Report Undercuts Iran’s Defense on Nuclear Effort

Report Undercuts Iran’s Defense on Nuclear Effort
By ROBERT F. WORTH - New York Times
November 8, 2011

WASHINGTON — Even as Iran on Tuesday angrily dismissed a new United Nations report on its nuclear ambitions as an American fabrication and a pretext for military action, some analysts said the report’s wealth of data could complicate efforts by Iran and its allies to defend the nuclear program as peaceful.

In the past, Iranian diplomats have repeatedly challenged United Nations weapons inspectors to publish any evidence that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons. Now the inspectors have done that, in a landmark report that cites numerous documents from a variety of sources suggesting that Iran has tried to build warheads.

The weight of evidence in the new report might even alter the calculus of Russia and China, who have for years been Iran’s chief defenders against European and American claims about Iran’s nuclear intentions, analysts said. But it is unlikely, at least for now, to alter their resistance to a military strike intended to disable Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities.

“China and Russia may be more reluctant now to vouch for Iran’s peaceful intentions,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “But they will continue to argue that dialogue, not coercion, is the only way to resolve this issue.”

Iranian officials began reacting to the long-awaited report even before it came out, suggesting earlier this week that it was a politicized document intended to bolster the case for an Israeli military strike on Iran. Speculation that Israel would carry out such a strike has increased in recent weeks. But in a possible indication of deepening concern, Iranian officials have also stepped up a campaign of threats to retaliate massively against any military action, with one lawmaker warning Tuesday that such a strike would make a battlefield not of Iran but of “the entire Europe and the U.S.,” according to Iran’s Fars news agency.

On Tuesday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran delivered a speech before the report’s release mocking Western claims about the nuclear program — which Iran maintains is for civilian purposes only — and saying that Iran did not need nuclear weapons to “cut off the hands of the United States.”

After the report was released, Iran’s state news agency, IRNA, published a more detailed rebuttal, saying the new evidence was all derived from a laptop said to have been stolen from an Iranian official in 2004. The news agency noted that the International Atomic Energy Agency’s director, Yukiya Amano, visited Washington last week, and accused him of following American orders to release the report. And somewhat bizarrely, the news agency argued that the detailed simulations and tests described in the document might have been purely speculative and unrelated to any real weapons program.

“Even if we accept that those evidences were true,” the rebuttal said, “they are all based on some computerized simulations and not a ‘practical activity.’ That is why the Agency has called the whole project ‘studies.’ There is no evidence in those documents to prove that the studies have been changed into practical projects or activities.”

Finally, IRNA referred to diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks in 2010 in which Mr. Amano appeared to say that his position on Iran’s nuclear program was not substantially different from the American administration — an admission it takes as proof that he is an American pawn.

It is true that the basic allegations in the report are not substantially new, and have been discussed by experts for years. Many of them appear to be those first uncovered in the laptop stolen in 2004, said Muhammad Sahimi, a professor of chemical engineering and materials science at the University of Southern California who has written extensively on Iran’s nuclear program.

But the new report states that the allegations have been corroborated in evidence provided by 10 member nations and by the inspectors’ own research.

“I think the I.A.E.A. has gone out of its way to explain the source of the information,” said Valerie Lincy, who is the editor of Iranwatch.org.

Ultimately, mutual distrust may render the evidence largely irrelevant. “For those who are cynical about Iranian intentions, any amount of proof is sufficient,” said Mr. Sadjadpour, the Carnegie Endowment analyst, “and for those who are cynical about U.S. intentions, no amount of proof is enough.”