I told Minty that, unless a breakthrough occurred soon, I believed we were heading toward a train wreck. He said he would speak to his government colleagues, and the very next day South Africa submitted a series of amendments to the draft Security Council resolution. These included the call for a ninety-day time-out. They adjusted the proposed sanctions to focus on the nuclear program. They clarified that any decision to lift a suspension would be based on the IAEA’s technical judgment and not the council’s political judgment.
The South African amendments could have created problems for the Western powers, who were intent on having the resolution adopted unanimously. The P-5+1 ignored South Africa’s proposals in public but began acting immediately behind the scenes to exert pressure on the other governments—as well as on Johannesburg—to vote in favor of the unaltered resolution. Their tactics worked; Minty called me the day before the resolution’s adoption to say that none of the eight other members of the council had spoken up in support of the proposed amendments. In the end, South Africa’s efforts had only delayed the inevitable.
The Security Council adopted Resolution 1747 by unanimous vote on March 24, 2007, calling once again on Iran to comply with suspension of its enrichment program. Sanctions included banning Iran’s arms imports and exports, freezing assets, and restricting the travel of individuals engaged in the country’s nuclear activities. British ambassador Sir Emyr Jones-Parry read a statement on behalf of the P-5+1 expressing readiness to continue talks with Iran. The statement included ideas on restarting negotiations based on the language I had proposed. Of course, my suggestion had been to present these ideas to Iran in confidence, before adopting a resolution, not publicly, in conjunction with punishment.
Interestingly, Jones-Parry’s statement claimed that the resolution’s purpose was to “eliminate the possibility of Iran acquiring a nuclear-weapon capability.” This was a far cry from previous language, used by the United States and others, which had expressed certainty that Iran already had a nuclear weapon program—a certainty that rested, as Jack Straw had once put it, on “not a whiff” of proof.[7] From this point on, the Americans shifted their vocabulary to speak only of Iran’s nuclear weapon “ambitions” or “intentions.” It was small comfort.
By mid-May 2007, our inspectors had determined that the Iranians had installed a total of ten 164-centrifuge cascades in the underground industrial enrichment facility at Natanz. Three more cascades were under construction. An additional two cascades were running above ground, in the pilot plant.
According to Olli Heinonen, Iran had achieved its explicit goal of enriching uranium up to 5 percent. Our experts considered that the Iranians had acquired most of the knowledge needed for enrichment. And the pace of expansion was increasing. “They are now installing one cascade per week,” Olli said. “By our estimation, if they keep up this pace, they will have three thousand centrifuges in place by the end of June, and eight thousand by Christmas.” This would put the Iranians well on the way to industrial enrichment capacity. Obviously, they no longer saw a purpose in holding back.
At this point, I envisioned four possible futures for Iran’s nuclear program, which I had the opportunity to lay out explicitly at a meeting in Spain with Prime Minister José Zapatero and his foreign minister Miguel Moratinos.
The first possibility was that Iran would choose voluntarily to return to zero enrichment, or full suspension. That seemed most unlikely.
The second was that the Iranians could be allowed a small R&D enrichment program, as a face-saving gesture. In return, they could be asked to freeze, for a number of years, their efforts to go to an industrial scale. Iran would also have to allow the IAEA to do robust inspections to be able to verify the absence of undeclared nuclear activities—the most important aspect from a nonproliferation perspective. Iran would have to help resolve any outstanding inspection issues. And they would need to commit themselves to remaining indefinitely a party to the NPT.
The third possibility was the status quo: remaining in the pointless stalemate on negotiations, with the West issuing more resolutions and sanctions as Iran moved steadily toward the threshold of industrial-scale enrichment, without adequate inspection or the Additional Protocol and without clarifying concerns about their past and current programs.
There was a fourth possibility. The radicals in the West might bomb Iran. This would produce Armageddon in the Middle East, a region already volatile and chaotic.
In my view, the only option was the second.
Zapatero and Moratinos were among the leaders who took the emerging threat of a major conflagration very seriously and engaged others—including Massimo D’Alema, the Italian foreign minister, and Jean-Claude Juncker, the prime minister of Luxembourg—to be ready to support any diplomatic initiative that might avoid a clash.
Facing the truth of where we were on the issue seemed important, but my efforts to bring clarity caused tempers to flare. On May 15, 2007, I gave an interview to David Sanger of the New York Times in which I stated that by now Iran had pretty much gained the knowledge to enrich uranium, even if they still needed to perfect it. “People will not like to hear it,” I said, “but that’s a fact.” I added that the purpose of the demand for suspension—which was to deny Iran this knowledge—had been “overtaken by events.”
I repeated the same lines in a long interview with the Spanish news service Grupo Vocento,[8] adding that it was incomprehensible to me that the Americans were ready to talk to the Iranians about security in Iraq but not about “the elephant in the room”—the nuclear issue. I also was critical about the lack of progress on disarmament.
The Americans and the French were furious. Greg Schulte, the U.S. ambassador, dropped by with a message from Rice saying that, to her deep disappointment, my media statements were undercutting the unity of the international community and their diplomatic efforts. I was giving motivation, she said, for those who wanted to use military force.
“Tell Rice,” I said to Schulte, “that I am equally disappointed that she did not understand the purpose of my statements, which is to show that the current strategy is not working and that the opportunity still exists to adjust the strategy.” I laid out for him the four scenarios I envisioned as alternative futures for Iran. The worst possible outcome—the use of force—remained a danger. I referred him to an interview that John Bolton had given the same day to Fox News, in which he implied that the United States might yet take this route.[9]
The Americans, Schulte said, did not trust the Iranians. That was pretty obvious, I replied. The United States, he added, needed to maintain its “moral clarity” until Iran abided by the Security Council resolution. It was a poor choice of words; I considered asking when the United States might achieve sufficient “moral clarity” to get rid of its nuclear arsenal, but I said nothing.
As he was about to leave, Schulte hinted that if the Agency was going to be “politicized”—meaning, I assumed, that if I was going to continue to speak in the same vein—Rice had told him the Americans could treat the IAEA budget like that of the Universal Postal Union. The reference was to an argument I frequently made to the Board that Member States should distinguish among UN agencies in terms of their mandates and relative budgetary priorities.
This was a cheap shot, and I told Schulte so. “You are the first ones who have benefited from the Agency,” I declared. “And if Member States decide not to pay their dues, I will be happy to shut the Agency’s doors.”
7
As described in chapter 5, I had gotten into a public spat with the Americans in the November 2003 Board meeting, because of their anger when I said that we had not seen evidence linking Iran’s nuclear material or activities to a nuclear weapons program.
8
Interview with Grupo Vocento, by Dario Valcarcel and Borja Bergareche, “Detecto una escalada gradual que aleja una solución pacífica con Irán,” ABC, May 17, 2007.
9
Bolton’s statement: “If you believe, as I do, that Iran is never going to be chatted out of its nuclear weapons, because it sees the nuclear weapons program as its trump card, then the only recourse is to dramatically ratchet up the economic and political pressure on Iran and keep open the option of regime change or even military force.” Interview on