I as an Iranian student would like to have a peaceful nuclear energy.
USA think he is still like John Wayn to kill whe ever he wants to.
Also USA talks about democracy while she held more than 1000 innocent Afghani people in Cuba.
Isreal has 250 nuclear warhead. There are so many resultion against Isreal, but she told the UN, up yours!!!
[It seems I will have to post a comment policy soon. In the meantime, I've edited these comments to remove a factually inaccurate and needlessly inflammatory sentence - DN]
Edited By Siteowner
Iman - then why not accept the proposal being offered to Iran, which would allow the country to develop nuclear energy but prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons?
Iman,
It would seem that you would not appreciate those opposed to Iran having nuclear technology caricaturing your country in the same manner that you seem to caricature the US. If you want to be taken seriously rethink your strategy.
Very nice and fair Roger,
I particularly liked ElBaradei's quote: "You have a right ..., but because of the lack of confidence ... you have to go through a probation period ..."
But, don't you think that what US is after is a little bit different than "probation period"? EU3 has been asking Iran to voluntarily give up its rights for good.
I would say 5 or 10 years probation is good, isn't it? If IAEA finds any type of diversion towards military use of nuclear technology, it'd become 20, 50, or 100 years. Wouldn't be fair?
Besides, the confidence building measures should be two-directional, both ways.
It is not only Iran that has had failures and delays. Iran has been trying to complete its first commercial nuclear power plant for over 30 years. It hasn't been completed yet. That itself is a clear violation of NPT. Why is it that Iran has to pay 5 times the price for fuel for Tehran's research reactor? (What happened to "on a non-discriminatory basis" term in NPT?). That is a clear violation of NPT too.
What I am saying is that PROBATION is good. To build confidence both ways.
While in practice it is difficult to determine a state's motives, that doesn't mean that evidence can't add more weight to certain interpretations.
As I've argued before, the rate (and effort) that a state puts into its nuclear program can be used as a crude metric to determine its intentions. Iran's program doesn't fall in the category of "hell-bent on nuclear weapons" (cf Iraq, the US's program, the Soviet program on one end of this spectrum versus the half-assed Libyan and Italian programs on the other; Iran is somewhere in the middle)
Of course, those intentions vis-a-vis ultimate oucomes may not yet even exist. I don't think that Iran (whoever "Iran" is) has decided unambiguously whether it wants a nuclear weapons program at all. There is near-universal support within Iran for a nuclear program that would give Iran the ability to produce nuclear weapons quite quickly. (The diseconomy of such a program are quite fascinating).
The question is what should be done now. Iran is at least 5-10 years from such a capability. Provoking a crisis wherein the IAEA's ability to monitor Iran is degraded is probably not the best plan. Anything that kicks the ball further down the field and delays Iran's capabilities to develop weapons is, therefore, a good idea.
The current diplomatic fudge is actually quite creative. By nearly unanimously sending a "report" to the Security Council in a month rather than "referring" Iran immediately. The question is how Iran will respond (after the inevitable initial bluster).
Here are the known facts about Iran's nuclear program:
1- Iran has a legitimate economic case for nuclear power, which the US (including some of the members of the current Bush administration) encouraged. (see http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ articles/A3983-2005Mar26.html and http://www.atimes.com/atimes/ Middle_East/GH24Ak02.html)
2- Iran's enrichment program was not clandestine, and was widely reported in the nuclear industry literature & on Iranian radio. Iran's deals with countries like CHina to make the necessary plants had been reported to the IAEA, and the IAEA had even visited Iran's uranium mines in 1992. (See Le
Monde Diplomatique: "Iran Needs Nuclear Energy, Not Weapons" November 2005)
3- While there were undeclared facilities in Iran, the IAEA reported in Nov 2003 that "to date, there is no evidence that the previously undeclared nuclear material and activities referred to above were related to a nuclear weapons program."
4- In Nov 2004, the IAEA reported that "all the declared nuclear material in Iran has been accounted for, and therefore such material is not diverted to prohibited activities."
5- In Jan 2006, the IAEA reported that "Iran has continued to facilitate access under its Safeguards Agreement as requested by the Agency . . . including by providing in a timely manner the requisite declarations and access to locations."
6- Repeated offers of compromise by Iran that would have addressed the risk of proliferation of nukes were simply dismissed without any consideration. Most recently, Iran's Jan 2006 offer to continue the suspension of enrichment for another 2 years of additional negotiations were summarily dismissed, and not even reported in the US press though it
was reported in the Iranian press (see
http:// www.atimes.com/ atimes/ Middle_East/ HB07Ak01.html )
Oh yeah, there's also a "magic laptop" which has literally fallen out of the blue sky, and conveniently provides all the evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Iran that no one else has found after 3 years of inspections.
So, there we have it. Draw your own conclusions.
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