I frequently spoke out on these issues, in speeches and press interviews, and the Americans just as frequently complained that I was over-stepping the limits of my position, speaking “out of the box.” I told them I had “no box,” that I felt it part of my responsibility to speak out on matters that had a direct impact on the nuclear nonproliferation regime, a responsibility that, as a Nobel laureate, I felt even more keenly. When it came to reporting on verification issues, my role was to present the facts. But I had witnessed the discrediting and manipulation of the IAEA’s work in the lead-up to the Iraq War and would not allow that to happen again on my watch. I felt it was important to leave as little room as possible for media hype or manipulation. And it was my charge to help Member States find peaceful solutions to nuclear tensions, by contributing my perspective and vigorously supporting nuclear diplomacy. I knew, of course, that the states themselves made the decisions in the end.
In early 2007 the British government announced its decision to upgrade its nuclear deterrence force by building new Trident nuclear ballistic missile submarines, a move effectively designed to extend the British nuclear deterrent to mid-century. I was amazed by the hypocrisy. In an interview with the Financial Times about Iran’s nuclear cycle development,[16] I said that as long as the United Kingdom and other such states continued to modernize their weapons, I would find it very difficult to tell other countries that nuclear deterrence was not good for them.
The Telegraph reported my comments under the title “UN Nuclear Watchdog Calls Trident Hypocritical.” John Sawers, then the director general for political affairs at the Foreign Office,[17] called to say that my remarks had gone down very badly in London. He expounded on how the British had reduced their nuclear force; it was the smallest arsenal among the P-5, and he felt I was picking on them.
“Don’t you understand,” I asked him, “that it is difficult to argue that some countries should continue to have nuclear weapons and modernize them while others are told they cannot?”
“Yes,” Sawers replied, “but we should not be compared with Iran.”
The issue was not Iran but the general principle. The United Kingdom seemed to be invoking an odd moral calculus: “We’re the good guys; they’re the bad guys; trust us.”
In the House of Commons, Blair was asked about my Financial Times interview. “The United Kingdom,” he replied, “has the right under the NPT to have nuclear weapons, and as Mohamed ElBaradei is the custodian of that treaty’s implementation, it would be a good idea for him to act accordingly.”[18] His rendering of the treaty was a revealing distortion but symptomatic of the behavior of the nuclear-weapon states, who fulfilled their obligations to disarm through lip service only.
It was especially distressing to note that only South Africa publicly protested the United Kingdom’s Trident decision. The non-nuclear-weapon states responded with deafening silence, a dismaying response that signaled to me their resignation in the face of a world order that had acquired the appearance of inevitable permanence.
I was reminded of this less than a year later, in a meeting with British foreign secretary David Miliband. We had been talking about Iran; Miliband acknowledged the complexity of the issue, but it was obvious that we did not see eye to eye. At one point he exclaimed, “Why do you think Iran wants to have nuclear weapons?”
“Why does the United Kingdom have nukes?” I was tempted to retort. I found the double standard astounding, but I kept silent.
The IAEA faced many challenges in carrying out its mandate. We were strained for resources. We had insufficient authority. We were spied on by the same intelligence agencies we relied upon to inform us when they detected nuclear anomalies; we were given selective intelligence information, which was often difficult to authenticate. We were dependent on Member States, some of whom had their own agendas, to supply us with state-of-the-art technology we could not afford. We were pressured by those who believed that funding the Agency came with the right to influence its work for political ends.[19] And we continued to face complex nuclear verification cases that challenged our resourcefulness and our patience.
But the great, unspoken travesty was that nuclear weapons continued to exist at all, much less that the most powerful countries on the planet held on to their arsenals like a security blanket. We repeatedly heard dire predictions about Iran developing a single nuclear weapon when the world was already blighted by the existence of more than twenty-three thousand such weapons. Many of those weapons were on “hair-trigger” alert—meaning that the leaders of the United States and Russia, faced with the possible launch of a nuclear missile that might well have been caused by computer error or unauthorized use, would have only half an hour to decide whether to retaliate, risking the devastation of entire nations in a matter of minutes. Yet political leaders continued to declare that all this was irrelevant to proliferation.
I had no intention of staying in my box.
11
IRAN, 2007–2008
Squandered Opportunities
The U.S. perception of the Iranian regime as a gang of glassy-eyed radicals had deep emotional roots, reaching back to the hostage crisis of 1979–1981. For the Iranians, their sense of the United States as the Great Satan went back still further, to 1953 and the overthrow of the Mossadegh government by the CIA. In both capitals, talk of the relationship was frequently tinged with an element of ideological and even religious fervor.
For the hard-liners in the Bush administration, the very notion of engagement with Iran represented a moral compromise. Their ultimate goal was regime change. But by 2007, the catastrophe of the Iraq War meant that a military strike on Iran no longer appeared to be a viable option, at least for the present. So the administration promoted Plan B: a policy of sanctions and isolation intended to cause Iran to buckle under pressure, particularly on the nuclear issue.
Sanctions served to express the international community’s displeasure, but, in my view, they could not resolve the issue. And the notion of Iran buckling was a fiction: although the idea played well inside the Beltway, it had nothing to do with reality. Nonetheless, U.S. hard-liners worked to undermine all European efforts to resume dialogue with Iran, especially when it came to uranium enrichment. At any point that conditions for a breakthrough seemed within reach, the Americans found a way to block progress. To the extent that the United States entered the discussion, on the periphery of P-5+1 attempts to restart negotiations, it was only to set the one condition certain to be ultimately rejected: the futile demand that Iran fully give up its enrichment.
The result was self-imposed failure by way of ideology. Provoked by sanctions and harsh rhetoric, Tehran continued to direct the steady buildup of its uranium enrichment expertise. By early 2007, with a few hundred centrifuges operating and more being installed daily, the Iranians were on their way to gaining the technological know-how the Americans deemed unacceptable. The U.S. policy was yielding one achievement only: the price of any eventual agreement was growing ever higher.
To forge a means of bringing the parties back to negotiations, I began to work on a new set of ideas. However, the United States was not the only country that required some coaxing. France, too, had recently veered toward a more uncompromising stance, and I wanted to understand why.
During a mid-January trip to Paris, I heard from Foreign Ministry officials that their recent statements on Iran were designed to keep the Americans engaged in the process. Bush had talked to Chirac some two years earlier about the very real threat of Israeli military action against Iran, and the French remained anxious. I was reminded of Britain’s none-too-successful strategy prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq: the claim that they were staying close to the United States in order to influence U.S. policy.
18
Rebecca Johnson, who had served as an adviser to UNMOVIC, wrote a detailed rebuttal to Blair in the
19
For example, during a meeting at my home with Nicholas Burns, U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs, and some of his colleagues, he handed me a paper detailing what the U.S. expected from the Agency in handling Iran’s nuclear file. Naturally, I was displeased, but I merely put the paper to one side, saying calmly, “We know what to do about Iran.” Burns’s retort was pointed: “You know,” he said, “that we pay 25 percent of your budget.”