Iran Nuclear Accord’s Complexity Shows Impact of Bipartisan Letter

[DaNGeROuS KiLLeR]

 

Iran's nuclear reactor in Arak, about 150 miles southwest of Tehran, will be redesigned to no longer produce two bombs worth of weapons-grade plutonium every year.

 

 

A bipartisan group of nuclear and Middle East experts, including five of President Obama’s former senior advisers on Iran, wrote a public letter last month describing the emerging nuclear deal with Iran as weak. They called for a number of improvements, and described the strengthening as a bare-minimum requirement to win their support for the complicated accord.

 

The letter was widely seen as laying down standards that, if unmet, could rally enough support in Congress to kill the deal.

 

As unveiled Tuesday in Vienna, the accord runs to 109 pages of fine print, long lists and paragraph after paragraph of mind-numbing jargon.

 

Even so, many of the new particulars bear on the perceived gaps raised in that letter and, more generally, on what critics and backers of the diplomacy have clashed over for months: whether the pact represents a formidable bar to Iran as a nuclear power or a muddle of half-measures and unwarranted concessions.

 

“This explains why it took so long,” Daryl G. Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, a private group in Washington, said of the negotiation. “I rate this as one of the most complex agreements — if not the most complex — ever to deal with nuclear issues. It’s much stronger that we expected.”

 

 

 

 

 

Robert J. Einhorn, a former State Department official now at the Brookings Institution and a signatory to the bipartisan letter, said the sheer weightiness of the formal deal spoke well for its long-term chances of success.

 

“Analysts will be pleasantly surprised,” he said. “The more things are agreed to, the less opportunity there is for implementation difficulties later on.”

 

The accord focuses on restricting Iran’s production of atomic fuel because making the fuel is much more difficult than designing a nuclear weapon. The makers of the Hiroshima bomb left the design untested because they were so confident of its powers.

 

The bipartisan group called for “strict limits” on Iran’s research into better centrifuges. The tall machines spin incredibly fast to purify uranium, which can fuel reactors or atom bombs, depending on its level of enrichment.

 

The issue flared up after Mr. Obama said in an April interview with National Public Radio that Iran could rush for a bomb with almost no warning during the final few years of the 15-year accord, depending on how quickly it mastered the technical nuances of advanced centrifuges.

 

In the formal deal, a dozen paragraphs detail many restrictions on centrifuge research, including strict limits on numbers and types of Iranian machines, including the IR-2m, the IR-4, the IR-6 and the IR-8. Mr. Einhorn called the specificity a positive development.

 

But David Albright, a centrifuge expert and the president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington research group, said the accord should have pressed Iran much harder.

 

 

 

“It’s a disappointing concession,” he said of its allowing limited work on advanced centrifuges. “It means Iran could have a tremendously short breakout time” after the last year of the accord. “Breakout” is considered the time that Iran, if so compelled, would need to enrich fuel to the purity needed for a bomb.

 

The letter writers also urged assurances of great freedom for inspectors to monitor the accord as well as to investigate clues that Iran long ago had engaged in secret research on nuclear arms — what diplomats called “possible military dimensions.”

 

Despite Tehran’s recent protestations, the accord laid out many details for enhanced monitoring, including to military sites, Mr. Einhorn said.

 

“They get access anywhere they have suspicions,” he said. He also noted that the full accord featured a mechanism for resolving inspection disputes that would allow Iran to be overruled.

 

The accord goes into many details on increased inspection measures, including the redoubling of the Iran corps of the International Atomic Energy Agency from about 50 to 150 inspectors. It also approves computer networks for accord surveillance and such advanced devices as electronic seals that instantly communicate their status.

The standard rules of nuclear inspection let nations influence the means of surveillance, and Iran previously had selected relatively backward gear that often forced teams of inspectors into tedious jobs, as well as painfully long waits for results.

 

Significantly, one of the first documents to emerge Tuesday in Vienna was an inspection pact signed by Yukiya Amano, the international energy agency’s director general, and Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran. It described a “road map for the clarification of past and present outstanding issues.”

 

 

 

 

The document laid out steps to address the military question, including technical meetings, measures and talks. It said a “separate arrangement” had been reached on Parchin — an Iranian military base from which inspectors have recently been barred. It is the site of suspected experimentation into nuclear arms.

 

The inspection document pledged to have the military assessment completed by the end of the year. Outside experts such as Mr. Albright, in contrast, have warned that full resolution of the knotty issue could take years.

 

One newly revealed inspection measure centers on Tehran’s plans for making plutonium — the other costly metal that can power atom bombs. Early in the negotiations, Iran agreed to redesign a half-built reactor complex ringed by antiaircraft guns, altering the facility known as Arak so it will no longer produce two bombs worth of weapons-grade plutonium every year.

 

The concession, announced in April as part of the preliminary accord, quickly fell off the public radar, a measure, nuclear experts say, of its completeness and lack of ambiguity.

“It’s a real success,” Frank N. von Hippel, a physicist who advised the Clinton White House and now teaches at Princeton, said in an interview. “The issue has been so thoroughly addressed that there’s nothing left to discuss.”

 

The Arak redesign, if completed, has potential implications for Iran’s military ambitions. Designers of nuclear arms typically choose plutonium over uranium because it takes less of the dense metal to make a blast of equal size. Weapon designers prefer it especially for missile warheads. The low weight for high power means the projectiles can fly further and hit more distant targets.

 

The final accord spells out in great detail how the Arak reactor is to be redesigned, and its old parts decommissioned. For instance, its old core “will be made