Qom facility - Tag Search

The Iranian regime's announcement that it plans to build ten new uranium enrichment plants prompted a surprised reaction from the West. French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner described it as "very dangerous"; Russian officials say they're "seriously concerned" with the announcement.

That was clearly the goal: As Julian Borger wrote this morning in The Guardian, Iran doesn't actually have the capacity to build those plants. The Christian Science Monitor quotes one expert who says the plan, announced yesterday by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, will take decades. It will also be hugely expensive; Iran, already facing massive budget deficits, can ill afford to spend billions more on uranium enrichment.

So the regime's threat, for now, is an empty one, an act of political theater intended to provoke a reaction.

(Updated below) The IAEA voted today 25-3 to censure Iran for defying a United Nations Security Council ban on uranium enrichment, and demanded that Iran cease further enrichment at its once-secret enrichment plant outside of Qom.

The full text of the resolution isn't yet available on the IAEA Web site; we'll post a link as soon as it goes up.

Today's vote is getting a lot of attention because both Russia and China voted in favor of the resolution. The Guardian suggests that it "could form the basis for a future binding resolution by the UN security council, which in turn could be used to impose sanctions." And Glyn Davies, the U.S. ambassador to the IAEA, said the resolution signaled that "the world's patience is running out."

Michael Slackman tries to figure out why the Iranian government is haggling over the IAEA's draft agreement, and concludes that politics -- local politics -- are a big part of the answer.

Tehran Bureau has an interesting post, from an unnamed "security correspondent," about Iran's seeming about-face on the draft IAEA deal. The piece is a little disjointed, but it concludes that the Iranian counteroffer is a reflection of an internal power struggle -- and not a sign of Iran's unwillingness to negotiate, or to eventually accept the deal.

Also today: A four-man IAEA team got its first look at Iran's recently-disclosed Qom facility. The agency isn't expected to release the results of its investigation until the team leaves Iran later this week.

Mohammad Reza Bahonar, Iran's deputy parliament speaker, told Iran's official IRNA news agency that Iran "doesn't accept" yesterday's draft deal with the IAEA.

Discouraging -- but Bahonar doesn't speak for the government, so we shouldn't read too much into a single statement from a single official.

10:44 a.m.: I'm not getting anything out of this hearing. The witnesses are not going to go into much detail in a public hearing, and the senators don't know much about Iran.

I'll update if anything interesting happens, but for now, consider the live blog done...

10:40 a.m.: Shelby wants to know if an Iranian nuclear weapon would be "transferred to terrorists." I have to say, when it comes to Iran's nuclear program, this isn't one of my big concerns. The weapon would be pretty quickly traced back to Iran, which would then face a massive retaliation.

Two quick Iran-related items capping off an interesting weekend.

First, James Jones, the U.S. national security adviser, was on Face the Nation this morning. He was asked about the New York Times report on Iran's nuclear program, and Ben Frumin over at TPM says he denied the report:

"Whether they know how to do it or not is a matter of some conjecture," he said. "What we're watching is, 'What is their intent?'"

This is encouraging, though let's also put it in perspective: The NYT report conflicts with the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which says Iran hasn't overcome the technical challenges of building a nuclear weapon; Jones isn't going to reject the NIE on national television.

Second, Iran will allow inspectors to visit the Qom facility on October 25. The delay is a little troubling, since it gives Iran plenty of time to sanitize the site.

David Sanger and Bill Broad have a front-page story in today's New York Times that is attracting a lot of attention. Their story claims that the IAEA believes Iran has "sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable" nuclear weapon.

The story is based on an internal IAEA report, the so-called "classified annex" we've been hearing about for months. The Institute for Science and International Security obtained the relevant excerpts from the IAEA report and posted them online (pdf).

Obama said yesterday that Iran must give the IAEA full access to its Qom facility (which the Iranian government has promised to do).

But the United States will continue to shield Israel from a similar level of international scrutiny, according to a report in the Washington Times.

This should probably be the last word on the question of whether Iran's Qom facility violates international law: IAEA director Mohamed ElBaradei says it does.

"Iran was supposed to inform us on the day it was decided to construct the facility. They have not done that," he said. "They are saying that this was meant to be a back-up facility in case we were attacked and so they could not tell us earlier on.

"Nonetheless, they have been on the wrong side of the law, you know in so far as informing the agency about the construction and as you have seen it, it has created concern in the international community."

ElBaradei reiterates, though, that he doesn't think Iran has an active nuclear weapons program.

I didn't get my hoped-for John Bolton op-ed this weekend (at least not in any newspapers I read), but I did get this op-ed from Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.) urging harsh sanctions on Iran. It begins with this gem:

Tehran could soon have humankind's most frightening weapon if substantial diplomatic progress is not made in the coming days.

Berman and I obviously have a different definition of "soon."