Former Iranian President Lays Out Conditions for Nuclear Cooperation

Powerful former Iranian President Akbar Rafsanjani today said Tehran must receive international assistance for its civilian nuclear program in exchange for increased Iranian cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (see GSN, Oct. 2).

Speaking during weekly Friday prayers, Rafsanjani laid out four conditions — including nuclear assistance — that must be met before Iran signs the Additional Protocol to its IAEA safeguards agreement and allows more intrusive international monitoring of its nuclear activities.

“The conditions we would impose for signing the protocol are the same as those imposed by the United States,” Rafsanjani said.  Tehran will insist, he said, “that our national security not be endangered, that our (Islamic) values and our sacred sites not be affected, that (military) secrets unconnected with the nuclear program not be revealed and that others fulfill their duty” to assist with Iran’s civilian nuclear plant development (Agence France-Presse, Oct. 3).

Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, meanwhile, said that Iran would cooperate with the IAEA.  The U.N. agency recently imposed an Oct. 31 deadline for Iran to prove it is not developing nuclear weapons.

“Tehran will continue its cooperation with the agency although the International Atomic Energy Agency issued an inappropriate resolution because Iran doesn’t have any worries regarding the transparency of its peaceful nuclear program,” Khatami said yesterday.  “Nuclear weapons will not be a source of security for us,” he added (Parisa Hafezi, Reuters, Oct. 3).

Iranian nuclear officials began meetings recently with senior IAEA representatives in Tehran (Agence France-Presse/Yahoo!News, Oct. 3).

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Failure to Negotiate With North Korea Will Lead to Asian Nuclear Proliferation, Senator Says

By George C. Wilson

National Journal

It was a memorable Washington moment.  It came right after the Senate Foreign Relations Committee finished grilling President George W. Bush’s man in Iraq, Paul Bremer, last week.  A 20-something woman walked from the spectator seats in the cavernous hearing room of the Hart Senate Office Building to the dais to lay her concerns about Iraq on Bremer’s chief griller, Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware, the committee’s ranking Democrat.  Biden listened attentively to the young woman for several minutes as the room emptied.  He then took her aback by skipping right over Iraq and telling her that she and others in her generation had something more menacing to worry about — the accelerating nuclear arms race in the Far East.

The 60-year-old Biden told me later that he could not help feeling gloomy as he looked at the trusting woman and realized that his generation of leaders was bequeathing to her a world more dangerous than the one they grew up in.  They had only one nuclear gun pointed at them, the Soviet Union’s, during the Cold War.  In addition, it wasn’t always on hair trigger.  But as things stand right now, the usually buoyant Biden said sadly, that young lady and others in her generation soon will be looking down the barrel of half a dozen nuclear guns, many on hair trigger, because President Bush has not found a way to stop North Korea from starting a nuclear arms race in the Far East.

“Things are unraveling on the Korean Peninsula,” Biden said in explaining his pessimism in a lengthy interview.  The North Koreans are proceeding with their manufacture of nuclear bombs (see GSN, Oct. 2).  “If they haven’t already reprocessed those 8,000 spent fuel rods” taken out of storage in January at their nuclear facility at Yongbyon to make plutonium for bombs, “they’re on the verge of doing it.”  This will set off a chain reaction, he warned, compelling Japan to field its own nuclear weapons “within two years.  Then South Korea will become a nuclear power” (see GSN, Aug. 11).  China, confronted on its eastern front with a nuclear North Korea, a nuclear Japan, and possibly a nuclear Taiwan, “will go ballistic, literally and figuratively.”

The Chinese, Biden continued, are going to conclude that they’re really in a very different neighborhood than they were before.  “They’re going to say, ‘We only had to look south at India before in worrying about nukes.  That’s why we helped Pakistan with its nuclear program.  So India is not our greatest concern right now.  But now we have to vastly increase our nuclear capability.’”

China has less than two dozen nukes now, mainly aimed at U.S. cities, and these weapons are designed mainly to deter an American attack.  “They are really for defensive purposes,” Biden said.  But if China’s old enemy Japan goes nuclear, as it surely will if North Korea continues on its present course, China will feel compelled to develop and deploy hundreds, perhaps thousands, of nuclear weapons to deter Japan and the other new nuclear powers in the neighborhood, Biden contended.  Nor can Indonesia be expected to sit out the nuclear race in the Far East as the action-reaction phenomenon takes hold.

The senator’s gloom cannot simply be dismissed as “the-sky-is-falling” rhetoric from a liberal whose party is out of power.  Biden has spent most of his adult life trying to keep nuclear scorpions around the world from striking each other.  He has held forth not only in open Senate hearings and debates but also in private meetings with presidents and diplomats around the world.  Besides, others who have been down the road of confrontation with Pyongyang share his worries about North Korea triggering an arms race and potentially a nuclear war.  Most notable among them is former Defense Secretary William Perry, who readied the military for all-out war with North Korea in 1994 even while helping the Clinton administration to craft an accord with Pyongyang designed to freeze the country’s nuclear advance.

“If it keeps on its present course,” Perry wrote in the Washington Post on July 23, “North Korea will probably have six to eight nuclear weapons by the end of the year; will possibly have conducted a nuclear test; and may have begun deployment of some of these weapons targeted against Japan and South Korea.  By next year, it could be in serial production of nuclear weapons, building perhaps five to 10 per year.  Given North Korea’s desperate economic condition, we should expect it to sell some of the products of its nuclear program, just as it did with its missile program (see GSN, April 25).  If that happens, a nuclear bomb could end up in an American city.  The administration has suggested that it would interdict such transfers.  But a nuclear bomb can be made with a sphere of plutonium the size of a soccer ball,” wrote Perry.  “It is wishful thinking to believe we could prevent a package of that size from being smuggled out of North Korea.”

So how do we stop this locomotive that has gotten up so much steam?

Biden and Perry see no acceptable alternative to Bush’s conducting serious and direct negotiations with North Korea.  Diplomatic officials say that the ones to date, conducted with Pyongyang under the umbrella of multilateral talks with China, Japan, Russia, and South Korea, have been less than halfhearted (see GSN, Sept. 2).  One diplomat in the know said that Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs John Kelly, Bush’s negotiator in the multination talks, brought nothing to the table for North Korea in the most recent round.  Kelly also infuriated the North Koreans by refusing to host a dinner for them, as they had done for us, the diplomat added.

Biden said despairingly that the neoconservatives around Bush, notably Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, are viscerally opposed to duplicating anything former President Bill Clinton did, such as negotiating a pact with North Korea.  They consider negotiations with rogue leaders such as North Korea’s Kim Jong Il a sign of weakness, the senator said.

“My instinct,” said Biden, “is that the ‘hate-Clinton’ attitude is 75 percent of the reason the Bush administration is not negotiating seriously with North Korea, and 25 percent is [the belief] that you cannot negotiate with this guy and if you’re strong enough and tough enough, he’ll yield.”  Secretary of State Colin Powell realizes that the United States, no matter how strong it is, cannot just stiff-arm countries, Biden said.  Powell periodically talks Bush into negotiating, as he did with North Korea, but Cheney keeps pulling him back.  “Like with a horse, Powell is always able to lead Bush to the water.  But just as he is about to put his head down, Cheney up in the saddle says, ‘Un-uh,’ and yanks up the reins before Bush can drink the water.  That’s my image of how it goes,” Biden said.

Everybody knows, Biden said, that the only way the United States can get North Korea to halt its nuclear march is to, “at a minimum, assure the North Koreans that we will not remove [Kim Jong Il’s regime] from power.  But what would that do to the neocons in the administration?  They would have to swallow 20 years of their tripe that they would never do that.”

According to author Bob Woodward in Bush at War, the president said, “I loathe Kim Jong Il.  I’ve got a visceral reaction to this guy because he is starving his people.  And I have seen intelligence on these prison camps — they’re huge — that he uses to break up families and to torture people.  I am appalled.  ... It is visceral.  Maybe it’s my religion, but I feel passionate about this.”

This moralist mind-set at the top of the American government, Biden said, is why he feels gloomier about the prospect of avoiding nuclear war, particularly in the Far East, than at any time since he came to Congress three decades ago.

Former CIA Director James Woolsey and retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney are among the conservatives who share Biden’s sense of alarm about North Korea’s touching off a nuclear arms race.  But they disagree that Washington can negotiate an agreement that Pyongyang will honor.  “We see no alternative but for China to use its substantial economic leverage, derived from North Korea’s dependence on it for fuel and food, to press hard and immediately for a change in regime,” they wrote in the August 4 Wall Street Journal.  “Kim Jong Il’s regime has shown that agreements signed with it, by anyone, mean nothing.”

If China fails to effect regime change, the United States should be prepared to do it through a war featuring “massive air power,” Woolsey and McInerney said.  They contend that precision bombs could destroy the thousands of North Korean artillery tubes, many in caves, before the guns could kill thousands of South Korean civilians.  Biden and others, however, do not share that belief.  The neocons of this view “are the same guys who would have been telling [President] Eisenhower that he had to use a nuclear weapon against China” to win the Korean War, Biden scoffed.  “Can you imagine the Cold War ending the way it did if these guys were in charge?”

Biden was arguing his liberal ideology.  But Perry was not arguing ideology when he studied, at Clinton’s request, what to do about North Korea’s emerging nuclear arsenal in the 1990s.  Perry’s background and interests were first and foremost technical, not political.  As Pentagon research chief under President Carter from 1977 to 1981, Perry championed the initial development of the precision weapons that we so rely on today.  He told me back then that he could not get military leaders to see their advantages, to trust them.  He sounded as discouraged about this mind-set on the technical front as Biden does now on the diplomatic front.

More than a decade later, Perry, as defense secretary, analyzed whether precision munitions and other weaponry could derail North Korea’s nuclear program at a cost the world would accept, not condemn.  In contrast to the antiseptic war outlined by Woolsey and McInerney, Perry concluded that a war with North Korea — precision weapons notwithstanding — would be unacceptably bloody, especially for the South Koreans.  He recommended negotiations instead.  He is recommending them again today, with the very same Pyongyang government that later double-crossed him by eventually starting a separate nuclear program to enrich uranium.  Perry is holding his nose and saying, “The only reason for considering negotiations with North Korea is that the other alternatives are so terrible.”

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North Korea Claims to Solve Nuclear Technology Obstacle

North Korea today announced that it had overcome key obstacles in its attempt to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons (see GSN, Oct. 2).

“All the technological matters have been solved fully in the process of making a switchover in the use of plutonium,” according to the state-run Korean Central News Agency.

The announcement comes on the heels of belligerent North Korean statements yesterday, in which officials promised to build the nation’s nuclear deterrent (Sang-hun Choe, Associated Press/Yahoo!News, Oct. 3).

Japanese Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi said today that the last round of six-nation talks in Beijing had produced a mutual agreement not to escalate the nuclear crisis, an arrangement that North Korea is now apparently ignoring.

Japan called the recent announcements from Pyongyang “lamentable” (Agence France-Presse/Yahoo!News, Oct. 3).

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also voiced concern about the North Korean statements.

“I think clearly the American people need to be concerned about North Korea,” he said.  “I think anyone who listens to all of the things that come out of that country and registers them has to be concerned about what one’s hearing,” Rumsfeld added (Agence France-Presse/Yahoo!News, Oct. 3).

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Putin Says Moscow Retains Effective Nuclear Deterrent

Russian President Vladimir Putin said yesterday that Russia can maintain its long-range nuclear deterrent well into the future (see GSN, Oct. 2).

In a meeting with senior military officials, Putin said Russia has several dozen SS-19 missiles that have been stored without fuel and “in that sense are new.”  Liquid missile fuel breaks down over time and can damage a missile, the Associated Press reported.

“Their capability, in particular in the sense of their ability to penetrate any missile defense systems, is unparalleled,” Putin said of the SS-19 missiles.  He described the missiles as “the most menacing” in Moscow’s stockpile.

The comments were apparently designed to assuage fears that Russia’s aging Soviet arsenal will soon fall behind that of the United States, according to AP.

“Thus, we have enough time to develop new types of weapons of the 21st century without rush,” Putin said (Vladimir Isachenkov, Associated Press/Rocky Mount Telegram, Oct. 2).

The missiles can remain in service until the 2030s, deputy chief of the General Staff Yuri Baluyevsky told the meeting.

Analysts, however, expressed some skepticism on the recent statements.  Putin’s announcement, and a recent warning to NATO, could be aimed toward Russian voters ahead of State Duma elections, according to Alexander Pikayev, a security analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center (Simon Saradzhyan, Moscow Times, Oct. 3).

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IAEA Begins Nuclear Talks With Senior Iranian Officials

Two senior International Atomic Energy Agency officials began talks with Iranian authorities today in an attempt to resolve questions about Tehran’s controversial nuclear development before the U.N.-mandated Oct. 31 deadline (see GSN, Oct. 1).

The United Nations has called on Iran to prove it is not developing nuclear weapons and to open itself to intrusive, unannounced inspections of it nuclear activities.

“The talks began at 10 a.m. under an atmosphere of understanding.  The talks are very important and vital for both sides,” said Saber Zaimian, a spokesman for Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization.

He said the talks could take “between one to three weeks depending on the progress of the negotiations.”

“We were invited by Mr. Vice President (Gholamreza) Aghazadeh, so I expect that he has a very important message for us and (that we will) progress very rapidly,” Deputy IAEA Director General Pierre Goldschmidt, one of the IAEA officials who traveled to Tehran, said.

 “We have only a few weeks to progress and report to the next board, so I expect we are going to make great progress,” he added (Ali Akbar Dareini, Associated Press, Oct. 2).

“We’re going to start very important discussions with top officials from Iran,” Goldschmidt said.

Iranian IAEA Ambassador Ali Akbar Salehi said Iran would not delay nuclear development while negotiations continued.

“For the time being we will continue enriching uranium,” Salehi said yesterday (Reuters/Jordan Times, Oct. 2).

Tehran, meanwhile, named a five-member panel to determine a policy toward the U.N. deadline.  Panel members include Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi, Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani, Information Minister Ali Yunessi, secretary for the high national security council Hassan Rowhani and Ali Velayati, the international affairs adviser to the supreme religious leader (New York Times, Oct. 2).

Some Iranian officials, meanwhile, seemed anxious to settle the issue before it is sent to the U.N. Security Council.

Iran is working toward “providing the necessary clarifications and taking the appropriate decisions to prevent this matter from going before the Security Council,” Kharrazi said.  In a later appearance on Iranian television, however, Kharrazi said it would be pointless to allow inimpeded inspections if Iran were not allowed to enrich uranium (Chicago Tribune, Oct. 2).

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Regional Approach to Middle East Arms Promoted

By Joe Fiorill
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON ó As the United States continues its as-yet-unsuccessful search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and the International Atomic Energy Agency’s board confronts Iran about its alleged nuclear weapon ambitions, calls have been going up for a comprehensive regional approach to the Middle East strategic landscape.

Iran, Israel’s Arab neighbors and others repeatedly cite nuclear-armed Israel as their main strategic foil.  At IAEA conferences and other international gatherings, they have been pushing for a Middle East nuclear weapon-free zone and for interim measures to build confidence among the region’s countries.

Former Egyptian Atomic Energy Authority head Fawzi Hammad, among others, has seized on recent developments in Iraq and Iran as a chance to renew the push for some eventual broad-based solution to Middle Eastern strategic instability.

“It definitely has to happen,” Bruce Jentleson, director of Duke University’s Sanford Institute of Public Policy, said this week.

“Resolving the bilateral issues is the first set of issues, and it’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient for regional security,” said Jentleson, whose scholarship has in the past focused on the now-stalled Arms Control and Regional Security process in the Middle East.

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Senior Associate Rose Gottemoeller, a former top U.S. nonproliferation official who recently visited Tehran as part of an expert group, said there has been a revival of interest in a regional process.

“There is a lot of interest regionally in how … we get back, at a minimum, into a consultative process,” said Gottemoeller.

Modest Steps Sought Amid Slow Going at IAEA

At the IAEA, there is little sign that convening regional talks is feasible in the near future.  The Arab League last month obtained passage of the latest in a series of IAEA General Conference resolutions calling for such a Middle East nuclear weapon-free zone, with agency members asking IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei to continue consultations with the region’s countries on early application of IAEA safeguards “as a necessary step towards the establishment of a NWFZ.”

The resolution appeared to be a step back from last year’s version, in which countries asked ElBaradei to “make arrangements to convene a forum in which participants from the Middle East and other interested parties could learn from the experience of other regions” that have established nuclear weapon-free zones.  ElBaradei reported in August that fundamental Israeli-Arab differences had prevented progress on the matter, and the call for a forum was absent from this year’s resolution.

“The positions of the two sides are poles apart. … There’s been no closing of the gap,” said Tariq Rauf, head of verification and security policy coordination in ElBaradei’s external relations office.

“Personally, I think at the moment, it’s totally hopeless,” Rauf said this week in a telephone interview from Vienna.  He described the agency as “stuck in the middle” between Israel and the Arabs.

The IAEA’s frustrations stem in part from a difference of view between Arab countries and Israel about whether nuclear weapons, including those of Israel, should be discussed as a first step or only after progress is made on other fronts.  Experts stressed that the success of regional talks will depend on their being comprehensive, rather than focusing solely on the nuclear question.

Hammad is among those trying to foster progress toward such talks.  Working with the nongovernmental Egyptian Council on Foreign Affairs, he has been contacting U.S. groups such as the Carnegie Endowment and nongovernmental organizations in the Middle East in a bid to organize a meeting next year, sponsored by NGOs but with an eye toward laying the groundwork for intergovernmental talks.

“I was really thinking of organizing a meeting between … the American community with nonproliferation, a meeting in the area to address the issue [of] how to establish this zone, how to have a plan for economic development as well as political reform,” Hammad said by telephone from Cairo.

“Really to get movement on the [Middle East] peace, you have to move also on creating this nuclear weapon-free zone,” he said.

Israeli expert Avner Cohen, who wrote the definitive 1998 book Israel and the Bomb, shares Hammad’s view of the region’s political and security affairs as profoundly linked, but he all but turned Hammad’s proposition around.

“Israel is the one who … is facing threats, existential threats. … A nuclear weapon-free zone in the Middle East cannot be achieved unless there is a positive move on the political side toward peace,” Cohen said.

Jentleson said political progress is necessary but that open discussion of Israel’s nuclear program must be possible.

“The Israeli nuclear program was on the table in ACRS.  The issue was, where do you start? …  I think a ‘Son of ACRS’ … probably can’t happen before real progress starts to get made again on the Palestinian-Israeli bilateral,” he said.

Iran Crisis Occupies Center Stage Despite Arab Focus on NWFZ

Nuclear weapon-free zones such as the one Arab countries are pushing to create in the Middle East are suggested in Article VII of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and governed by criteria set in 1975 by the U.N. General Assembly.  To date, zones are in force in Latin American, the South Pacific and Southeast Asia.  A nuclear weapon-free zone treaty for Africa has been signed by more than 50 nations and another for Central Asia is in the late stages of negotiation (see GSN, July 22).

In the IAEA General Conference resolution passed last month, which was initially submitted by Oman on behalf of the Arab League, countries declared themselves  “concerned by the grave consequence, endangering peace and security, of the presence in the Middle East region of nuclear activities not wholly devoted to peaceful purposes” and welcomed initiatives in pursuit of a nuclear weapon-free zone in the region.

The General Conference also called on Middle East countries “to forthwith accept the application of full-scope agency safeguards to all their nuclear activities as an important confidence-building measure among all states in the region and as a step in enhancing peace and security in the context of the establishment of a nuclear weapon-free zone.”

The U.N. General Assembly, whose latest such resolution dates from December of last year, is slated to receive a related report from U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan during its current session.

For now, though, the focus of the United States and other powerful players is on the more immediate problem of Iran’s suspected nuclear weapon development.

A nuclear weapon-free zone in the Middle East “would be a desirable ultimate situation,” U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said Sept. 15 at the IAEA, “but right now, there is a specific question of compliance with the IAEA. … We shouldn’t … keep changing the subject because it happens to be preferable to the subject that the focus is on here, and that is on Iran and its conduct.”

At the urging of the United States, the IAEA Board of Governors has set an Oct. 31 deadline for Iran to clear up contradictions between its pronouncements about its nuclear program and IAEA inspectors’ findings.  The board is slated to meet again next month and could remit the matter to the U.N. Security Council should it deem Iran to be in noncompliance with Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty obligations.

Iran, Israel Face Off

Although many see the Iran controversy as an opportunity to push for regional talks such as those once conducted under the aegis of ACRS, such talks can be restarted only after the Iranian situation is resolved, according to Tel Aviv University political science professor Yair Evron.

Speaking last month at a Carnegie Endowment-PIR Center nonproliferation conference in Moscow, Evron said Israel’s nuclear weapons are “irrelevant” to regional stability but acknowledged that regional talks could be useful as a forum to “discuss, at depth, politics and strategy and arms control issues in the Middle East … on the condition that all the states taking part in this … recognize the right to exist of each other.”  Iran, he said, still refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist.

Meanwhile, with no comprehensive solution in sight, U.S.-led demands for Tehran to come clean continue to be met with protestations about Israel’s undeclared nuclear weapons.

Ali Asghar Soltanieh, deputy director general of international political affairs in Iran’s Foreign Ministry, said Sept. 19 at the Moscow conference that Israel, the “main obstacle” to nonproliferation in the Middle East, “has stubbornly refused to sign the NPT, despite international pressure.”  He evoked the possibility of an arms race in the Middle East, saying the situation “must be addressed through universal nonproliferation.”

A week earlier, as the IAEA board was imposing its deadline on Iran, Iranian envoy Ali Akbar Salehi also sought to keep Israel at the center of the debate.  “Among those who have pursued and produced nuclear weapons outside the five” declared nuclear weapons countries, Salehi said, “Israel gets away with murder.  It is pampered instead of being chastised.”

Some observers have questioned the pertinence of such remarks, suggesting that Israel is not especially relevant to Iran’s security situation.  In the Washington Quarterly’s Autumn 2003 issue, Shahram Rubin of the Geneva Center for Security Studies and Robert Litwak of the Woodrow Wilson International Center write that “Iran has used Israel as an all-purpose bogey.”

“Israel,” Rubin and Litwak write, “has served as a diversion and a pretext, in that Tehran uses its support for the Palestinians to deflect its neighbors’ concerns about Iran’s own WMD programs.”  The real reason Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, the scholars say, is that “hard-liners” in the country “see the program as the ultimate guarantor of Iran’s influence and security and, not incidentally, their own political power.”

Jentleson said Iranian references to the Israeli threat are “more rationalization than motivation … but it works.”

For its part, Israel maintains its time-tested ambiguity, refusing to acknowledge or declare its nuclear arms but not directly denying their existence.

“There’s been no change in Israel’s longstanding position that we won’t be the first country in the region to introduce nuclear weapons into the region,” said Mark Regev, a spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington.

Said Rauf, “Israel claims to be the only democracy in the region, but then, on the nuclear issue, it is a question of total opacity.”

Israel has also sought to portray itself as just one member of a united international front on the Iran question — “This isn’t an Israel-Iran issue; this is the global community,” Regev said — even as it has suggested it could eventually attack Iran, just as it bombed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981.

“At the moment,” Israeli army Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Moshe Ya’alon was quoted as saying last week, “there is continuing international diplomatic activity to deal with this threat, and it would be good if it succeeds.  But if that is not the case, we would consider our options.”

New Process Sought to Replace ACRS

The major international body convened to address arms control in the region, the U.S.- and Russian-chaired ACRS group, has been stalled since 1995, initially because of general regional discord and Israeli-Egyptian disagreement over what place nuclear weapon-free zone talks should have in the ACRS process.

One Western diplomat said last month’s IAEA General Conference resolution “doesn’t reflect reality,” since it expresses support for ACRS, which the diplomat said has “died.”

According to Jentleson, however, a “Son of ACRS” process is feasible and could involve all Arab League members, Israel and, as ACRS does not, Iran and Iraq.  “The core idea that ACRS was about still pertains; it just got put aside,” said Jentleson.

Jentleson added, though, that new talks must take into account subsequent developments such as the involvement of the Quartet — the United Nations, the United States, Russia and the European Union — in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

“Whether ACRS itself is the right institutional format or not — probably not, because so many other things have changed. … I think it would be Son of ACRS,” he said.

Gottemoeller said even a “Son of ACRS” is not likely to get off the ground.  “Nobody’s talking about returning to the ACRS process.  It seems that people feel that that got itself into a dead end. … There does seem to be a mood for a fresh start,” she said.

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North Korea Says 8,000 Fuel Rods Reprocessed

North Korea announced that it has reprocessed 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods in an important step toward developing a nuclear weapons arsenal, Xinhua News Agency reported today (see GSN, Oct. 1).

While meeting with reporters in New York, North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Su Hon said that Pyongyang had “changed the purpose of these fuel rods.”

“Since the United States has threatened the D.P.R.K. with nuclear weapons to launch a pre-emptive nuclear attack against the D.P.R.K., we have no choice but to be in possession of the nuclear deterrence,” he said (Xinhua News Agency, Oct. 1).

In an official statement, North Korea’s Foreign Ministry said that the reclusive country might continue reprocessing.

Pyongyang said more fuel rods at its Yongbyon plant could be reprocessed and “churned out in an unbroken chain” (James Brooke, New York Times, Oct. 2).

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said that the issue was “serious” but he doubted the accuracy of the North Korean claims.

“This is the third time they have told us they just finished reprocessing the rods,” Powell said, adding, “we have no evidence to confirm that.”

He said officials in Washington are examining ways to meet North Korea’s demands for a nonaggression guarantee so that talks on the nuclear standoff could move forward (Federal News Service transcript, Oct. 2).

Analysts were unsure of how to take North Korea’s latest move.

“There is no way to verify what they are saying, but that does not mean it is not true,” said Scott Snyder, Korea representative for the Asia Foundation (Brooke, New York Times).

“One thing we can tell you is that we are in possession of a nuclear deterrence and we’re continuing to strengthen that deterrence,” Choe said.

Avoiding previous threats to proliferate weapons of mass destruction, Choe said that Pyongyang has “no intention of transferring any means of that nuclear deterrence to other countries.”

The vice foreign minister put a damper, however, on hopes that North Korea would soon meet with other regional powers to continue dialogue on the nuclear standoff.

“Certain mass media is circulating rumors as though we have just made promises to participate in the next round of the six-party talks,” Choe said, adding, “unfortunately, this is not true” (Reuters, Oct. 1).

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Moscow Criticizes NATO, Threatens to Modify Nuclear Strategy

Russia warned today that it would be forced to re-evaluate its nuclear weapons policies if NATO failed to adopt changes sought by Moscow.

“Should NATO remain a military alliance with its current offensive military strategy, this will prompt a fundamental reassessment of Russia’s military planning and arms procurement,” according to an internal Russian Defense Ministry document released today.

The review would include “changes to Russia’s nuclear strategy,” the document said.

Moscow has not approved of past NATO expansion into Eastern Europe and the alliance is now setting its eyes on the former Soviet Baltic states — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — according to Agence France-Presse.

“Russia is carefully following NATO’s transformation, and expects it to put a complete end to direct and indirect elements of its anti-Russian policy,” the document said (Agence France-Press/SpaceWar.com, Oct. 2).

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Informal Korean Nuclear Talks Held in New York

In an effort to set the stage for another round of talks on the Korean nuclear crisis, North Korean diplomats met with representatives from China, the United States, South Korea and Japan in New York earlier this week (see GSN, Sept. 30).

Li Gun, deputy director general of the North Korean Foreign Ministry’s American Affairs Bureau, traveled to New York to represent Pyongyang (Vassily Golovnin, ITAR-Tass, Oct. 1).

In an address to the U.N. General Assembly yesterday, North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Su Hon said Pyongyang would only return to talks on the nuclear standoff if Washington took “simultaneous action” to defuse the crisis.

“Under the present circumstance in which the D.P.R.K. and the United States are leveling guns at each other, asking the other party to put down the guns first does not make any sense,” Choe said.  “This can be construed only as an ulterior intention to disarm and kill the D.P.R.K.,” he added.

Choe said disarmament could take place if both sides act.

“Simultaneous action is a realistic way of denuclearizing the Korean peninsula, and any opposition to it is tantamount to the refusal of the denuclearization,” he said (Priscilla Cheung, Associated Press/Yahoo!News, Sept. 30).

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly said today that Washington was not happy about the U.N. address.

“We’re a little disappointed with the speech that the vice minister of the D.P.R.K. made at the United Nations,” Kelly said.  Regarding potential talks, he said that the United States is “hoping to have something in the next month or five or six weeks, but we don’t know that for sure.”  Kelly was in Tokyo to meet with Japanese and South Korean officials on the crisis (Kenji Hall, Associated Press, Oct. 1).

A Japanese Foreign Ministry official said Tokyo was attempting to arrange another round of nuclear talks.

“Our policy of pushing for the earliest possible reopening of six-nation talks has not changed at all,” the official said (Ryan Nakashima, Agence France-Presse, Oct. 1).

South Korean Unification Minster Jeong Se-hyun, meanwhile, said yesterday that North Korea most likely wants to restart the nuclear talks and will probably not conduct nuclear tests, as it has previously threatened.

“Intelligence agencies in Seoul and Washington have concluded that such possibility is low,” he said (Carol Giacomo, Reuters, Sept. 30).

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IAEA Chief Expects Iran to Meet Nuclear Cooperation Deadline

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said yesterday that he expects Iran to prove it is not developing nuclear weapons before a U.N.-mandated Oct. 31 deadline (see GSN, Sept. 30).

“Four weeks is ample time for Iran to come up with a full and complete declaration,” said IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei.  “The next few weeks are key to gauge the level of cooperation and transparency displayed by Iran,” he added.

ElBaradei said Iran should have no problem “telling us the full story,” but he added that it was unclear how long it would take IAEA inspectors to verify Iran’s claims.

“I am not going to scuttle the process because of a particular date, nor am I going to jump to conclusions,” he said (George Jahn, Associated Press/Yahoo!News, Sept. 30).

Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi said today that the IAEA must not send the issue to the U.N. Security Council.

“The official position of the Islamic Republic of Iran regarding the Additional Protocol [which would allow more intrusive monitoring of Iran’s nuclear activities] … is for greater cooperation with the IAEA.  We are determined to have an active and transparent cooperation with the agency,” Kharazi said (Agence France-Presse, Oct. 1).

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Frustrated China Delays Diplomatic Visit to North Korea

China has delayed the visit of a high profile emissary to North Korea because of Pyongyang’s stance on nuclear weapons development, Kyodo News Service reported today (see GSN, Sept. 25).

Wu Bangguo, chairman of the National People’s Congress Standing Committee, was invited by North Korea and was expected to visit before the end of September.  Chinese officials reportedly visited Pyongyang to arrange the trip, but North Korea’s intransigence on the nuclear issue has put Beijing in a tough position, Kyodo News reported.  North Korean officials were reportedly upset by the six-nation talks in Beijing last month and have not yet agreed to future talks (Kyodo News Service/BBC Monitoring, Sept. 26).

Chinese diplomats are attempting to “narrow differences” over the format of future talks on the nuclear crisis, according to Fu Ying, the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s director general for Asian affairs.

“I think it’s a bit early to thing about a date.  We need to work on the substance to narrow the differences,” she said (Christopher Bodeen, Associated Press, Sept. 26).

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Bush Tries to Rally World Against Iranian Nuclear Development

U.S. President George W. Bush has appealed to world leaders to press Iran on its controversial nuclear activities.  Bush met face-to-face with several leaders on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly session that began this week in New York, (see GSN, Sept. 25).

“It is very important for the world to come together to make it very clear to Iran that there will be universal condemnation if they continue with a nuclear weapons program,” Bush told reporters yesterday.  “And I will tell you, the response was very positive,” he added.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan recently said that the U.N. mandated Oct. 31 deadline to determine the nature of Tehran’s nuclear program is “one last chance for Iran to comply” (David Sands, Washington Times, Sept. 26).

Bush said that he intends to discuss Russian assistance to Iran’s nuclear development when Russian President Vladimir Putin visits the Camp David presidential retreat for a two-day summit beginning today.

“You bet I’ll talk to President Putin about it this weekend,” Bush said (Scott Lindlaw, Associated Press/Los Angeles Times, Sept. 26).

Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi said yesterday that Iran is willing to sign the Additional Protocol to its international safeguards agreement, which would allow for more intrusive monitoring of its nuclear activities.  His comments came before a scheduled trip by U.N. officials to Iran today for inspections and talks that will begin Sunday and last until Oct. 31.

“Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program nor does it intend to embark on one,” Kharazi said in a speech to the U.N. General Assembly.  “Thus we have nothing to hide and, in principle, have no problem with the Additional Protocol,” he added (Agence France-Presse, Sept. 26).

Kharazi also said that Iran should not be prevented from developing civilian nuclear power.

“There should be a more severe monitoring system to make sure no nuclear arms are produced, but that doesn’t mean countries should be deprived of the right to use nuclear power for peaceful purposes,” he said.  In a reference to Israel’s widely acknowledged nuclear arsenal, Kharazi also said “a single standard should be applied to everyone” (Barbara Slavin, USA Today, Sept. 25).

New Find Causes Controversy

A nuclear weapons expert today said that reports that U.N. inspectors had found traces of enriched uranium at the Kalaye Electric Co. near Tehran could in fact validate Tehran’s earlier claims.  David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, said the find could lend support to Iran’s contention that it imported contaminated equipment.  The contaminated equipment was reportedly assembled at the electrical facility.

“It would have been very shocking if they had not found HEU (highly enriched uranium) there,” Albright said.  “But Iran has to prove its point that it did not enrich uranium at all,” he added.

Kharazi that Iranian President Mohammad Khatami is facing domestic “pressure to pull out of the NPT [Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty].”

Khatami is “in the middle of two sides of pressure.  You could imagine what could be the result of that,” Kharazi added.

He said, however, that Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei “believes it (a nuclear bomb) is haram, it is forbidden.  We do not think have a bomb would create security for us.  It would create more problems” (Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, Sept. 26).

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Japan to Construct Nuclear Testing Monitoring Facilities

Japan plans to build 10 nuclear test monitoring facilities by 2007, sources said yesterday (see GSN, Sept. 24).

The facilities will be part of an international network of more than 300 monitoring stations established by the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, according to the Daily Yomiuri.  The Japanese monitoring facilities are set to monitor seismic waves, atmospheric pressure and airborne nuclear substances (Daily Yomiuri, Sept. 26).

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Afghanistan Signs, Ratifies Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty

Afghanistan signed and ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Wednesday, according to a CTBT Organization press release (see GSN, Aug. 13).  To date, 169 nations have signed the treaty and 105 have ratified it, including 32 of the 44 nations whose ratifications are necessary for the treaty to enter into force (CTBT Organization release, Sept. 25).

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Northrop Grumman Wins Modifications for ICBM-Related Contracts

The U.S. defense contractor Northrop Grumman has won an Air Force contract modification worth more than $130 million to help sustain U.S. ICBM systems, the U.S. Defense Department announced yesterday (see GSN, Sept. 12, 2002).  Under the contract, Northrop Grumman will provide a number of maintenance activities for the Minuteman and Peacekeeper ICBMs, including systems and sustaining engineering, testing, hardware and software contract modification and contract repair.

The company has also been awarded a contract modification worth more than $7 million for the sixth option year of a 15-year contract for the lease and infrastructure payment for the ICBM prime team facility, according to the Pentagon.  The prime team is required to be consolidated at one facility due to a need to vacate buildings at the Hill Air Force Base in Utah (U.S. Defense Department release, Sept. 25).

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IAEA Detects Uranium at Second Iranian Site

The International Atomic Energy Agency has discovered evidence of weapon-grade uranium at a second site in Iran, diplomats said today (see GSN, Sept. 24).

Inspectors discovered the uranium at the Kalaye Electric Company in Tehran, to which the IAEA had once been denied access.

Diplomatic officials were divided over whether the find validated Iran’s claim that it had imported previously contaminated equipment, or supported U.S. contentions that Tehran is attempting to secretly enrich uranium in violation of its Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty commitments (Louis Charbonneau, Reuters, Sept. 25).

Meanwhile, Tehran is willing to discuss its controversial nuclear development with Washington if U.S. officials “change their approach and bring in a new environment for cooperation,” Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi said Tuesday.

Kharazi said also that Iran is willing to sign the Additional Protocol to its IAEA safeguards agreement — which would allow for more intrusive IAEA monitoring of Tehran’s nuclear activities — if U.S. President George W. Bush drops his objections to Iran’s nuclear program.

“We want to make sure the Additional Protocol would be enough and would solve the problem,” Kharazi said.  “We don’t have anything to hide because we do not have a program for producing nuclear weapons.  Therefore, we are ready to be quite transparent.  But we cannot let others deny our rights,” he added (Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, Sept. 25).

Kharazi said that Iran would not be willing to abandon its nuclear power development.

“No, by no means, because this is right, it is legal, this is based on our commitment to the NPT,” he said.  “This is a big difference — between having the technology to enrich uranium needed for power plants as fuel and the technology to actually make a bomb,” Kharazi added (Mable Chan, CNN.com, Sept. 24).

The Iranian foreign minister said Tehran would “hopefully not” withdraw from the NPT, as some Iranian officials have suggested (Peter Spielmann, Associated Press/San Francisco Chronicle, Sept. 24).

International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei said Iran is sending “worrying signals” about its nuclear program.

If Tehran pulled out of the nonproliferation treaty, “then the matter would go to a much higher level of confrontation,” ElBaradei said yesterday (Reuters/Planet Ark, Sept. 25).

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Pakistan Proposes “Action Plan” to Resolve Kashmir Dispute With India

By Mike Nartker
Global Security Newswire

Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf yesterday said he has proposed an “action plan” to help resolve the dispute between Pakistan and India over the region of Kashmir — a potential flashpoint between the two nuclear rivals (see GSN, Aug. 7).

During a press conference yesterday at U.N. headquarters in New York, Musharraf outlined his plan to resolve the issue of Kashmir, which he described as the “core dispute” between the two South Asian rivals.  Musharraf’s plan includes a cease-fire on the Line of Control dividing the province; Pakistani aid in facilitating a cease-fire between the Islamic militant groups operating in the Indian side of Kashmir and New Delhi along with pledges by India to cease military action in the province; and the enlargement of the U.N. force currently deployed on the Line of Control.

Musharraf said yesterday that he was unsure if India would accept his proposal, which he hoped would begin a dialogue between India and Pakistan.

“I only can hope optimistically that good sense prevails, and they come forward, and we sit down and talk and move towards resolution of disputes to the benefit of not only the people of India and Pakistan, but also … to the benefit of the whole region, the south Asian region,” Musharraf said.

Musharraf also said he had asked U.S. President George W. Bush during a bilateral meeting yesterday for assistance in facilitating a dialogue between India and Pakistan.  In addition, any such dialogue should also involve the people of Kashmir as well, Musharraf said.

“It should be a trilateral dialogue, if possible, between Pakistan, India, and people of Kashmir, representatives of Kashmiris,” Musharraf said.  “In any case, the solution that we are talking of has to be a solution which is acceptable to India, Pakistan and the people of Kashmir,” he added.

India has often accused Pakistan of providing support for cross-border terrorism in Kashmir, a charge Musharraf vigorously denied yesterday.

“There is no government patronage or anything that is happening across the Line of Control,” Musharraf said.  “And this is the guarantee that I gave to [Indian] Prime Minister [Atal Behari] Vajpayee, and it should suffice.  And therefore, we need to start talking,” he added.

Growing Military Imbalance

In addition to his proposal to resolve the Kashmir dispute, Musharraf said yesterday that he had also proposed a restraint regime between India and Pakistan on conventional and unconventional weapons.  A number of recent reports have indicated India’s interest in purchasing several types of conventional weapons systems, including ballistic missiles and missile interceptors (see GSN, Sept. 22).  Israel has often been mentioned as a possible supplier of military equipment to India, which Musharraf said yesterday was a “cause of concern” to Pakistan (see GSN, Sept. 11).

Musharraf said he discussed the growing imbalance between the Indian and Pakistani militaries during his meeting with Bush.  The Pakistani newspaper DAWN reported today that Musharraf called yesterday for countries to restrain from supplying major military systems to India.

“Those powers which desire peace, stability and security in South Asia and oppose the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction must review their decisions to offer such major strategic weapons systems to India.  They must contribute to maintaining arms restraint and a military balance in South Asia,” the newspaper quoted Musharraf as saying.

Musharraf yesterday pledged to maintain Pakistan’s strategy of deterrence, which includes the country’s nuclear arsenal, in the face of India’s arms purchases. 

“If we want to prevent war in South Asia between India and Pakistan, through the strategy of deterrence, we create a no-win situation for India.  And that is how war is deterred.  And we maintain that level.  We will always maintain this deterrence level, for our own security,” he said.

As part of that strategy, Musharraf indicated yesterday that he raised the issue of F-16 fighter purchases with Bush during their meeting.  In the late 1980s, Pakistan paid for F-16s from the United States, but the planes were never delivered after the United States imposed sanctions on Pakistan for its nuclear weapons activities.  While Bush has lifted the arms embargo to reward Pakistan for its assistance in the war on terrorism, there has been no indication that the F-16 sale will go forward.  Aviation Week and Space Technology reported earlier this month that Pakistan has indicated an interest in purchase F-16s from Belgium, but such a sale would still require U.S. permission to proceed (see GSN, Sept. 3).

The topic of U.S. military assistance to Pakistan also came up last week during a meeting of the U.S.-Pakistani Defense Consultative Group in Washington, according to a U.S. Defense Department press release.  During the three-day meeting, U.S. and Pakistani officials began initial discussions on the military component of a $3 billion, five-year U.S. aid program to Pakistan that Bush and Musharraf announced during a meeting at Camp David in June (see GSN, June 24).  The United States confirmed at last week’s meeting its commitment to provide information on the availability of new weapons “as soon as possible,” the Pentagon statement said.  Bush has said, however, that the aid package will not include the sale of F-16s.

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Congress Allocates $45 Million for New Long-Range Bomber Development

A project to consider the next-generation U.S. strategic bomber is set to receive $45 million in the 2004 defense appropriations bill passed by the House and the Senate yesterday, Aerospace Daily reported (see related GSN article, today).

The House of Representatives initially proposed $100 million for the new bomber effort and the House-Senate conference committee later agreed on $45 million in its report publicly released yesterday.  In that report, lawmakers suggest that the technologies developed for the new bomber “can also be demonstrated and incorporated in the existing bomber fleet” (see GSN, Aug. 22).

The conference report also provided an $80 million boost to the Missile Defense Agency’s $65 million request for the Israeli Arrow missile defense system (Marc Selinger, Aerospace Daily, Sept. 25).

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U.S. Navy Museum Follows Arms Treaty Rules in Displaying Trident Missile

The U.S. Navy Museum has received a training model of a Trident 1 sea-launched ballistic missile, which is set to be included in a planned submarine exhibit, the Navy newsletter The Dolphin reported today (see GSN, Aug. 20).

The Trident 1 Training Model of Missile, set to be put on display, will not have to be reported under the U.S.-Russian START agreement because it has been disabled according to treaty rules.  The missile has a hole drilled through the aft dome of the first stage motor, according to the Dolphin, and museum personnel must ensure that the hole remains visible and not filled, the Dolphin reported. 

A previous exhibit of a Poseidon missile was required to be reported under START as a static display because it had been similarly disabled, the Dolphin reported (Marie Dumontet, The Dolphin, Sept. 25). 

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