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Concerns iran nuclear arms { May 8 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://nytimes.com/2003/05/08/international/asia/08DIPL.htmlhttp://nytimes.com/2003/05/08/international/asia/08DIPL.html
May 8, 2003
New U.S. Concerns on Iran's Pursuit of Nuclear Arms
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
ASHINGTON, May 7 — The Bush administration is concerned that Iran has stepped up its covert nuclear program, and the government is now seeking broad international support for an official finding that Tehran has violated its commitment not to produce nuclear weapons, officials said today.
The officials said that the United States was pressing nations that sit on the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which oversees peaceful nuclear programs, to declare that Iran has violated the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which it has signed.
Such a finding could lead to punitive action by the United Nations, adding pressure on Iran, which is already nervous about American troops in Iraq, the officials said. The atomic energy agency is to meet on the matter next month.
Administration officials also said today that a new intelligence assessment had led them to conclude that North Korea may have resumed production of small amounts of plutonium, which could be used for nuclear weapons. Previously, intelligence officials had assured the White House that no plutonium was being produced there.
While the North Korea situation has received more public attention recently, in part because it has acknowledged its nuclear ambitions, administration officials said that Iran was an equally urgent problem because its program is further along than previously thought.
"It's not just that Iran is speeding up its nuclear plans," an administration official said. "It's also that we've only recently learned some things about their program that have been going on for two years. There's also a lot of hammering from the Israelis for us to take this problem seriously."
Of greatest concern is the recent disclosure that Iran has built a uranium enrichment plant at Natanz in central Iran, a site not known to nuclear experts until last year.
The site contains large underground structures believed by intelligence experts to contain centrifuges used in producing highly enriched uranium, a fuel for nuclear weapons.
The Natanz site is said by experts to be more worrisome than the Russian-assisted nuclear reactor at the Persian Gulf city of Bushehr, which they say has the potential of producing weapons-grade plutonium.
In February, Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, led a team of inspectors to Natanz. But American officials said the visit was not a formal inspection, and that Dr. ElBaradei at first seemed reluctant to pronounce the site a nuclear-weapons facility.
Iran maintains that the Natanz site is to be used for peaceful purposes, a position reiterated this week by Iran's nuclear energy director, Gholamreza Aghazadeh, in meetings with the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.
But American officials say that a recent evaluation of what Dr. ElBaradei found in February, as well as other nations' intelligence, has convinced American and other experts that Natanz is so obviously a weapons facility that the International Atomic Energy Agency can be persuaded to act on it.
"We were surprised by the scale of the discoveries by the director general," an administration official said, referring to Dr. ElBaradei. "We knew that Iran was working on a centrifuge program. But we were surprised by the number of centrifuge pieces waiting to be assembled. They had a hundred-plus centrifuges built, and they were building more."
American officials said that Dr. ElBaradei now appeared more likely to present a tough picture of the Natanz site at an agency meeting in mid-June. Meanwhile, the administration is pressing Russia, Western European nations and others to get him to do just that.
But the American-led ouster of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Iran's neighbor and longtime enemy, has complicated matters. There is now sharp disagreement within the administration over whether the new situation gives the United States more leverage over Tehran or less.
As a consequence, administration officials say that they are embroiled in yet another internal debate about how best to deal with Iran's nuclear threat.
This time, the hawkish faction centered at the Pentagon favors working through the United Nations, hoping that the pressure will get Iran to abandon its program. They say that Iran has an incentive to cooperate because of the American military presence next door.
The moderates want the United States to engage in talks with Iran on all the issues of concern in Washington — not just about nuclear matters but also about American fears of a revolutionary brand of Islamic fundamentalism in Iraq supported by Iranian-backed Shiites.
The United States is also trying to get Iran to stop backing Hezbollah and other militant groups linked to terrorist acts against Israel and American targets around the world. This topic was pressed on Syria, an Iranian ally, last weekend by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.
Mr. Powell is to return to the region this weekend for meetings in Israel and with leaders of Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Administration officials and other experts say the Iran problem will be a major subject because it has the potential to destabilize the entire region.
"I can't conceive of a viable security order for the Middle East, post-Saddam Hussein, that does not take Iran into account," said Flynt Leverett, until recently a senior director of Middle East affairs with the National Security Council staff.
Mr. Leverett, now a fellow with the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution, said the United States had to address both Iran's nuclear weapons capability and its "continuing willingness to work through proxies on the ground" to subvert Iraq and other nations in the region.
In the last year, the United States has dealt privately with Iran, administration officials say.
Both Zalmay Khalilzad, the White House envoy, and Ryan Crocker, a deputy assistant secretary of state, have had secret contacts with Iranian officials — some as recently as earlier this year — in New York and Europe, the officials said.
Results have been mixed, the officials said. There has been cooperation on ousting the Taliban and Al Qaeda and stabilizing Afghanistan, especially in western parts of the country where Iran has influence.
Iran was also said to have understood American intentions in Iraq, at least in part, some officials said, and tacitly agreed to help with refugees, downed American aircraft and other problems near its border during the recent war.
A possible signal of Iranian willingness to talk with the United States came last month with a call by Hashemi Rafsanjani, Iran's former president, for a referendum on possibly improving relations with the United States. Until now, officials said, such talk would have been anathema.
On the negative side, with the Iraq war over, the United States has been concerned about Iran's possible interference with revolutionary operatives in Iraq loyal to Teheran and uninterested in any efforts by the United States to extend its influence.
Last week, in what officials said was a significant warning to Iran, American forces in Iraq signed a cease-fire with the People's Mujahedeen, a group Washington had designated as a terrorist organization and which opposes Iran and the Iranian-backed groups in Iraq.
The original decision to list the People's Mujahedeen as a terrorist organization was considered a gesture toward Iran. So the cease-fire was said by some in the administration to signal that the United States was determined to play rough in extending its influence in the region.
There are parallels to how the United States is now dealing with Iran and North Korea, the two remaining members of what Mr. Bush called an "axis of evil."
As with North Korea, whose nuclear weapons program could lead, if it continues, to the acquisition of nuclear weapons by South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, the United States fears that an Iranian program could lead to nuclear ambitions by Iran's neighbors. They would include Saudi Arabia, which is believed capable of quickly acquiring such weapons from its ally, Pakistan, and Israel, which is already assumed to be an undeclared nuclear weapons state.
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