Dan Rather INCONCLUSIVE REPORTS from International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors. United States-backed deadlines and ultimatums. Mixed signals from the regime in power... sound familiar? It should.
It's a road the United States and the world community have been down before most recently with Iraq and North Korea and which it now, with Iran, seems fated to travel once again.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has long been suspected of trying to develop nuclear weapons. For just as long, its government has denied this charge, maintaining that its nuclear programme exists solely to provide power for a growing population.
But this past July, the IAEA found trace amounts of highly enriched uranium at an Iranian nuclear site. Since highly enriched uranium is used for making nuclear bombs, this discovery seemed to put the lie to Iranian denials. When confronted, Iranian officials said the uranium must have come from imported machinery. And when the IAEA followed up by demanding to know which country the 'tainted' machinery had come, Iran stonewalled.
This impasse, along with other apparent Iranian cover-ups and reversals, is leading the United States and the international community down a quick, slippery slope to confrontation with Iran. What form that confrontation will take is still very much up in the air. But the initial signs are not encouraging, and they seem to be providing another perilous case study of just how hard it is to stop a country from developing nuclear weapons once a weapon programme is detected or suspected.
After inspectors detected the weapons-grade uranium, IAEA Director General Mohamed Elbaradei neatly summarised the challenge: "The important thing is to pull them back from the nuclear threshold. If there is too much pressure, too many penalties, they may decide to withdraw from the [Nuclear Non-Proliferation] treaty, and then there is no access at all".
In September the IAEA tried to apply pressure, with only the threat of penalties: The body voted to give Iran until October 31, to prove to the world that it is not secretly building nuclear weapons by agreeing to unconditional international inspections over and above what Iran has already allowed. Iran's first response was to withdraw from the meeting, but not the treaty. Iran's second response, last week, was to announce its intentions to scale back it co-operation wit IAEA to what Iran interprets as barebones compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty. And in a chilling postscript that recalled North Korea, Iran announced that it was, in fact involved in enriching uranium, on "an experimental level".
What now? If Iran does not change its position by October 31, the matter will likely be turned over to the UN Security Council, which might impose sanctions. But the looming problem of a nuclear-armed Iran will remain. And in Iran, this problem is complicated by the long-running power struggle between the theocratic hard-liners in power and secular, reform-minded elements elsewhere in Iranian government and society.
Many experts on Iran feel that, given time, the moderates might win the day. But if the nuclear clock is ticking, time might be something they don't have. And history has shown that when Iranians have perceived a threat from without Iraq, the United States they have tended, predictably, to come together. So a ratcheting up of U.S. and international pressure might have the effect of handling victory to Iranian hard-liners.
There are no easy solutions, and there is so very much at stake. It was not for nothing that when President Bush addressed the United Nations last week, he went straight from his discussion of Iraq into the "challenge...[of] the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction." Alongside terrorism, it seems to be the salient challenge of our time.
Dan Rather is a television news anchor in the USA. Copyright 2003 DJR Inc. Distributed by King Features Syndicate.
