There is No "Smoking Gun"

Lest we forget, there is no “smoking gun” or any viable evidence of nuclear proliferation by Iran that would warrant drastic counter-measures to deprive the country of its nuclear rights, notwithstanding the conclusions of the recent US intelligence report on Iran that confirms that Iran’s nuclear activities today are peaceful.  Has the US intelligence community as a whole recanted and or revised its conclusion? The answer is negative.

Add to this the fact that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) despite its recent inapt foray to the Iraq analogy of asking Iran to prove a negative, i.e., the absence of any WMD program, has closed the book on all the so-called “outstanding issues,” such as the sources of equipment contamination with highly-enriched uranium, this after extensive inspection of Iran’s nuclear facilities following the Iran-IAEA Work Plan of August 2007.  The principle reasons for referring Iran to the UN Security Council in the first place, all those issues have now been resolved in Iran’s favor, according to the IAEA’s February 2008 report.  Per the concluding paragraph of this Work Plan, “"After the implementation of the Work Plan and the agreed modalities for resolving the outstanding issues, the implementation of the safeguards in Iran would be conducted in a routine manner."(3)

This is precisely what is needed today, instead of perpetuating an unnecessary crisis (of choice)(4)  with the help of fabricated evidence and outright political pressures on the atomic agency, not to mention misleading allegations by certain nuclear experts who are willing to risk their reputation by insisting that Iran is manufacturing “weapons-grade uranium.”  

On the contrary, the IAEA inspectors, armed with surveillance cameras at the Natanz enrichment facility, after numerous “unannounced” inspections of this and other facilities have confirmed that Iran’s activity is limited to benign “low-enrichment” (of up to 4%.).(5)  Given Iran’s transparency and the robust Iran-IAEA verification standards, the agency would immediately detect any diversion to weapons-grade enrichment.  Iran has hinted that it is willing to re-adopt the intrusive Additional Protocol if its file is returned from the Security Council to the IAEA.