Pakistan Found to Aid Iran Nuclear Efforts

New York Times
September 2, 2004
Pakistan Found to Aid Iran Nuclear Efforts
By DAVID E. SANGER

A new assessment of Iran's nuclear program by the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency says that, as early as 1995, Pakistan was providing Tehran with the designs for sophisticated centrifuges capable of making bomb-grade nuclear fuel. It also finds evidence that, as of the mid-August, Iran had assembled and tested the major components for 70 of the machines, which it showed to inspectors from the agency.

But the report, issued to members of the agency yesterday as a confidential document, provided no new evidence of the kind of covert programs that the agency has discovered in the last year, and suggested that the Iranian government was slowly becoming more helpful to inspectors. That assessment, American officials said, is likely to discourage moves by the Bush administration to take Iran to the United Nations Security Council for penalties unless it dismantles its program, which the Iranians say is entirely peaceful and which the United States says is designed to produce nuclear weapons.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, returning from a brief visit to Panama, told reporters yesterday that the Bush administration was still studying the report but that the United States would definitely push the agency's board of governors in September to refer Iran's lack of cooperation to the United Nations Security Council, where further steps would be considered.

The administration has tried such a step in the past but failed to get enough votes on the board, and Mr. Powell said yesterday that it remained to be seen "whether there is a consensus'' on the board now.

In an interview last week with The New York Times, President Bush suggested that he would be patient, and would pursue diplomatic means to halt any Iranian weapons program. "We'll continue pressing diplomatically,'' Mr. Bush said.

He said the cases of Iran and North Korea were different from that of Iraq. "Diplomacy failed for 11 years in Iraq,'' he said. "And this new diplomatic effort is barely a year ago.''

Senator John Kerry has argued that Mr. Bush has allowed the nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea to speed forward while the United States is engaged in Iraq.

The report will help Europe and Russia - two of Iran's largest trading partners, with much to lose if penalties are enacted - which are seeking to defuse any confrontation. In the absence of what one senior European official called "a smoking nuke,'' the report issued yesterday seems likely to delay any major decisions on how to deal with Iran until after the American presidential election. But the report also suggested that the Iranians fully intended to move forward with the production of uranium, on a much larger scale than in the past.

The report, issued under the name of the agency's director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, notes Iranian plans to conduct an industrial-scale test of a plant that converts raw uranium into nuclear fuel. Iranian officials, the agency reported, plan to turn 37 tons of nearly raw uranium, called yellowcake, into uranium hexafluoride. That, in turn, is poured into the centrifuges for enrichment.

Several specialists in the United States government and outside said that amount of uranium could be enough to produce fuel for five or six atomic weapons. But Iran insists that it only intends to use enriched uranium for electric production, a contention American officials dismiss. A country with huge oil reserves, they say, has no need for nuclear power.

The report states that Iran received the design for an advanced centrifuge, called a P-2 because it was a second-generation machine designed in Pakistan, as early as 1995. American intelligence officials have said they had no evidence, throughout the 1990's, that Iran was receiving aid from Pakistan, so the atomic energy agency's findings suggest what one senior intelligence official called "a fairly major failure, despite the fact that we were watching Iran and Pakistan quite closely.'' Three years later, Pakistan conducted its first nuclear tests.

But Iran, which had invested in an earlier model of the centrifuges, has insisted to inspectors that it did not begin producing the newer, far more sophisticated machinery until two years ago. The agency said it was still investigating that.

Though the report does not cite the source of the purchase, it is now known to have come from the laboratories of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of the Pakistani bomb. Pakistan's government has argued that it had no knowledge of Dr. Khan's clandestine activities, which included sales to Libya and North Korea starting about the same time.

"What Iran got came almost entirely from one country,'' said a senior international diplomat who had been briefed on the findings. "And it seems to point directly back to Pakistan's own laboratories.''

The origin of the equipment is especially important because Iran is trying to explain why some samples of uranium taken by the agency show that it has been enriched far beyond the levels needed to produce nuclear power, though a little short of the usual purity for bomb fuel. In the report, the agency says that its studies indicate that it is "plausible'' that some of the samples it took in Iran had been contaminated by equipment that was previously used elsewhere, presumably in Pakistan.

If it is true, it would help lift suspicion that Iran was already producing uranium suitable for arms. But agency officials are still suspicious that some of the uranium could have been produced elsewhere in Iran, at plants they have yet to discover.