Iran deal can be effectively verified to prevent "sneakout"
The agreement is based on verification, not trust. According to the U.S. fact sheet, Iran has agreed to accept the IAEA’s Additional Protocol as well as several even more intrusive monitoring and inspection measures that will provide high confidence that Iran is not making bomb material at its declared nuclear facilities and will significantly strengthen the ability of inspectors to detect clandestine facilities
Quicktabs: Arguments
MYTH: A comprehensive deal will not prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons using a covert program.
REALITY: A comprehensive agreement will block Iran's uranium and plutonium pathways to the bomb. Among other features, the agreement will set verifiable limits on Iran's uranium-enrichment capacity and its stockpiles of enriched uranium. It would also dramatically cut the output of weapons-usable plutonium at the Arak heavy-water reactor. U.S. negotiators have stated that an acceptable final deal will push the time it would take Iran to produce enough highly enriched uranium for one bomb to 12 months.
A comprehensive deal also would put in place additional measures to ensure that any covert program is deterred or quickly detected. The additional monitoring and verification under the interim agreement has already dramatically expanded international oversight of Iran's nuclear program through increased IAEA access to sites. A comprehensive deal will provide additional monitoring and verification.
In addition, Iran has agreed to implement and ratify the additional protocol as part of a comprehensive deal. Specifically, it gives the IAEA expanded right of access to information and sites. With the additional protocol, the agency will have regular access to Iran's entire fuel cycle, including facilities such as Iran's uranium mines, centrifuge production facilities, and heavy-water production plant. This will make it far more difficult for Iran to siphon off materials for a covert program.
The additional protocol also helps the IAEA check for any clandestine nuclear activities in Iran by providing the agency with greater authority to carry out inspections in any facility with nuclear material. It also enables the agency to visit the nuclear facilities on short notice, making it more difficult to cover-up any activities intended to divert materials or that are inconsistent with a facilities' stated purposes.
MYTH: 2) Inspection and verification measures in the deal won't stop Iran from cheating.
Think again. Iran already has the most heavily monitored nuclear program in the world save Japan. Global powers have already demonstrated their ability to acquire information about previously undisclosed nuclear activities in Iran. Still, the inspection and verification measures being discussed as part of a comprehensive nuclear deal will be unprecedented in nature and scope. The international community will acquire information and insight into Iran's nuclear program at a level never previously achieved. From start to finish, there will be state-of-the-art science and technology monitoring every link in Iran's nuclear supply and production chain.
Furthermore, if Iran sees timely and sustained benefits from a nuclear deal, it will maximize the incentives for following through on its commitments. Buy-in from Iranian decision-makers and the Iranian public is the only way to prevent a deal from collapsing in Tehran. Iran already has the technical capacity to build nuclear weapons, but it has not made the political decision to do so. The cost-benefit analysis in Tehran is clear: Sanctions and other forms of pressure produced 20,000 Iranian centrifuges. Diplomacy, respect, and the potential for political and economic reintegration were the incentives that produced previously unthinkable limitations to Iran's nuclear program.
Iran’s second option for a breakout would be a covert sneak out in which it uses an entirely new set of facilities that has not been detected by the IAEA. Such an approach is difficult to carry out and would take a few years.7 Iran has twice tried to build covert enrichment facilities, first Natanz and then Fordow, both of which were detected long before they ever came online.8
The parameters agreed to in Lausanne, which create robust monitoring and verification mechanisms, will make it exceedingly more difficult for Iran to secretly develop covert facilities. Most importantly, the inspections regime will include continuous video monitoring of Iran’s uranium mines and uranium mills for the next 25 years and the monitoring of centrifuge production facilities for 20 years.9 This cradle to grave monitoring of the entire process will force Iran to develop secret alternative sources of uranium and centrifuges if it ever wishes to develop a covert nuclear program – a difficult proposition indeed.10
The International Atomic Energy Agency can field a sophisticated array of gadgetry to detect if Iran is departing from its obligations: fiber-optic seals on equipment that can signal the IAEA if they are cut; infrared satellite imagery that can track down hidden reactors; environmental sensors that can detect minute signs of nuclear particles; hardened cameras built to withstand tampering and radiation.
To that list, the West’s intelligence services can add even more: sophisticated cyber espionage operations; an array of seismic and acoustic sensors; and networks of old-fashioned, human spies.
As a deal nears—another deadline looms this week—the Obama administration’s allies are emphasizing these technologies as evidence that the United States will be able to detect Iranian cheating, and in so doing, be able to deter such action.
“This will be a state-of-the-art verification regime, with sophisticated sensors, seals, cameras, coupled with comprehensive audits, interviews, inventories, and a controlled import channel for all Iranian purchases of nuclear-related technology,” said Joseph Cirincione, the head of the Ploughshares Fund, a WMDs nonproliferation organization. “If Iran tries to break out, sneak out or creep out of this agreement, we will catch them."
Advanced spying and monitoring technologies are most useful for figuring out whether Iran is cheating at secret, undeclared nuclear facilities. One tool the IAEA has access to is commercial, high-resolution satellite technology that can give them imagery of locations all across Iran.
“That capability has revolutionized the ability to find things that were once hidden in remote locations,” said Tom Shea, who worked at the IAEA for 24 years and helped establish nonproliferation safeguard procedures.
Satellites—like DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-3 orbiter—can be used to take photographs in the shortwave infrared spectra, for example, detecting a clandestine reactor that is putting off heat. Electro-optical and radar satellites could help complete the picture. (That’s one of the ways that the U.S was able to find Iran’s previously secret underground nuclear facility in 2009.
Another tool for finding clandestine sites is environmental sampling, which has improved to the point where inspectors can identify infinitesimally minute particles to find hidden nuclear facilities or sniff out misuse at declared facilities.
“You can detect individual atoms, very small samples, so it’s virtually impossible to hide that you’ve been doing nuclear activity in a room,” Persbo said.
And by using remote environmental technologies, the IAEA can engage in “wide area monitoring of ambient air and the ground… they can detect [nuclear activities] without going directly into certain areas,” said Daryl Kimball, executive director at the Arms Control Association.
[Question]: IAEA inspectors were quoted in The New York Times as saying the the job was so daunting that the inspectors frequently describe themselves as overwhelmed, monitoring a modern nuclear infrastructure with Betamax era equipment. Is that what we're dealing with?
This is what is going to change. The new agreement will rev everything up to twenty-first century technology. As Tim Mak wrote in a recent piece for The Daily Beast:
The International Atomic Energy Agency can field a sophisticated array of gadgetry to detect if Iran is departing from its obligations: fiber-optic seals on equipment that can signal the IAEA if they are cut; infrared satellite imagery that can track down hidden reactors; environmental sensors that can detect minute signs of nuclear particles; hardened cameras built to withstand tampering and radiation.
These aren't Game of Thrones wax seals on parchment paper. These are fiber optic seals where, if they're tampered with, they send a signal back to headquarters immediately, instantaneously. You no longer require, as these inspectors were talking about, old technology where there'd be sensors or cameras, and they'd have to inspect it weeks later to see if they had been tampered with.
As Andreas Persbo, a verification and compliance expert, has said, "with the present technologies that will be applied, you introduce an extremely fine level of monitoring into Iranian facilities. You could be very assured that the IAEA will detect even marginal, inconsequential breaches or movements from what the Iranians declare that they will do."
Fortunately for the JCPOA, the refrain of an “anytime, anywhere” access may make for a great sound bite, but its utility is overstated by Cotton and other critics of the agreement. An access delay — even one of 24 days — wouldn’t make any material difference to the IAEA’s ability to detect undeclared nuclear activities.
When IAEA inspectors search for undeclared nuclear activities, they look for tiny traces of nuclear material on surfaces. Fortunately for them, nuclear material lingers. And, modern detection technology is so amazingly effective that minuscule traces of nuclear material can be detected years after nuclear activities took place. Countries have tried to sanitize facilities completely to remove every last trace of nuclear material. Iran did so at the Kalaye Electric Company after its secret nuclear program was revealed in 2002. Syria tried the same thing in 2007 after Israel bombed its plutonium-production reactor at al-Kibar. In both cases, the IAEA still managed to detect nuclear material. Those findings were critical to persuading the organization’s governing body to make a formal finding of noncompliance against both Iran and Syria.
Perhaps Iran has learned from its past mistakes and could do a better job of cleaning up nuclear material in the future and keeping its program secret. But, what’s clear is that perfect cleanup — if it were possible — would take many months. After just 24 days, the IAEA would have little difficulty detecting the residue from undeclared nuclear activities.
So, here’s the bottom line: The Iran deal doesn’t provide for anytime, anywhere access, but it does facilitate timely access anywhere — and that’s what needed for effective verification.
What the IAEA actually needs is some preliminary evidence about where a secret nuclear facility might be lurking. The much-discussed but little-understood Additional Protocol was developed precisely for that purpose, and the JCPOA obliges Iran to accept it, first voluntarily and subsequently on a legally binding basis. But, the JCPOA goes beyond the Additional Protocol in two innovative and important ways.
First, IAEA monitoring will be extended to declared yellowcake (the precursor material to the feedstock for enrichment) and to declared centrifuge components. This measure will deter Iran from diverting this material and equipment to a secret program. Iran could, of course, try to acquire yellowcake or centrifuge components secretly instead — but doing so would create more opportunities for detection.
Second, the deal also creates a “Procurement Working Group” to oversee the import of all equipment and material that either is used or could be used for nuclear purposes. The intelligence communities of the United States and its friends spend considerable resources monitoring Iranian imports. If they discover that Iran has obtained any items that should have been declared but weren’t, they will have acquired clear evidence of secret nuclear activities in Iran. They could hand this evidence to the IAEA, which could conduct inspections to investigate further.
All in all, therefore, the JCPOA provides for some impressive verification provisions to guard against sneak-out. That said, no one should be under any illusions. Detecting small, undeclared centrifuge plants is difficult, and there is no guarantee of success. But, perfection is not the right metric against which to assess a nonproliferation agreement. The real question is whether sneak-out is more likely with a deal or without one. And here the answer is clear: Sneak-out would be much more likely without a deal, because the IAEA’s powers to detect clandestine facilities would be much more limited.
More than that, I believe that the terms of such a deal are of less importance to America’s national interests than how the nations of the Middle East respond to it. Since the election of Hassan Rouhani as President of Iran, I have believed that Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah ‘Ali Khamene’i, concluded that he did not need an actual nuclear arsenal because he calculated that there was little likelihood of either an American or Israeli attack and perhaps that Iran was far enough along toward being able to build a nuclear weapon as it needed to be given that threat environment. I also believe that Rouhani’s election convinced him that relieving the pressure of the sanctions on Iran’s economy was a higher priority than making further progress toward fielding a nuclear arsenal—so long as Iran did not have to give up its nuclear capability entirely and forever in return for the lifting of sanctions. Based on this analysis, I suspect that the Iranian government does not intend to cheat on any nuclear agreement or to use it as a cover to covertly acquire nuclear weapons as North Korea did, at least not for now or for the foreseeable future.
Of course, the agreement is far from perfect as no tough international negotiation yields a deal that is completely satisfactory to all sides. Perhaps the greatest weakness of the agreement is that some of the constraints on Iran’s nuclear activities are lifted after 10–15 years, particularly with regards to its centrifuge capacity and ability to conduct research and development on next-generation centrifuges. Opponents will rightfully argue that there is a danger that this agreement leaves in place the potential for Iran to become a nuclear threshold state in 15 years and it is certainly true that permanent restrictions would have been more effective.
The good news is that the agreement still leaves in place a number of sufficient checks that last longer than 15 years. Most important, the key elements of the inspections regime, including the Additional Protocol, remain in place forever or for 25 years, giving the United States and its partners unprecedented visibility into Iran’s nuclear program. Iran is also forbidden from ever pursuing any research and development activities that could contribute to the development of a nuclear explosive device, including uranium or plutonium metallurgy activities. Through the joint oversight mechanism the United States will have the ability to gain visibility into Iran’s research and development plans and block any changes Iran proposes that the United States find unacceptable.
Pages
Iran has received nearly two snap nuclear inspections a month and almost double the overall number of visits it had just five years ago, indicating the value of the deal the U.S. and its allies reached in 2015 to rein in the country’s nuclear program.
[ More ]United Nations inspectors will be present with Iranian technicians as they take samples from a key military site, two Western diplomats said, undercutting an objection by U.S. Republicans to the nuclear deal between Iran and world powers.
[ More ]America’s top spy says he’s “pretty confident” that the U.S. will be able tell whether Iran is cheating on the proposed nuclear deal, thanks in part to special new tools the intelligence community has developed to buttress inspections and international monitoring efforts.
[ More ]The authors explain how the IAEA's environmental sampling process with Iran would work, concluding that "[o]n the basis of what has been made known so far, there is no reason to suspect that the IAEA’s conclusions about Iran won’t be sound."
[ More ]The head of the United Nations agency charged with leading an investigation into Iran’s past nuclear activities defended the probe, hitting back at suggestions that the watchdog had ceded control of inspection of one important site to Iran.
[ More ]In a letter published Thursday, ten current and former members of the House Intelligence Committee -- all Democrats -- urged other members of Congress to visit a secure facility in the House and read the U.S. intelligence community's classified assessment of the deal. That assessment, the members write, makes it clear that it will be "nearly impossible for Iran to develop a covert [uranium] enrichment effort without detection" under the agreement.
[ More ]In classified hearings before a joint Congressional intelligence committee, intelligence community officials affirmed that with the combination of the intel they will gain from the Iran deal and their existing technical collection means, they will be able to successfully verify and monitor Iran's compliance with the agreement.
[ More ]The author reports on how state of the art anti-neutrino detectors will be employed to monitor and verify Iran's compliance with the nuclear agreement.
[ More ]
James Acton reviews the verification proceedings of the nuclear deal and argues that while not perfect, they allow "effective verification" to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons at a covert facility.
[ More ]The UN’s nuclear monitors have great new sensors, but eavesdropping gear and radioactive residue will make their job of monitoring the nuclear deal with Iran harder than ever.
[ More ]