Doug Lorimer
Opposition by Russia and China appears to have stalled Washington's attempt to have the UN Security Council adopt a resolution requiring that Iran, under threat of punitive action, halt its production of nuclear fuel (low-enriched uranium).
Washington's centrepiece of its anti-Iran propaganda campaign, which is aimed at justifying an invasion of the oil-rich nation, is the allegation that Iran's uranium enrichment research activities are aimed at making a nuclear weapon.
On April 9, Iranian scientists produced nearly 2 kilograms of uranium gas with 3.6% fissionable uranium-235 content — fuel-grade uranium (weapons-grade uranium has at least 90% U-235 content).
On May 3, Iran announced that its scientists had enriched a small amount of uranium gas to 4.8% U-235. Making the announcement, Mohammad Ghannadi, Iran's deputy chief for nuclear research and technology, told a conference in Qom that the country's political leadership had ordered him to ensure that enrichment did not go beyond 5%.
That same day, the UN ambassadors of the five veto-wielding permanent members of the Security Council — Britain, China, France, Russia and the US — met to discuss Iran's refusal to suspend its enrichment activities as a "confidence-building measure", as was requested in a February 4 resolution of the governing board of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and in a non-binding March 29 Security Council "presidential statement".
With Washington's backing, the British and French ambassadors presented a joint draft resolution to the meeting that invoked chapter 7 of the UN charter to make it mandatory for Iran to indefinitely cease such research and production. Chapter 7 allows the imposition of international sanctions or the use of military force to counter threats to "international peace and security". However the meeting ended in a deadlock, after the Chinese and Russian ambassadors stated their governments' opposition to invoking chapter 7 against Iran.
On May 11, Russian UN ambassador Vitaly Churkin told reporters in New York that there had been a "change of mood" by the Western powers in the week after the May 3 meeting. Voice of America reported that the "new mood was reflected in the comments of Washington's UN ambassador, John Bolton. Earlier, he had pushed for prompt passage of the British-French draft resolution, with a short deadline for Iranian compliance." However, on May 10 "Bolton expressed skepticism about whether Iran would accept a proposed European package of incentives in return for suspending uranium enrichment. But he suggested the idea was worth a try in the interest of maintaining unity among the five permanent Security Council members."
French foreign minister Philippe Douste-Blazy told reporters that same day that the European Union would offer Tehran an "ambitious package in the domain of civilian nuclear energy, in the domain of trade, in the domain of technology and, why not, in the security domain" if it agreed to halt its enrichment activities.
Speaking on NBC's Today show on May 11, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that while Washington had "no problem with Iran having a civil nuclear program", it had to be a "program that cannot lead to the technologies that lead to a bomb. That means that enrichment and reprocessing on their territory can't be permitted."
However, any move by the Security Council to single out Iran and prohibit it from continuing its IAEA-supervised enrichment activities would violate the 1970 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Signatory countries are legally entitled to research and produce nuclear fuel "without discrimination".
This is of no concern to Washington since it has little respect for the NPT, as former US president Jimmy Carter recently noted. In an op-ed piece in the March 28 Washington Post, Carter wrote: "While claiming to be protecting the world from proliferation threats in Iraq, Libya, Iran and North Korea, American leaders not only have abandoned existing treaty restraints but also have asserted plans to test and develop new weapons."
The NPT calls on nuclear weapons states "to facilitate the cessation of the manufacture of nuclear weapons, the liquidation of all their existing stockpiles, and the elimination from national arsenals of nuclear weapons and the means of their delivery". In direct contravention to this, Washington is spending US$40 billion a year to maintain and modernise its arsenal of 10,000 nuclear weapons.
The April 6 Los Angeles Times reported that the US is "quickly moving ahead with a new nuclear bomb program known as the 'reliable replacement warhead', which began last year. Originally described as an effort to update existing weapons and make them more reliable, it has been broadened and now includes the potential for new bomb designs. Weapons labs currently are engaged in a design competition."
On May 14, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the state IRNA news agency that Iran would reject any offer that required it to "halt its peaceful nuclear activities". Referring to the latest manoeuvres of the US and its European allies, he said that "they want to offer us things they call incentives in return for renouncing our rights". He added: "They are still living in the colonial era and their decisions have no value for us."
From Green Left Weekly, May 24, 2006.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.