Qom, Contingencies, and Confidence

Courtesy of ISIS, the IAEA today released new safeguards reports on Syria and the Iranian nuclear program.

On the Qom facility, now known as the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant (FFEP), Iran explained to the IAEA that the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran had been allocated the site in the latter half of 2007 and that “that was when the construction of the FFEP had started.” Iran reiterated that explanation in an October 28 letter:

“As a result of the augmentation of the threats of military attacks against Iran, the Islamic Republic of Iran decided to establish contingency centers for various organizations and activities . . .  

“The Natanz Enrichment Plant was among the targets threatened with military attacks. Therefore, the Atomic Energy Organization requested the Passive Defence Organization to allocate one of those aforementioned centers for the purpose of [a] contingency enrichment plant, so that the enrichment activities shall not be suspended in the case of any military attack. In this respect, the Fordow site, being one of those constructed and prepared centers, [was] allocated to the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) in the second half of 2007. The construction of the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant then started. The construction is still ongoing. Thus the plant is not yet ready for operation and it is planned to be operational in 2011.”

Let alone the fact that building backup enrichment plants is highly inefficient and completely unnecessary for a country that intends to demonstrate the peaceful nature of its program, Iran’s reasoning of Qom’s role as a “contingency” center seems curious even if we accept the given premise that the threat of attack requires contingency planning in the first place. Iran would need to notify the IAEA long before the plant came online, at which point it might be a more vulnerable target than Natanz, which is already surrounded with air defenses. While a mountain location would have made it more difficult to destroy, the more achievable goal for any future airstrike against a reputedly peaceful program might simply render the site inoperable by targeting the surrounding infrastructure and access to the facility. Given this, the value of Qom as a contingency site is probably not too high.

The declared 2007 start of construction continues to be a major point of contention, in part because any earlier construction would have violated its modified safeguards agreement with the IAEA, which requires notification immediately following the decision to construct a facility. Additionally, no one recognizes Iran’s early-2007 ‘suspension’ of the notification requirement, since no state can modify its safeguards agreements without IAEA consent. Iran continues to claim that its suspension is legal due to a lack of parliamentary ratification. However, the Carnegie Endowment’s James Acton wrote a piece back in September refuting these arguments:  

The problem with this argument is that, like every other state, Iran did not ask its parliament, the Majlis, to ratify its original Subsidiary Arrangements! To claim that a modification to these arrangements requires ratification is therefore absurd.

Moreover, Iran—like every other state—modifies its Subsidiary Arrangements regularly, without asking for parliamentary ratification. For example, as the size of its enrichment plant at Natanz has grown, Iran has (reluctantly) agreed to various improvements in safeguards. These improvements required modifications of the Subsidiary Arrangements, but Iran did not ask the Majlis to ratify them.

In response to the claimed Iranian timeline on Fordow, the IAEA stated that commercial satellite imagery revealed that construction had occurred at the site as early as 2002, paused in 2004, and then continued from 2006 until the present. Since the IAEA has confirmed that construction began a full as early as seven years ago, Iran is obviously in violation of this agreement.

Probably the most jarring statement in the report is that due to Iran’s handling of the Qom rollout, the Agency has become less confident in its ability to verify the full extent of Iran’s nuclear program, which has given “rise to questions about whether there were any other nuclear facilities in Iran which had not been declared to the Agency.”

The report ends on a cautionary tone. Unless Iran clarifies outstanding concerns about its program and implements the Additional Protocol, the IAEA will eventually be unable to credibly assure the world that Iran does not have a secret nuclear program in place. With the IAEA report lining up against Iran’s version of events, next week’s Board of Governors meeting doesn’t bode well for Iran.  

For more, check out Joshua Pollack's post over at ACW and the ISIS' analysis here.