President Obama has vowed he will never allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon. Now he has to prove it.
Many lawmakers say they will fight any deal that can’t verify all pathways for Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon have been shut off. Experts are worried that may not be possible. And recent statements by Iranian officials have reinforced those concerns.
“It is clear, when it comes to the issue of verification, that this administration has a long way to go,” said House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif.
Obama says he will not sign any deal unless it guarantees Iran will not develop such a weapon with the most intrusive and comprehensive inspection regime ever imposed on any nation’s nuclear program.
“[Iran is] going to have some form of peaceful nuclear power, and that will then pose a challenge for the international community, which is why the political agreement calls for unprecedented framework of inspections that allows us to assure that it’s not being used or diverted in ways that could be weaponized,” Obama said, referring to the “historic agreement” announced April 2 on which a final settlement is to be negotiated by July 1.
But Iranian officials see it differently. “Any unconventional inspection or monitoring which would make Iran into a special case, would not be acceptable, and the monitoring must only be as monitoring regimes taking place all over the world and nothing more,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, supreme leader of the country’s Shiite Muslim theocracy, said in an April 9 speech.
Iranian Defense Minister Brig. Gen. Hossein Dehqan has said international inspectors would not be allowed to visit military sites, a crucial step in ensuring Tehran is not trying to build a bomb.
“The administration has shrugged off such comments as Iranian domestic spin. But the issue of inspections and verification will be central to how Congress judges any final agreement,” Royce said.
Though Democrats are likely to protect Obama from having the Republican-controlled Congress reject any deal he would sign, the wide disagreements that have opened up between Tehran and Washington since the framework was announced have cast doubts on the outcome of the talks.
“The question is will they want to do it? It’s not the technical aspects of implementing that will be hard, it’s will we get the kind of intrusive, complete comprehensive inspections that we want to be able to guarantee that the commitments that are made are being kept,” said Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and co-sponsor of a bill that would require congressional review of a deal.
And those disagreements aren’t the only issues threatening to make Obama’s goal untenable. Concessions already made by the United States and its partners in the P5+1 group — Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China — have raised serious concerns about the ability to prevent Iran from cheating on any deal that may emerge from the negotiations, and about what happens when the deal expires.
“Fundamentally, this deal will represent acceptance by the international community of Iran as a nuclear weapons threshold state,” said Stephen Rademaker of the Bipartisan Policy Center, a former chief counsel to the House Foreign Affairs panel.
By deciding to legitimize Iran’s ability to enrich uranium and conduct other nuclear research in exchange for limits that would keep Tehran at least a year away from being able to develop a nuclear weapon for 10 years, the administration reversed longstanding U.S. nonproliferation policy to buy time, he said. Iran will be on the “one-inch line” toward the goal of developing multiple nuclear weapons once the deal expires, even if it complies, he said.
“By any measure this is a huge retreat for U.S. policy and a big victory for Iran,” Rademaker said.
Other concessions raise technical and political questions.
“The United States is going to have to take steps to significantly strengthen this deal … if this deal is to be verifiable,” said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, who has advised U.S. negotiators on technical issues in the talks.
The independent, nonpartisan organization has highlighted key ambiguities in the framework that could allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons, most importantly the need for Iran to give a full accounting of past military-related nuclear activities and full access to international inspectors.
“This isn’t over when there’s a deal. It’s going to require a lot of work,” Albright said, noting that any deal would be tough to monitor because Iran continues to evade accountability.
Even if the technical issues can be resolved, the political framework of any deal will put international inspectors in a tough position, said Charles Duelfer, a former U.N. and U.S. arms control inspector in Iraq.
“Overall, I cannot imagine the circumstances in Iran playing out favorably for the inspection system,” he said, citing the 1990s experience of U.N. inspectors in Iraq, where they had more access and authority, yet still failed.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, which would verify Iran’s compliance, will be under intense political pressure, with some countries taking a tougher line than others on what constitutes a violation, he said.
“There will be no consensus on that in the international community,” he said. “The pressure will be on the director of the IAEA to make a judgment.”
With sanctions set to be removed early in the process, perhaps as soon as Iran signs a deal, the pressure will be on inspectors to prove a violation, because countries will want to protect their commercial ties with Tehran, Duelfer said.
Albright’s group examined whether Iran had violated a November 2013 interim agreement by feeding uranium hexafluoride gas into a research centrifuge at the Natanz nuclear site and concluded in a Dec. 16 report that the move violated the spirit if not the letter of that deal. But U.S. officials, eager to keep the talks going on a final agreement, shrugged it off.
“If Iran is caught cheating, will this or the next administration be prepared to call them out?” Royce asked. “I’m not confident.”
