Syria also refused to allow the IAEA to visit the three other sites allegedly related to the destroyed facility. They were military facilities, not nuclear related, we were told, and therefore the Agency had no reason to visit them. They also refused to show us where the debris from the destroyed facility had been taken.
During the June 2009 IAEA Board meeting, this stalemate—the result of withholding information from the Agency, and then assigning it the impossible task of verifying what no longer existed—led to a particularly direct confrontation. Once again, I urged Israel to share the information that had led it to use force against the Syrian facility at Dair Alzour. The Israeli ambassador to the IAEA, Israel Michaeli, complained, saying I was making “redundant” demands. Israel, he said, had already provided answers to the IAEA’s relevant questions, denying that the uranium traces could have come from Israeli munitions.[15] By pressing Israel to come up with more evidence of Syria’s nuclear program, Michaeli declared, I was showing a “political bias.” He also implied that because we had not called for a special inspection on Syria, the Agency was not using all the tools in its toolkit.
Michaeli was out of line, and he knew it, but I also knew he was acting under instructions from his capital. I answered him with a directness that shocked some of the delegates. His stance, I said, was “totally distorted.” By refusing to provide us with the necessary evidence, Israel was essentially obstructing the IAEA’s investigative process. I made my next remarks looking directly at him:
The representative of Israel… is mentioning that Syria should be deplored and condemned. But Israel, with its action, is to be deplored by not allowing us to do what we are supposed to do under international law…. You say we refrain from using tools. Israel is not even a member of the [nuclear nonproliferation] regime to tell us what tools are available to us. [Your country] cannot sit on the fence, making use of the system without being accountable…. We would appreciate it if you could stop preaching to us how we can do our jobs.
Regarding his accusation that I was biased, I said I would not even dignify it with a response.
We were stuck. Despite my repeated requests—including those made public in IAEA Board reports—Israel and the United States did not give us further evidence to substantiate their conclusion that the Dair Alzour facility had been nuclear. The Syrians continued to claim that it was not nuclear, but they refused to provide additional information or access to prove their contention.
Sometime later, I sent an appeal through a Syrian businessman with direct access to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. I pressed for cooperation with the IAEA, making clear that the issue would continue to hang over Syria until it was cleared up. A message came back saying that al-Assad appreciated my efforts; curiously, what was missing was any denial that Dair Alzour had been a nuclear reactor site.
The hypocrisy could not have been clearer: for some Member States, nuclear proliferation concerns were tools to be used, hyped, or ignored according to geopolitical ends, depending on the relationship with the country in the stand.
The most fundamental problem with the nuclear nonproliferation regime is, in itself, a double standard: the inherent asymmetry, or inequality, between the nuclear haves and have-nots, exacerbated by the continuing reliance by the nuclear-weapon states on nuclear weapons and their lack of progress on nuclear disarmament. Worse, rather than moving to fulfill their commitment to disarm, most have modernized their arsenals and continue to develop new types of weapons. For countries that do not have such weapons and do not fall under a nuclear umbrella protection arrangement such as NATO, this reinforces the perception that the acquisition of nuclear weapons is a sure path to power and prestige, an insurance policy against attack.
The UN Security Council also is part of the problem, in part because of the veto power wielded by the P-5, the five nuclear-weapon states. The Security Council’s charge is to maintain international peace and security and to be responsive to threats against that peace and security. Certainly, some violations of an IAEA safeguards agreement may not rise to the level of requiring referral to the council. However, on those rare occasions when such referrals are made, the council should be appropriately responsive: it should be agile, resolute, forceful when needed, and above all, consistent in its actions.
By those standards, the record of the Security Council in responding consistently to nuclear threats has been abysmal. In 1981, after Israel destroyed Iraq’s Osirak reactor and the Security Council condemned the bombing, it also urged Israel to put its nuclear facilities under IAEA safeguards. Israel ignored the resolution, and the Security Council took no further action. In 1998, after the Indian and Pakistani nuclear weapons tests, the Security Council condemned the testing and asked both countries to cease the development of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. When those resolutions were ignored, the council again backed off. In the case of North Korea, when the IAEA first reported North Korea’s noncompliance in 1993, and in 2003, when the country withdrew from the NPT altogether, the council took no meaningful action, instead letting the United States take the initiative through the Agreed Framework in the 1990s, and in the latter case deferring to China’s lead in setting up the six-party talks.
On the other hand, the Security Council imposed sanctions on Iraq in 1990 that led to egregious violations of human rights for millions of Iraqi civilians and culminated in a war in 2003 without the council’s consent. To add insult to injury, the council continued to maintain certain sanctions against Iraq for years after the 2003 invasion, long after it was clear to everyone that Iraq had no WMD. The council was unable to agree on how to terminate the UNMOVIC and IAEA mandates in Iraq and close the WMD file. And burdened by the ravages of a war that should never have occurred, Iraq was forced to finance UNMOVIC for more than four years while it sat idle in New York.
While the P-5 exacerbated nuclear insecurity through their actions in the Security Council, their own failure to disarm contributed directly to proliferation itself. Yet the P-5, and the United States in particular, refused to acknowledge the linkage between their lack of progress on disarmament and the growing volume of proliferation-related concerns.
In April 2004 a joint proposal was submitted to the U.S. Congress by the secretaries of state, energy, and defense, to develop “small” nuclear weapons. Their argument was essentially that these weapons would be perceived as more readily usable. If enemy countries believed that the United States might actually use these mini-nukes, the deterrent effect would be stronger. It did not seem to occur to them that the idea of a “more usable” nuclear weapon ran directly contrary to the tenets of the NPT regime and would only tempt more countries to acquire such weapons to defend themselves.
The United States also continued to develop its missile defense shield, which both Russia and China regarded as a threat. The United States claimed that the shield was intended to protect them against missiles by “rogue states,” meaning North Korea and Iran. Many experts pointed out that this argument did not make sense. An attack by a small country—or, for that matter, by a group of terrorists—would more likely come in the form of a crude bomb smuggled in through a harbor or across a border, and not through a missile with the country’s name on it. The missile shield would be pointless.
15
Israel had provided a one-line answer to the IAEA’s questions, merely saying that the source of the uranium found was not Israeli, not even acknowledging that it had been responsible for the actual bombing.