 2 and 3 of the Protocol, and that all such declarations should be correct and complete; * emphasized the importance of Iran continuing to act in accordance with the provisions of the Additional Protocol to provide reassurance to the international community about the nature of Iran's nuclear programme; and urged Iran to ratify without delay its Additional Protocol; * recalled that in previous resolutions the Board had called on Iran to suspend all enrichment related and reprocessing activities; welcomed Iran's voluntary decisions in that respect; regretted that those commitments had not been comprehensively implemented and called on Iran immediately to correct all remaining shortcomings, and to remove the existing variance in relation to the Agency's understanding of the scope of Iran's decisions regarding suspension, including by refraining from the production of UF6 and from all production of centrifuge components, as well as to enable the Agency to verify fully the suspension; * in the context of Iran's voluntary decisions to suspend all enrichment related and reprocessing activities, called on Iran, as a further confidence building measure, voluntarily to reconsider its decision to begin production testing at the Uranium Conversion Facility (UCF) and also, as an additional confidence building measure, to reconsider its decision to start construction of a research reactor moderated by heavy water, as the reversal of those decisions would make it easier for Iran to restore international confidence undermined by past reports of undeclared nuclear activities in Iran; * recalled that the full and prompt cooperation with the Agency of all third countries was essential in the clarification of certain outstanding questions, notably contamination; * commended the Director General and the Secretariat for their professional and impartial efforts to implement Iran's Safeguards Agreement, and, pending its entry into force, Iran's Additional Protocol, as well as to verify Iran's suspension of enrichment related and reprocessing activities, and to investigate supply routes and sources; * decided to remain seized of the matter. 3. In resolution GOV/2004/49, the Board also requested the Director General to report well in advance of the September Board -- or earlier if appropriate -- on the above issues as well as on the implementation of this and prior resolutions on Iran. The present report is the sixth in a series of written reports addressing the implementation of safeguards in Iran2, and provides the Board with an update of developments since the Director General's last report in June 2004. 2 The initial report to the Board of Governors on this specific matter was provided by the Director General orally at the Board's meeting on 17 March 2003. The Director General subsequently submitted five written reports to the Board: GOV/2003/40, dated 6 June 2003; GOV/2003/63, dated 26 August 2003; GOV/2003/75, dated 10 November 2003; GOV/2004/11, dated 24 February 2004; and GOV/2004/34 dated 1 June 2004 and Corr.1 dated 18 June 2004.
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A. Chronology from June 2004 4. From 29 May to 3 June 2004, Agency inspectors visited a number of workshops in Iran to establish a baseline for monitoring the suspension of production of centrifuge components, held discussions on the P-2 centrifuge programme and visited a workshop where P-2 composite rotor cylinders had been manufactured. 5. During a mission to Iran which took place from 22 to 30 June 2004, the Agency: conducted inspections at the Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant (PFEP) at Natanz, and at the Uranium Conversion Facility (UCF); carried out complementary access at the Esfahan Nuclear Technology Centre (ENTC); and conducted design information verification at the Fuel Enrichment Plant (FEP) at Natanz and at the Molybdenum, Iodine and Xenon Radioisotope Production (MIX) Facility at the Tehran Nuclear Research Centre (TNRC). 6. On 22 June 2004, during the same mission, the Agency requested access to the Lavisan-Shian site in Tehran which had been referred to in the June 2004 Board of Governors meeting as having been relevant to alleged nuclear activities in Iran before the site was razed after November 2003. The Agency visited the site on 28 June 2004. 7. On 23 June 2004, the Agency received from Iran a letter of the same date stating that Iran "plan[ned] to suspend implementation of the expanded voluntary measures conveyed in [its] Note dated 24 February 2004", and that Iran "thus, intend[ed] to resume, under IAEA supervision, manufacturing of centrifuge components and assembly and testing of centrifuges as of 29 June 2004." In the letter, Iran requested the Agency to "take steps necessary to enable resumption of such operation as of 29 June 2004." 8. On 25 June 2004, the Director General wrote to Iran, referring to its letter of 23 June 2004, and expressing the hope that Iran would "continue to build international confidence through implementing its voluntary decisions to suspend all enrichment related and reprocessing activities" and informing Iran that the Agency would be in contact to clarify the practical implications of the decision of the Iranian authorities. Both letters were circulated to the Board of Governors for information under cover of a Note dated 25 June 2004. 9. On 29 June 2004, the Agency received from Iran a letter dated 27 June 2004 in which, referring to its own letter of 23 June 2003, Iran provided a list of seals which "[have] to be removed from material, components and equipment related to the restart of manufacturing, assembling and testing of gas centrifuge machines." In that letter, Iran also requested the Agency's response regarding "removal of the seals either by the Agency inspectors...or by the operator..." In a letter dated 29 June 2004, the Agency acknowledged receipt of Iran's letter and agreed to the removal of the seals by the operator in the absence of Agency inspectors. 10. From 30 June to 2 July 2004, the Agency met in Vienna with an Iranian delegation to discuss outstanding safeguards implementation issues. At the close of the meeting, Iran and the Agency agreed on actions to be taken in July and August 2004 to achieve progress on the resolution of those issues. 11. As agreed during that meeting, in a letter dated 2 July 2004, the Agency provided Iran with comments on the initial declarations submitted by Iran on 15 June 2004 pursuant to Articles 2 and 3 of the Additional Protocol. On 2 July 2004, the Agency also forwarded to Iran for its comments information that it had acquired through open sources on some dual-use equipment and materials, and associated locations, that could also be used for non-peaceful nuclear applications.
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12. As also agreed during the meeting of 30 June to 2 July 2004, on 5 July 2004, the Agency provided Iran with a list of questions in relation to its centrifuge enrichment programme and asked that the answers be provided in writing by 20 July 2004. 13. During a visit of Agency inspectors to Iran from 6 to 18 July 2004, an Agency team met with Iranian officials to discuss the Agency's comments on Iran's Additional Protocol declarations. The team also visited Natanz to recover nuclear material left over in equipment and piping that had been used in the centrifuge research and development (R&D) programme at the Kalaye Electric Company workshop. 14. During that visit, Iran also returned to the Agency 40 seals which it had removed from equipment and centrifuge components located at Natanz, Pars Trash and Farayand Technique (see para. 9 above). The Agency team also held discussions with Iranian officials on outstanding uranium conversion issues. In addition, the team visited the waste disposal site located at Qom, and performed complementary access at Lashkar Ab'ad, at a uranium production plant located near Bandar Abbas, and at TNRC. 15. On 19 July 2004, the Agency received a letter from Iran dated 15 July 2004 concerning the source of contamination of the room under the roof of the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR). In the letter, Iran provided new information concerning the source of the material involved in the contamination. 16. From 25 July to 2 August 2004, Agency inspectors carried out inspection activities at TRR and PFEP, and at facilities on the Esfahan site, where complementary access was also carried out. At Natanz, the inspectors also visited the administrative building and the centrifuge rotor storage building in connection with the monitoring of Iran's suspension of enrichment related activities. 17. From 3 to 8 August 2004, an Agency team, led by the Director of the Division of Safeguards Operations B (DIR-SGOB), met with Iranian officials in Tehran to discuss the outstanding safeguards implementation issues identified at the meeting of 30 June to 2 July 2004. At the opening of the meeting, Iran provided the Agency with written answers to some of the questions that the Agency had previously sent to Iran. These answers were discussed in detail during the meeting. 18. At the close of the meeting, Iran agreed to complete its written answers and to provide additional documentation to the Agency. On 8 August 2004, Iran provided the Agency with more information and documentation. Following a preliminary review of that information and documentation, the Agency wrote to Iran on 16 August 2004 to request information that remained outstanding. 19. On 16 August 2004, the Agency received a letter from Iran dated 14 August 2004 stating that the operator of UCF was "intending to perform hot test to be started on 19 August 2004." 20. Between 21 and 25 August 2004, discussions at TNRC were held, and complementary access at Karaj and inspections and design information verification at PFEP and UCF were carried out. 21. Between 19 and 30 August 2004, the Agency received from Iran a number of communications forwarding additional information relevant to the outstanding issues as discussed during the 3-8 August 2004 meeting in Iran and responding to the Agency's letter of 16 August 2004.
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B. Outstanding Issues and Assessments Centrifuge programme 22. The Agency has continued to investigate the statements made by Iran regarding the chronology of its P-2 centrifuge enrichment programme (GOV/2004/34, para. 26), particularly as regards the period 1995 to 2002. 23. During the discussions which took place in August 2004, Iran repeated that, although the design drawings of a P-2 centrifuge had been acquired in 1995, no work on P-2 centrifuges was carried out until early 2002 when, according to Iran, the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) management decided that "work on a modified P-2 machine based on a sub-critical rotor design would not hurt," and, in March 2002, a contract to study the mechanical properties of the P-2 centrifuge was signed with a small private company. Iran stated that no feasibility or other preliminary studies or experiments were conducted by Iran during the period between 1995 and 2002. 24. Iranian officials also stated that, in spite of frequent contacts between 1995 and 1999 on P-1 centrifuge issues with the intermediaries (who, according to Iran, had provided both the P-1 and P-2 drawings), the topic of P-2 centrifuges was not addressed at all in those meetings nor in the course of making any other foreign contacts. Iran attributed this to the fact that a decision had been made to concentrate on the P-1 centrifuge enrichment programme, and that, in addition, the AEOI was undergoing senior management and organizational changes during that period of time. 25. During the 3-8 August 2004 meeting, and subsequently, the Agency received from Iran more details on the manufacturing and mechanical testing of the modified P-2 composite rotors under the contract with the private company during the period 2002-2003. The Agency reiterated its previous requests for further information from Iran on the procurement of magnets for the P-2 centrifuges, in particular on the source of all such magnets, with a view to facilitating completion by the Agency of its assessment of the P-2 experiments said to have been carried out by the private company. In a letter dated 30 August 2004, Iran informed the Agency that it was "trying to receive that information which would then be transmitted to the Agency". 26. In connection with the Agency's overall assessment of Iran's P-2 centrifuge enrichment programme, the reasons given by Iran for the apparent gap between 1995 and 2002 do not provide sufficient assurance that there were no related activities carried out during that period. The Agency is continuing its investigations of the supply network. Information in this regard will be essential for confirming the statements made by Iran with regard to the acquisition of detailed P-2 manufacturing drawings in 1995, and for understanding the subsequent developments in connection with Iran's P-2 centrifuge enrichment programme. The investigations into the supply network will also provide an opportunity for the Agency to confirm the accuracy of the information provided by Iran on its P-1 centrifuge enrichment programme. Origin of contamination 27. Iran has continued to maintain that the LEU and HEU particles found at Natanz, the Kalaye Electric Company workshop, Farayand Technique and, more recently, at Pars Trash, are due to contamination originating from imported P-1 centrifuge components. However, a number of unanswered questions remain: * why, if the contamination of the domestically manufactured centrifuge components was due solely to contamination from the imported components, the domestic components showed predominantly LEU contamination, while the imported components showed both LEU and HEU contamination.
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* why, if the source of contamination is the same (imported components), the contamination at PFEP differed from that found at the Kalaye Electric Company workshop and Farayand Technique. * why 36% uranium-235 (U-235) particles were found mainly in three of the locations where the imported components were located, and not at others, and why, at the Kalaye Electric Company workshop, there was a relatively large number of particles of 36% U-235 compared to the number of particles of U-235 with other enrichment levels. 28. For the Agency to be able to resolve the issue of LEU and HEU contamination, more information is needed on the locations where the imported components were manufactured and where they were subsequently used or moved to in transit to Iran (i.e. all locations where contamination of the components might have occurred). 29. While Iran provided some information in October 2003 on intermediaries involved, it continues to maintain that it does not know the origin of the components. During the 3-8 August 2004 meetings, the Agency again discussed this matter with Iran and reiterated its request that Iran make every effort possible to identify the origin of the components and the locations outside of Iran that Iranian officials had visited in the 1990s in connection with centrifuge related issues. Subsequently, Iran provided some additional information on one of those locations. 30. The Agency has also continued its discussions with the State from which most of the contaminated centrifuge components originated. The State has provided the Agency with new information on the results of its investigations into the supplier, which indicate that the components imported by Iran may not all have originated from that State. However, additional work, including swipe sampling by the Agency of equipment, is required by the Agency to help it confirm the origin of the contamination from that equipment and to verify the new information. In connection with this work, information from intermediaries and/or the companies and workshops involved in the production and storage of centrifuge components (including information derived from environmental sampling) is indispensable. The Agency is pursuing this matter through contacts with other States and with companies and individuals. 31. The Agency's analysis to date has shown that most of the HEU contamination found at the Kalaye Electric Company workshop and Natanz correlates reasonably with the HEU contamination found on imported components. Given this analysis, other correlations and model enrichment calculations based on the enrichment process in a possible country of origin, it appears plausible that the HEU contamination found at the Kalaye Electric Company workshop and Natanz may not have resulted from enrichment of uranium by Iran at those locations. Other explanations for this and the LEU contamination continue to be investigated by the Agency. 32. As indicated above, on 19 July 2004, the Agency received a letter from Iran reiterating its previous assertion that the source of contamination of the room under the roof of the Tehran Research Reactor building had been "UF6 which [had] been produced through R&D conversion" (not UF6 imported in 1991, as Iran had initially informed the Agency), but providing additional information on the source of the material which had been used as feed for that conversion. The Agency continues to regard as not technically plausible Iran's explanation that the contamination was due to a leaking bottle. However, the Agency will only be able to pursue this issue if new information becomes available. Uranium conversion experiments 33. Between 1981 and mid-1993, small scale uranium conversion experiments were conducted by Iran at research laboratories at ENTC and TNRC. The Agency has been reviewing the information
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provided by Iran with a view to assessing Iran's declarations regarding these experiments. The Agency has concluded that Iran's statements and declarations regarding the technical scope of its work, the equipment used and the amounts of nuclear material consumed and produced are consistent with what was ascertained by the Agency as a result of its investigations. Laser enrichment 34. The Agency has completed its review of Iran's atomic vapour laser isotope separation (AVLIS) programme and has concluded that Iran's descriptions of the levels of enrichment achieved using AVLIS at the Comprehensive Separation Laboratory (CSL) and Lashkar Ab'ad and the amounts of material used in its past activities are consistent with information available to the Agency to date. Iran has presented all known key equipment, which has been verified by the Agency. For the reasons described in the Annex to this report, however, detailed nuclear material accountancy is not possible. 35. It is the view of the Agency's AVLIS experts that, while the contract for the AVLIS facility at Lashkar Ab'ad was specifically written for the delivery of a system that could achieve 5 kg of product within the first year with enrichment levels of 3.5% to 7%, the facility as designed and reflected in the contract would, given some specific features of the equipment, have been capable of limited HEU production had the entire package of equipment been delivered. The Iranian AVLIS experts have stated that they were not aware of the significance of these features when they negotiated and contracted for the supply and delivery of the Lashkar Ab'ad AVLIS facility. They have also provided information demonstrating the very limited capabilities of the equipment delivered to Iran under this contract to produce HEU (i.e. only in gram quantities). Plutonium separation experiments 36. As of the last report to the Board, there remained a number of questions concerning the dates and quantities of material involved in the plutonium separation experiments carried out by Iran (GOV/2004/34, Annex, paras 15-16) 37. Iran has now agreed with the Agency's estimate of the amounts of plutonium that had been produced by irradiation (milligram quantities). During the August 2004 discussions, Iran explained the reasons for the high level of americium-241 (Am-241) and the plutonium-240 (Pu-240) contamination found in samples taken from a used glove box stored at Esfahan. As noted in the previous report, there are indications that the age of the plutonium in solutions could be less than the 12-16 years declared by Iran; that is to say, that the separation activities were carried out more recently than that. The Iranian officials maintain their earlier statements regarding the age of the plutonium. The Agency is continuing to look into this matter. Hot cells 38. In response to questions by the Agency about past efforts by Iran to procure hot cell windows and manipulators, and the specifications associated with those items, Iran informed the Agency that there had been a project for the construction of hot cells for the production of "long lived radioisotopes" but that it had been abandoned due to procurement difficulties. In August 2004, Iran presented to the Agency detailed drawings that Iran had received from a foreign company in 1977 for hot cells which were to have been constructed at Esfahan. Iran stated that it had not yet made more detailed plans for hot cells for the Iran Research Reactor (IR-40) site at Arak, but that it had used information from those drawings as the basis for specifications in its efforts to procure manipulators for hot cells intended for the production of cobalt and iridium isotopes. In a letter dated 19 August 2004 Iran reiterated its previous statement that the hot cell project at Arak consisted of nine hot cells -- four for the
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"production of radioisotopes", two for the production of cobalt and iridium3, and three for "waste management processing" -- and would require ten back-up manipulators. 39. The Agency will continue to follow up on this issue with a view to achieving a better understanding of Iran's plans with respect to hot cells. Additional Protocol 40. The Agency is reviewing the initial declarations submitted by Iran pursuant to its Additional Protocol on 21 May 2004, as well as the clarifications and supplementary information provided by Iran following the detailed discussions in July and August 2004 between the Agency and Iran. Investigation of supply routes and sources 41. As requested by the Board in resolution GOV/2004/21, the Agency is continuing to pursue its investigation of the supply routes and sources of conversion and enrichment technology and the sources of related equipment and nuclear and non-nuclear materials. The Director General will provide more information to the Board about the results of this investigation upon its completion. Transparency visits and discussions 42. The Lavisan-Shian site in Tehran was referred to in the June 2004 meeting of the Board of Governors in connection with alleged nuclear related activities and the possibility of a concealment effort through the removal of the buildings from that site. 43. As indicated above, in response to an Agency request, Iran provided access to that site. Iran also provided access to two whole body counters, and to a trailer declared to have been previously located on that site and to have contained one of the whole body counters. The Agency took environmental samples at these locations. Iran also gave the Agency a description and chronology of activities carried out at the Lavisan-Shian site. According to Iran, a Physics Research Centre had been established at that site in 1989, the purpose of which had been "preparedness to combat and neutralization of casualties due to nuclear attacks and accidents (nuclear defence) and also support and provide scientific advice and services to the Ministry of Defence." Iran provided a list of the eleven activities conducted at the Centre, but, referring to security concerns, declined to provide a list of the equipment used at the Centre. Iran stated further that "no nuclear material declarable in accordance with the Agency's safeguard[s] was present" and that "no nuclear material and nuclear activities related to fuel cycle [were] carried out in Lavisan-Shian." 44. According to Iran, the site had been razed in response to a decision ordering the return of the site to the Municipality of Tehran in connection with a dispute between the Municipality and the Ministry of Defence. Iran recently provided documentation to support this explanation. 45. The documentation provided by Iran is currently being assessed, and the environmental samples are being analysed. 46. In accordance with Agency practice in connection with its evaluation of other States' nuclear programmes, the Agency has discussed with the Iranian authorities open source information relating to dual use equipment and materials which have applications in the conventional military area and in the civilian sphere as well as in the nuclear military area. The Agency welcomes Iran's willingness to discuss these topics. 3 Cobalt-60 and iridium-192 have half-lives of 5.2 years and 74 days, respectively.
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Suspension 47. In its Note Verbale of 29 December 2003, Iran informed the Agency that, with immediate effect, it would suspend: * the operation and/or testing of any centrifuges at PFEP at Natanz; * further introduction of nuclear material into any centrifuges; * installation of new centrifuges at PFEP and installation of centrifuges at FEP. 48. Iran also indicated that it would withdraw nuclear material from any centrifuge enrichment facility if and to the extent practicable. It further stated that: * it currently was not constructing any type of gas centrifuge enrichment facility at any location in Iran other than the facility at Natanz, nor did it have plans to construct new facilities capable of isotopic separation during the suspension; * it had dismantled its laser enrichment projects and removed all related equipment; * it was not constructing or operating any plutonium separation facility; * during the period of suspension, it did not intend to make new contracts for the manufacture of centrifuge machines and their components; * the Agency could fully supervise storage of all centrifuge machines assembled during the suspension period; * Iran did not intend to import centrifuge machines or their components, or feed material for enrichment processes, during the suspension period; and * there was no production of feed material for enrichment processes in Iran. 49. On 24 February 2004, Iran invited the Agency to verify its further voluntary decisions to: * suspend the assembly and testing of centrifuges; and * suspend the domestic manufacture of centrifuge components, including those related to the existing contracts, to the furthest extent possible (and said that any components that were manufactured under existing contracts that could not be suspended would be stored and placed under Agency seal). 50. Iran also confirmed that the suspension of enrichment activities applied to all facilities in Iran. 51. On 21 May 2004, Iran informed the Agency that it had not, at any time, made any undertaking not to produce feed material for the enrichment process, and that its voluntary and temporary suspension did not include suspension of the production of UF6. 52. As previously indicated in the Director General's report to the Board (GOV/2004/34, para. 42; Annex, paras 60-61), Iran informed the Agency that it was conducting hot tests at UCF that would generate UF6 product. One such test, which generated about 30-35 kg UF6, was conducted between May and June 2004. Another larger test involving 37 tonnes of yellowcake is planned for August/September 2004. 53. As indicated above, Iran notified the Agency on 23 June 2004 of its intention to resume, "under IAEA supervision, manufacturing of centrifuge components and assembly and testing of centrifuges". Following this, the seals that had been used by the Agency as one of the measures for monitoring Iran's suspension of the manufacture, assembly and testing of centrifuge components at Natanz, Pars
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Trash and Farayand Technique were removed by Iran and returned to the Agency during its visit to Iran between 6 and 18 July 2004. As of mid-August 2004, about 70 rotors had been newly assembled and tested, and were shown to the Agency. The Agency is discussing with Iran the necessary arrangements for the Agency to exercise "supervision". In that regard, the Agency has proposed that it seal the tested rotors, a measure which Iran has not to date accepted. It must be noted that, in the absence of such seals, the Agency's supervision of the activities identified by Iran cannot be considered effective. 54. Since the last report of the Director General to the Board of Governors, the Agency has been able to verify that there has been no operation or testing of any centrifuges at PFEP; that there has been no further introduction of nuclear material into any centrifuges at PFEP; that there has been no installation of new centrifuges at PFEP or installation of centrifuges at FEP; and that there has been no reprocessing at the Jabr Ibn Hayan Multipurpose Laboratories (JHL). 55. The Agency has also been able to reconfirm that it has not observed to date at TNRC, Lashkar Ab'ad, Arak, the Kalaye Electric Company workshop, Natanz or UCF any activities inconsistent with the Agency's understanding of Iran's current suspension undertakings. C. Findings and Next Steps 56. The Agency welcomes the new information provided recently by Iran in response to the Agency's requests, although the process of providing information needs, in certain instances, to be accelerated. In some cases, such as Iran's clarifications related to its initial declarations pursuant to its Additional Protocol, the provision of new information has been prompt. In other cases, sufficiently detailed information has, despite repeated requests, been provided so late that it has not been possible to include an assessment of its sufficiency and correctness in this report. The Agency also welcomes the cooperation by Iran in providing access to locations in response to Agency requests, including at the Lavisan-Shian site. 57. Although the Agency is not yet in a position to draw definitive conclusions concerning the correctness and completeness of Iran's declarations related to all aspects of its nuclear programme, it continues to make steady progress in understanding the programme. In this regard, the Agency's investigations have reached a point where, with respect to two aspects previously identified by the Agency as requiring investigation (i.e. Iran's declared laser enrichment activities and Iran's declared uranium conversion experiments), further follow-up will be carried out as a routine safeguards implementation matter. 58. Two issues remain key to understanding the extent and nature of Iran's enrichment programme: * The first issue relates to the origin of uranium contamination found at various locations in Iran. As stated above, some progress has been made towards ascertaining the source of the HEU contamination found at the Kalaye Electric Company workshop and Natanz. From the Agency's analysis to date, it appears plausible that the HEU contamination found at those locations may not have resulted from enrichment of uranium by Iran at the Kalaye Electric Company workshop or at Natanz. However, the Agency will continue to pursue the identification of sources and reasons for such contamination. The Agency will also continue with its efforts to understand the source of the LEU contamination found in various locations in Iran, including on domestically manufactured components.
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* The second issue relates to the extent of Iran's efforts to import, manufacture and use centrifuges of both the P-1 and P-2 design. While the Agency has gained a better understanding of Iran's efforts relevant to both designs, additional work by the Agency will be necessary, inter alia, to confirm Iran's statements regarding the absence of P-2 centrifuge related activities in Iran between 1995 and 2002 and regarding P-2 centrifuge procurement related activities. 59. There are other issues that will also require further follow-up, for example the timeframe of Iran's plutonium separation experiments. 60. The Agency has been able to verify Iran's suspension of enrichment related activities at specific facilities and sites, and has been able to confirm that it has not observed, to date, any activities at those locations inconsistent with its understanding of Iran's current suspension undertakings. 61. It is important for Iran to support the Agency's efforts to gain a full understanding of all remaining issues by continuing to provide access to locations, personnel and information relevant to safeguards implementation in response to Agency requests -- as well as by proactively providing any additional information that could enhance the Agency's understanding of Iran's nuclear programme. 62. The Agency welcomes the cooperation of other States in response to Agency requests, which is key to the Agency's ability to resolve some of the outstanding issues. Information received to date from other States has proven useful in understanding aspects of the uranium contamination found in Iran. The Agency will continue to request States to actively assist the Agency in resolving these issues. 63. The Director General will report to the Board as appropriate and not later than the November 2004 meeting of the Board.

Annex Verification Activities A. Uranium Conversion - Experiments and Testing 1. Between 1981 and mid-1993, Iran conducted a variety of small scale uranium conversion experiments which encompassed the conversion of uranium ore concentrate (UOC) to ammonium diuranate (ADU) and UO2, the conversion of UOC to ammonium uranyl carbonate (AUC), the conversion of uranyl nitrate (UN) directly to UO3, the conversion of UO2 to UF4 through wet and dry processes and the conversion of UF4 to UF6. During the period 1995 to 2002, techniques to convert UF4 to uranium metal were developed and, during the period 1997 to 2002, research and development on processes in connection with the Uranium Conversion Facility (UCF) at Esfahan was also conducted. 2. These activities, the time periods during which they were conducted, the quantities of nuclear material used and the quantities of products and wastes are summarized in the following table. PROCESS TIME PERIODS DISPOSITION OF NUCLEAR MATERIAL4 Conversion of UOC to ADU (ENTC) 1983 to mid-1987 49.6 kg imported U3O8 used to produce 36 kg ADU Conversion of ADU to UO2 (ENTC) Early 1985 to mid-1987 34 kg of the 36 kg ADU used to produce 28 kg of UO2; 2 kg ADU unused 12 kg of the 28 kg UO2 used in subsequent experiments, 16 kg UO2 unused Total of 6.7 kg U as liquid waste from UOC-ADU and ADU-UO2 conversion disposed of at Qom Conversion of UOC to AUC (ENTC) 1986 to mid-1987 About 5.5 kg imported UOC used to produce about 7 kg AUC Conversion of UOC to AUC (TNRC) 1989 to end 1992 About 2.7 kg imported UOC used to produce about 4.5 kg AUC Wet process production of UF4 (TNRC) 1990 to mid-1991 12.8 kg imported UOC used to produce 10 kg UF4; waste disposed of at Qom
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4 For the sake of simplicity, natural and depleted uranium have been combined.
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Dry process production of UF4 (TNRC) End 1991 to early 1992 About 2.7 kg imported UO2 used to produce about 3 kg UF4; 2.5 kg UF4 remains on inventory; 0.5 kg waste disposed of at Qom Conversion of UF4 to UF6 (TNRC) Mid-1991 to mid-1993 9.8 kg imported UF4 used to produce 6.9 kg UF6; 2.7 kg U disposed of as waste Conversion of UN to UO3 (TNRC) Second half 1992 2.2 kg imported UOC used to produce 0.3 kg UO3; waste disposed of at Qom Pulse column experiments (TNRC) Early 1997 to early 2002 22.5 kg UO2 used for various experiments, out of which equivalent of 8.6 kg UO2 remains as liquid waste; equivalent of 14 kg UO2 disposed of as waste at Qom Conversion of UF4 to uranium metal (TNRC) 1995 to early 2002 358.7 kg UF4 (mainly imported) used to produce 126.4 kg uranium metal; 3 kg uranium metal recovered from waste 3. With the exception of the studies on uranium metal conversion and pulse columns, the small scale conversion activities started in the early to mid-1980s and continued for several years. The last of these, the UF4-UF6 experiments, ended in June of 1993. There are inherent difficulties with investigating activities which ended over a decade ago, and it is not possible to verify in detail the chronologies and descriptions of the experiments which took place in Iran. Therefore, the Agency's activities have been focused on assessing the consistency of information provided by Iran and examining remaining equipment and nuclear material. 4. Very detailed documentation was provided for some of the conversion experiments and tests, for example, the UO2-UF4, UF4-UF6, UN-UO3 and uranium metal activities. Less detailed documentation was provided for the older activities, such as those associated with the UOC-ADU, ADU-UO2 and UOC-AUC activities. The documentation was supplemented by technical meetings with scientific staff involved with and responsible for these activities. Except for the equipment associated with the UOC-AUC experiments, equipment used during the experiments was examined and, where possible, compared with documentation. Inventory examination and verification activities, including the recovery of nuclear material hold-up from the equipment, were performed to confirm, where possible, the quantities of nuclear material used, produced and lost as waste. 5. An issue of concern since the outset of the investigation of the small scale conversion activities has been the very small quantities of nuclear material used and produced relative to the size, quality and capacity of the equipment involved, particularly in connection with the UOC-ADU, ADU-UO2, UO2-UF4 and the UF4-UF6 projects. The large scale experimental equipment, if used for full scale production, could consume and produce far in excess of what was declared to have been consumed and produced during the declared life of these activities. 6. A related issue is the use of the equipment during the period between when the activities were said to have ceased (1991-1993) and April 1999, when the equipment is said to have been dismantled and put into storage. Iran has stated that the equipment was kept in storage until January 2004, when it was examined by the Agency and the nuclear material hold-up recovered therefrom, and the equipment was destroyed at the initiative of the Iranian authorities.
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7. Examination of the equipment prior to and during its destruction showed that the equipment was in very good condition and appeared to have been little used, which is consistent with the declared scale of its use. B. Irradiation and Reprocessing Experiments B.1. Plutonium separation 8. As described in the Director General's report to the March 2004 Board meeting (GOV/2004/11, para. 21), Iran had irradiated depleted UO2 targets and reprocessed them on the site of TNRC. According to Iran, 6.9 kg of UO2 had been irradiated, 3 kg of which were subsequently reprocessed to separate plutonium, and the remaining 3.9 kg had been buried in containers at the site. 9. However, on the basis of information available to it, the Agency concluded (GOV/2004/34, para. 36; Annex, paras 15-16): that the amount of plutonium declared by Iran had been understated (quantities in the milligram range rather than the microgram range as stated by Iran); that the plutonium samples taken from a glove box said to have been involved had plutonium-240 abundance higher than that found in the plutonium solution bottles presented; that the age of the plutonium solution in the bottles appeared to be less than the declared 12-16 years; and that there was an excess amount of americium-241 in samples. 10. With regard to the quantity of plutonium in solution, a recalculation by Iran based on corrected irradiation data and using a corrected equation indicated a quantity of plutonium in the range of that estimated by the Agency. During the meeting in Iran on 16 May 2004, Iran acknowledged that its theoretical estimations of the produced plutonium had been understated and accepted the Agency's estimate as being correct. 11. The age of the plutonium solutions was discussed during the meetings that took place between 3 and 8 August 2004. The Agency explained in detail the methodology it had used for dating the plutonium that had been separated, and the additional on-going work to validate the results. The Iranian officials reiterated their previous statement that the experiments had been completed in 1993 and that no plutonium had been separated since then. The Agency agreed to analyse the available data further. 12. Iran also stated that plutonium with higher Pu-240 abundance originated from work carried out between 1982 and 1984 at the Radiochemistry Laboratory of the TNRC to produce smoke detectors using Am-241. This, in Iran's view, not only explained the Pu-240 contaminant, but also the high Am-241 content in the samples. Iran stated that the Am-241 had been imported from abroad prior to the Iranian revolution in 1979, and explained that, in 1990, the glove box that had been used in connection with the Am-241 was transferred to the building where plutonium separation took place, but that it had been used for training purposes and not for plutonium experiments. According to Iran, that glove box, along with others, was moved in 2000 to a warehouse at ENTC. 13. The overall assessment with respect to the plutonium experiments is pending finalization of the results of the plutonium dating.
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B.2. Polonium-210 (Po-210) production 14. The Agency has continued to follow up the explanations given by Iran on the purposes of the irradiation of bismuth metal samples that took place in TRR between 1989 and 1993 (GOV/2004/34, Annex, paras 17-19). Iran has reiterated its statement that when the project "Po-210 production by Bismuth irradiation in NRC Reactor" was approved by the Nuclear Research Centre (NRC) (later renamed the Tehran Nuclear Research Centre) in 1988, the researcher, in his project proposal, had only referred to a potential application of radioisotope batteries. 15. The Agency had previously requested further documentary information to support Iran's claims that the purpose of the project was to study the production of Po-210 on a laboratory scale only, and that there were no other clearly defined objectives or other projects that dealt with the application of Po-210. The Agency had also requested to see the original of the project proposal. Iran stated that the original documentation could not be found, but provided a statement by the Director of NRC certifying that the copy provided to the Agency, as well as the copy of the letter of approval by the former Directors of NRC also provided to the Agency, were "correct and accurate and authentic." 16. Iran subsequently reiterated in writing that it "does not have project for neither production of Po-210 nor production of neutron sources, using Po-210" and that "there [had] not been in the past any studies or projects on the production of neutron sources using Po-210". The Agency is still assessing the information provided by Iran. C. Uranium Enrichment C.1. Gas centrifuge enrichment 17. As described in GOV/2004/34 (Annex, para. 21), Iran has acknowledged that 1.9 kg of UF6 contained in two small cylinders received from abroad in 1991 had been used to test centrifuges at the Kalaye Electric Company workshop. During a visit to Natanz on 10-11 July 2004, Agency inspectors, with the cooperation of Iran, recovered about 650 g of uranium from the dismantled equipment from the Kalaye Electric Company workshop. The recovered material is currently being analysed. 18. In late May 2004, the Agency visited the workshop where Iran states the composite rotor cylinders for the modified P-2 design had been manufactured. The Agency concluded that the cylinders had in fact been manufactured at the workshop, and that only very limited technical capability exists there. In late May/early June 2004, further discussions were held with the owner of the private company that had received a contract from the AEOI to investigate the P-2 design. The detailed discussions covered the chronology of events that took place between 1995, when Iran says the P-2 centrifuge drawings were received from intermediaries, and 2002, when the contract was signed, including the work carried out by the private company and any development work. 19. During the 3-8 August 2004 meeting, and subsequently, the Agency received from Iran more details on the manufacturing and mechanical testing of the modified P-2 composite rotors under the contract with the private company during the period 2002-2003. The Agency reiterated its previous requests for further information from Iran on the procurement of magnets for the P-2 centrifuges, in particular, on the source of all such magnets, with a view to facilitating completion by the Agency of its assessment of the P-2 experiments said to have been carried out by the private company. In a letter dated 30 August 2004, Iran informed the Agency that it was "trying to receive that information which would then be transmitted to the Agency."
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20. On 8 August 2004, the Agency received a written communication from Iran outlining in more detail key dates of the P-2 related work. More detail was also provided about the enquiries made by the contractor concerning potential procurements from abroad. 21. The reasons given by Iran for the apparent gap between 1995 and 2002 do not provide sufficient assurance that there were no related activities carried out during that period, given that Iran had acquired a full set of drawings in 1995, and given that the owner of the private company was able to make the modifications necessary for the composite cylinders within a short period after early 2002 when, according to Iran, he had seen the drawings for the first time. The Agency is attempting to verify this information, inter alia, through the network of suppliers. C.1.1. Origin of contamination 22. As described in GOV/2004/34 (Annex, paras 25-31), environmental samples taken by the Agency at Natanz and at the Kalaye Electric Company workshop (and, more recently, Pars Trash) revealed particles of natural uranium, LEU and HEU that called into question the completeness of Iran's declarations about its centrifuge enrichment activities. The following unanswered questions remained to be resolved: * Analysis of samples taken from domestically manufactured centrifuge components showed predominantly LEU contamination, while analysis of samples from imported components showed both LEU and HEU contamination. It is still not clear why the components would have different types of contamination if, as Iran states, the presence of uranium on domestically manufactured components is due solely to contamination originating from imported components. * The types of uranium contamination found at the Kalaye Electric Company workshop and at Farayand Technique differ from those at PFEP at Natanz, even though Iran has stated that the source of contamination in both cases is the imported P-1 centrifuge components. * Environmental samples showing the presence of uranium particles enriched to 36% U-235 were found mainly in one room in the Kalaye Electric Company workshop and on the balancing machines which had been relocated from the Kalaye Electric Company workshop to Farayand Technique, both of which locations seemed to be contaminated by more than trace quantities of that material. Samples were also taken at the centrifuge assembly workshop at Natanz where Iran stated that the balancing machines had been located between February and November 2003. 23. Another distinct particle cluster of about 54% U-235, with U-236 contamination, was identified in samples taken from the surfaces of imported centrifuge components, which tends to support Iran's assertion that the source of that contamination had been imported components. However, further assessment is required to understand why 54% particles were also found in a sample collected from the chemical traps of the PFEP, which had not yet commenced operation at the time the sample was taken. 24. Since the issuance of the last report to the Board, the Agency and the State from which most of the imported P-1 centrifuges originated have, in a cooperative effort, continued to share their respective analytical results. The results provided by the State indicate that not all HEU found in the samples taken in Iran may have originated in that State. However, additional work, including swipe sampling by the Agency of equipment at appropriate locations, is required by the Agency to help it confirm the origin of the contamination from that equipment and to verify this new information. The Agency has also been in contact with a third State with a view to facilitating the resolution of the contamination questions.
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25. In April 2004, the Agency was able to visit two locations in Tehran which Iran declared as also having been involved in the centrifuge R&D programme and where mechanical testing of centrifuge rotors was said to have been carried out. In the course of these visits, environmental samples were taken which also indicated the presence of HEU particles in the tested rotors for the P-1 centrifuge programme. Iran states that the R&D involved the use of imported P-1 centrifuge components and that they were likely to have been the source of the contamination. This matter was discussed again with the Iranian authorities in August 2004, and additional samples were taken from those components. 26. Iran maintains its assertion that it has not enriched uranium to more than 1.2% U-235 using centrifuge technology, and that it has not had and does not have any HEU. 27. The Agency's analysis to date has shown that most of the HEU contamination found at the Kalaye Electric Company workshop and Natanz correlates reasonably with the HEU contamination found on imported components. Given this analysis, other correlations and model enrichment calculations based on the enrichment process in a possible country of origin, it appears plausible that the HEU contamination found at the Kalaye Electric Company workshop and Natanz may not have resulted from enrichment of uranium by Iran at those locations. Other explanations for this and the LEU contamination continue to be investigated by the Agency. 28. With regard to the outstanding question relating to UF6 contamination in the room under the roof of the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR) building (see GOV/2004/34, para. 30; Annex, paras 21-23; GOV/2003/63, paras 17-19), Iran originally attributed the contamination to the leakage of small bottles of UF6 that had been imported in 1991. Subsequently, however, Iran acknowledged that this was not the case, as that material had been used for P-1 centrifuge tests at the Kalaye Electric Company workshop. In a letter dated 4 February 2004, Iran stated that "for a period of time 2S bottles of UF6 [imported in 1991] as well as UF6 bottles from conversion R&D programme had been stored in this storage. It is most probable that the particles, which have been found in the samples [taken by the Agency], could be the result of leakage of UF6 bottles from R&D conversion, which have been kept in this storage from 1997 to 1998." It was understood from Iran's communication that the "conversion R&D programme" to which Iran refers in its letter of 4 February 2004 is the conversion between 1991 and 1993 of UF4 which had been imported in 1991 to UF6, as referred to in GOV/2003/75 (Annex 1, Table 1 and para. 23). 29. On 19 July 2004, the Agency received a letter from Iran dated 15 July 2004, in which Iran reiterated the statement it made in its 4 February 2004 letter that the source of contamination of the room under the roof of the Tehran Research Reactor building had been "UF6 which [had] been produced through R&D conversion", but confirmed the Agency's understanding about the source of the material which had been used as feed for that conversion process. During the Agency's August 2004 visit, the team re-visited the room. Based on all information presently available to the Agency, its current assessment remains as stated in para. 23 of the Annex to GOV/2003/34 that the Agency continues to regard as not technically plausible Iran's explanation that the contamination was due to a leaking bottle. C.2. Laser enrichment 30. As reported earlier (GOV/2003/75, Annex 1, para. 59), Iran in its letter dated 21 October 2003 acknowledged that, starting in the 1970s, it had had contracts related to laser enrichment using both atomic vapour laser isotope separation (AVLIS) and molecular laser isotope separation (MLIS) techniques with foreign entities from four countries: * 1975 -- a contract for the establishment of a laboratory to study the spectroscopic behaviour of uranium metal; this project had been abandoned in the 1980s as the laboratory had not functioned properly.
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* Late 1970s -- a contract with a second supplier to study MLIS, under which four carbon monoxide (CO) lasers and vacuum chambers were delivered, but the project had ultimately been terminated due to the political situation before major development work had begun. * 1991 -- a contract with a third supplier for the establishment of a "Laser Spectroscopy Laboratory " (LSL) and a "Comprehensive Separation Laboratory" (CSL), where uranium enrichment would be carried out on a milligram scale based on the AVLIS process. The contract also provided for the supply of 50 kg natural uranium metal. * 1998 -- a contract with a fourth supplier to obtain information related to laser enrichment, and the supply of relevant equipment. However, due to the inability of the supplier to secure export licences, only some of the equipment was delivered (to Lashkar Ab'ad). 31. In August 2004 Iran provided additional documentary evidence to support the descriptions previously provided by it with respect to its laser programme. Further discussions were held with Iranian authorities between 3 and 8 August 2004 during the meetings in Tehran. 32. With regard to the first two contracts, Iran has stated that the laser spectroscopy laboratory and the MLIS laboratory were never fully operational. These statements are supported by the information obtained by the Agency thus far from the suppliers, from the inspection of the declared equipment, from interviews with the scientists involved and from the results of environmental sampling analysis. 33. With regard to the third contract, Agency experts have reviewed a number of documents provided by Iran in May and August 2004 on the operation of the LSL and CSL prior to their dismantlement in 2000. Discussions have also been held with Iranian officials on this matter, and environmental samples taken and the results assessed. The Agency's review indicates that the equipment at the CSL operated fairly well until 1994, when foreign scientists completed their work. According to Iran, "the enrichment separation envisaged in the contract [for the CSL], and in some experiments higher enrichment were achieved in mgr" (the contract provided for "getting one milligram Uranium enriched with 3% concentration of U235 in no longer than eight hours"). As confirmed in an analysis, provided to the Agency, that had been carried out by the foreign laboratory involved in the project, the highest average enrichment achieved was 8%, but with a peak enrichment of 13%. 34. As described earlier, Iran had received 50 kg uranium metal as part of the third contract. According to the information provided to the Agency, a total of 8 kg uranium metal was used in LSL and CSL experiments. However, according to Iran, 500 g of it was evaporated in the experiments, in the course of which milligram quantities of uranium were collected. If, as declared by Iran, the evaporated uranium and collectors had been discarded with wastes, mainly at the Qom disposal site (which the Agency has visited twice), recovery of the small quantities of nuclear material involved would not be feasible and therefore accurate nuclear material accountancy is not possible. 35. According to Iran, the LSL and CSL laboratory experiments carried out between 1994 and 2000 were unsuccessful due to continuous technical problems encountered with copper vapour lasers (CVLs), electron beam guns or dye lasers. Examination by the Agency of the laboratory notebook and other supporting documents provided by Iran confirms Iran's statement that isotope separation was not successful during that period. 36. The fourth contract was for the supply of AVLIS equipment to Lashkar Ab'ad. Iran stated that, due to the inability of the supplier to secure export licences for some of the equipment (in particular, the CVLs and dye lasers, some collector parts, the electron beam gun and the power sources), only some of the equipment (including a large process vessel with supporting diffusion pumps and some diagnostics instruments), along with some training and documentation, was provided under the
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contract. Iran has stated that it made attempts to procure the missing equipment, such as additional CVLs and electron beam guns, with limited success. 37. According to Iranian officials, as a consequence of these difficulties, Iran took advantage of the existing CVLs and dye lasers from CSL, and installed them in the pilot scale vessel in Lashkar Ab'ad where, in late 2002, a total of four runs with uranium feed using a total of about 500 g uranium metal were carried out. As evidence to support this statement, Iran has presented laboratory notebooks of one of the scientists involved in these activities. As described earlier, the Agency has taken environmental samples, and metal parts were taken from the chamber, with a view to determining whether enrichment levels higher than the 0.8% U-235 declared by Iran were achieved. The results of the Agency's analysis indicate enrichment levels (0.99% + 0.24% U-235) consistent with those declared by Iran. 38. While the contract for the AVLIS facility at Lashkar Ab'ad was specifically written for the delivery of a system that could demonstrably achieve enrichment levels of 3.5% to 7%, it is the opinion of Agency experts that the system at Lashkar Ab'ad, as designed and reflected in the contract, would have been capable of HEU production had the entire package of equipment been delivered. In that connection, the experts point to the Lashkar Ab'ad AVLIS vacuum vessel, which incorporated a number of features specific to HEU separation work, including: * an ion trap for the extraction of ion impurities for increased HEU yield; and * a collector assembly designed for the relatively low throughput of HEU. 39. In response to the Agency's questions in connection with this assessment, Iran referred to the contract and the design parameters contained therein, which provide that the design was guaranteed by the supplier to "have actual production of at least 5 kg of a product within the first year after installation. The product will be 3.5% up to 7% enriched." Iran also provided information demonstrating the very limited capabilities of this particular equipment delivered to Iran under this contract to produce HEU (i.e. only in gram quantities). Iranian AVLIS researchers maintain that they were not aware of the significance of these features when they negotiated and contracted the supply and delivery of the Lashkar Ab'ad AVLIS facility. D. Heavy Water Reactor Programme D.1. Heavy Water Reactor IR-40 40. As referred to in the report of the Director General to the March 2004 Board meeting (GOV/2004/11, para. 56), Iran has provided preliminary design information on the IR-40, which is to be constructed at Arak. Iran has also provided information on the IR-40 pursuant to Articles 2.a.i. and 2.b.i. of its Additional Protocol. Iran's declarations concerning R&D activities related to the design of the heavy water reactor were further discussed in the meetings in Tehran which took place in July and August 2004, following upon which, Iran provided additional information. That information is being reviewed by the Agency. D.2. Hot Cells 41. In response to questioning by the Agency about past efforts by Iran to procure hot cell windows and manipulators, and the specifications associated with those items, Iran informed the Agency that
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there had been a project for the construction of hot cells for the production of "long lived radioisotopes" but that it had been abandoned due to procurement difficulties. In August 2004, Iran presented to the Agency detailed drawings that Iran had received from a foreign company in 1977 for hot cells which were to have been constructed at Esfahan. Iran stated that it had not yet made more detailed plans for hot cells for the IR-40 complex at Arak, but that it had used information from those drawings as the basis for specifications in its efforts to procure manipulators for hot cells intended for the production of cobalt and iridium isotopes. In a letter dated 19 August 2004 Iran reiterated its previous statement that the hot cell project at Arak consisted of nine hot cells -- four for the "production of radioisotopes", two for the production of cobalt and iridium5, and three for "waste management processing" -- and would require ten back-up manipulators. The Agency is continuing to assess the information provided by Iran. E. Implementation of the Additional Protocol E.1. Declarations 42. Iran has continued to act as if its Additional Protocol is in force. Following receipt of the initial declarations submitted by Iran on 21 May 2004 under the Additional Protocol, the Agency began its review of the declarations and, on 2 July 2004, provided comments to Iran on those declarations. During the early July 2004 visit of inspectors to Iran, the Agency reviewed its comments with Iran. During the Agency's August 2004 visit to Iran, additional comments were provided by the Agency to Iran and a number of revisions requested, which Iran agreed to provide by mid-August 2004. Clarifications were also sought by Iran on the interpretation of some of the provisions of the Additional Protocol. The Agency and Iran intend to revisit some of the issues raised by Iran in the near future. E.2. Complementary Access 43. Since the June 2004 Board meeting, the Agency has carried out complementary access in Iran on six occasions at five locations: twice at ENTC, and once each at TNRC, Lashkar Ab'ad, Karaj and the Bandar Abbas uranium mine and production plant at Gchine. F. Transparency Visits and Discussions 44. During the June 2004 meeting of the Board of Governors, the Director General asked Iran to provide the Agency, in the interest of transparency, access to the Lavisan-Shian site. The request was prompted by a reference made during that meeting to the Lavisan-Shian site in connection with alleged nuclear related activities (including the use of whole body counters) carried out at that site and the possibility of a concealment effort by Iran to hide these activities through the removal of all of the buildings from the site after November 2003.
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5 Cobalt-60 and iridium-192 have half-lives of 5.2 years and 74 days, respectively.
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45. On 28 June 2004, the Agency visited the Lavisan-Shian site, where it took environmental samples. Iran gave the Agency a description and chronology of activities carried out at the Lavisan-Shian site. As described by Iran in a follow up letter to the Agency dated 8 August 2004, a Physics Research Centre had been established at that site in 1989, the purpose of which had been "preparedness to combat and neutralization of casualties due to nuclear attacks and accidents (nuclear defence) and also support and provide scientific advice and services to the Ministry of Defence." Iran provided a list of the eleven activities conducted at the Physics Research Centre, but, referring to security concerns, declined to provide a list of the equipment used at the centre. In a letter to the Agency dated 19 August 2004, Iran stated further that "no nuclear material declarable in accordance with the Agency's safeguard[s] was present" and reiterated its earlier statement that "no nuclear material and nuclear activities related to fuel cycle were carried out at Lavisan-Shian." 46. During its discussions with the Agency in June 2004, Iran confirmed its acquisition from a foreign entity of two whole body counters and their installation in two trailers. Iran further confirmed that one of these whole body counters, together with its trailer, had previously been located at the Lavisan-Shian site. Between 28 and 30 June 2004, Iran provided the Agency access to two whole body counters, and to a trailer said to have contained one of the whole body counters while it was located at Lavisan-Shian. The Agency collected environmental swipe samples from the whole body counters and the trailer. 47. According to Iran, the site had been razed in response to a decision ordering the return of the site to the Municipality of Tehran in connection with a dispute between the Municipality and the Ministry of Defence. Iran recently provided documentation in support of this explanation, which is currently being assessed. 48. The environmental swipe samples from the whole body counters and the trailer, along with the vegetation, soil and swipe samples collected from the Lavisan-Shian site, are currently being analysed, and the documents provided by Iran in support of these explanations are being assessed. 49. In accordance with Agency practice in connection with its evaluation of other States' nuclear programmes, the Agency has discussed with the Iranian authorities open source information relating to dual use equipment and materials which have applications in the conventional military area and in the civilian sphere as well as in the nuclear military area. G. Suspension of Enrichment Related and Reprocessing Activities G.1. Scope of suspension 50. As described in the previous Board report (GOV/2004/34, Annex, para. 51), Iran informed the Agency on 29 December 2003 that: * it would suspend the operation and/or testing of any centrifuges, either with or without nuclear material, at PFEP at Natanz; * it would suspend further introduction of nuclear material into any centrifuges; * it would suspend installation of new centrifuges at PFEP and installation of centrifuges at the Fuel Enrichment Plant (FEP) at Natanz; and
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* it would withdraw nuclear material from any centrifuge enrichment facility if and to the extent practicable. 51. Iran stated further that it did not currently have any type of gas centrifuge enrichment facility at any location in Iran other than the facility at Natanz that it was now constructing, nor did it have plans to construct, during the suspension period, new facilities capable of isotopic separation; it had dismantled its laser enrichment projects and removed all related equipment; and it was not constructing nor operating any plutonium separation facility. 52. Iran also stated on 29 December 2003 that, during the period of suspension, Iran did not intend to make new contracts for the manufacture of centrifuge machines and their components; the Agency could fully supervise storage of all centrifuge machines assembled during the suspension period; Iran did not intend to import centrifuge machines or their components, or feed material for enrichment processes, during the suspension period; and "[t]here is no production of feed material for enrichment processes in Iran." 53. On 24 February 2004, Iran informed the Agency that instructions would be issued by the first week of March to implement the further decisions voluntarily taken by Iran to: (i) suspend the assembly and testing of centrifuges, and (ii) suspend the domestic manufacture of centrifuge components, including those related to the existing contracts, to the furthest extent possible. Iran also informed the Agency that any components that were manufactured under existing contracts that could not be suspended would be stored and placed under Agency seal. Iran invited the Agency to verify these measures. Iran also confirmed that the suspension of enrichment activities applied to all facilities in Iran. 54. On 15 March 2004, Iran notified the Agency that the Agency's verification of the suspension of centrifuge component production could begin as of 10 April 2004. However, due to disputes between the AEOI and some of its private contractors, three private companies would continue with centrifuge component production. 55. Iran stated in a letter dated 18 May 2004, received by the Agency on 21 May 2004, that "Iran has not, at any time, made any undertaking not to produce feed material for the enrichment process. The decision taken for voluntary and temporary suspension is based on clearly defined scope which does not include suspension of production of UF6." 56. On 23 June 2004, the Director General received a letter from Iran informing him that Iran "plan[ned] to suspend implementation of the expanded voluntary measures conveyed in [its] Note dated 24 February 2004" and that Iran "thus, intend[ed] to resume, under IAEA supervision, manufacturing of centrifuge components and assembly and testing of centrifuges as of 29 June 2004." In the letter, Iran requested the Agency "to take steps that may be necessary to enable resumption of such operations as of 29 June." On 25 June 2004, the Director General wrote to Iran, referring to its letter of 23 June 2004, and expressed the hope that Iran would "continue to build international confidence through implementing its voluntary decisions to suspend all enrichment related and reprocessing activities" and informing Iran that the Agency would be in contact to clarify the practical implications of the decision of the Iranian authorities. Both letters were circulated to the Members of the Board of Governors for their information under cover of a Note dated 25 June 2004. 57. On 29 June 2004, the Agency received a letter forwarding a list of seals which, as foreseen in its letter of 23 June 2004, would be removed from material, components and equipment related to centrifuge component manufacturing and assembling. In a letter dated 29 June 2004, the Agency acknowledged receipt of Iran's letter and agreed to the removal of the seals by the operator in the absence of Agency inspectors.
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G.2. Monitoring activities 58. The status of the Agency's monitoring activities as of May 2004 was provided in the Director General's previous report to the Board of Governors (GOV/2004/34, Annex, paras 56-68). The Agency has continued its monthly monitoring activities at PFEP, most recently on 21-22 August 2004, to ensure that the suspension of enrichment activities at PFEP is fully implemented. The surveillance records from the cascade hall have been reviewed to ensure that no additional centrifuge machines were installed; the seals on equipment and nuclear material were verified to ensure that they had not been tampered with and replaced. The cascade hall continues to be under Agency surveillance and all the previously declared UF6 feed material remains under Agency seal. Other activities conducted by the Agency in connection with the monitoring of Iran's suspension undertakings have included: * design information verification at FEP; * monitoring of the decommissioned status of the AVLIS pilot plant at Lashkar Ab'ad through complementary access; and * inspections at JHL. 59. During the Agency's June 2004 visit to Esfahan, the operator of UCF stated that, of the 143 kg of UF4 produced and verified by the Agency previously, 60 kg had been fed into the UF6 process line. About 25 to 30 kg of UF6 produced from those activities was being kept in two condensers and another 5 kg of UF6 had been stored in a container. The operator told Agency inspectors that the equipment testing had been completed and that another larger test involving 37 tonnes of yellowcake is planned for August/September 2004. 60. Following on this, the seals that had been used by the Agency as one of the measures for monitoring Iran's suspension of the manufacture, assembly and testing of centrifuge components at Natanz, Pars Trash and Farayand Technique were removed by Iran and returned to the Agency during its visit to Iran between 6 and 18 July 2004. As of mid-August 2004, about 70 rotors had been newly assembled and tested, and were shown to the Agency. The Agency is discussing with Iran the necessary arrangements for the Agency to exercise "supervision". In that regard, the Agency has proposed that it seal the tested rotors, a measure which Iran has not to date accepted. It must be noted that, in the absence of such seals, the Agency's supervision of the activities identified by Iran cannot be considered effective.