Iran must declare all of its past and current nuclear activities to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in order for the agency to credibly conclude that the country’s nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only, former IAEA deputy director general Olli Heinonen wrote in a research paper for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies on Monday.
The IAEA’s knowledge of the full scope of Iran’s nuclear program contains many significant gaps, Heinonen warned. Iran has only sporadically cooperated in helping the agency outline the history of the nuclear program. Iran provisionally adopted the IAEA’s Additional Protocol in 2003, allowing the agency to map the history of Iran’s production of nuclear materials. But the country stopped abiding by the protocol two years later, Heinonen wrote, meaning that the IAEA could not effectively monitor Iran’s history of uranium mining, centrifuge research and development, or manufacturing.
This means that the IAEA is unable to uncover the full scope of the possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear research. In its final report on the topic last December, the IAEA acknowledged that it did not have a full understanding of Iran’s nuclear program, but closed the country’s file anyway.
In order to work around that lack of knowledge, Heinonen wrote, Iran must give the IAEA “direct access to all weaponization-relevant people and sites – including military sites – in order to verify the correctness and completeness of Iran’s declarations.” This includes access to the Parchin military base, where the IAEA found two uranium molecules of unknown origin that could point to past weaponization work. (Earlier this month, White House officials acknowledged that the uranium was likely part of a weaponization program.)
Coming clean about its past nuclear work should be in Iran’s interests, Heinonen pointed out. If Iran cooperates and helps the IAEA reach a credible conclusion that its nuclear program is solely peaceful, sanctions against Iran’s ballistic missile program and conventional arms trade would likely be lifted. In addition, Heinonen wrote, Iran would be able “to advance the narrative that it should be treated as a country in good standing with its nuclear nonproliferation obligations,” and which would allow it to argue that restrictions on its enrichment activities should be relaxed or lifted.
Even so, Heinonen cautioned that a full IAEA conclusion that Iran’s nuclear history has a totally peaceful history would hardly be sufficient for evaluating Iran’s compliance with international nuclear norms, since such a finding “does not analyze that country’s long-term intentions.”
Other experts have expressed similar concerns about Iran’s nuclear program. After the IAEA decided to close its file on Iran’s past nuclear work in December, a paper written by the Institute for Science and International Security argued that the file should not have been closed given that Iran had not fully accounted for its past nuclear work. After the Obama administration acknowledged that uranium discovered by the IAEA at Parchin was likely part of a nuclear weapons program, the institute wrote that it was necessary for the IAEA to have access to Parchin, or else the finding that Iran had not pursued any weaponization program would be “unverifiable.”
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