It turns out that the head of an organization in charge of monitoring compliance with nuclear non-proliferation is urging the world community to accept the idea that another country will join the nuclear club in the near future.

If this is so, the much-abused Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons may be buried -- what's the point of having a treaty that is so easy to breach? Moreover, even the U.N. Security Council is unable to uphold it.

On March 24 it approved Resolution 1747, providing for tougher sanctions compared with the previous resolution and giving Iran 60 days to stop all uranium enrichment. If you believe Iranian officials, a total of 1,600 centrifuges are currently in operation at the Natanz uranium enrichment facility. Upon the expiry of this deadline, ElBaradei should submit to the Security Council a report on Iran's compliance with the resolution.

When the resolution was adopted, Iran had two cascades with 164 centrifuges each. Iran has refused to stop uranium enrichment. In order to reach an industrial level of nuclear fuel production for its nuclear power plants, Tehran intends to launch 3,000 centrifuges. The Iranian leaders have declared their intention to have more than 50,000 centrifuges up and running in order to meet the requirements of their civilian nuclear power industry.

This is no bluff. The Natanz facility is designed for 54,000 centrifuges. They will be capable of producing the required amount of nuclear fuel for 20 nuclear units with an aggregate capacity of 20,000 megawatts that are mentioned in all of Iran's plans for its nuclear industry. The first unit is now under construction in Bushehr.

The experience of the Bushehr nuclear plant shows that the construction of 20, 1-megawatt units will take decades. This is why experts are wondering why Iran is rushing to get 50,000 centrifuges if it does not even have the technology to handle enriched uranium. The very idea of starting industrial uranium enrichment on 3,000 centrifuges, not to mention the commissioning of the entire enrichment facility in Natanz, is counterproductive.

However, there are other calculations that allow one to look at this problem from another angle. Experts believe that 3,000 centrifuges can enrich uranium to the level of 80 percent to 90 percent required for one nuclear bomb, whereas 50,000 can accomplish this task in five to seven weeks or two months at most.

These facts allow the West, especially the United States, Iran's main opponent, to accuse Tehran of trying to develop technology for producing weapons-grade uranium.

The world community will soon try to lure Iran back to the negotiating table. The U.N. Security Council is drafting its third resolution on Iran, and on Friday Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, will meet Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign and security policy chief, for a second round of talks.

However, these talks are giving rise to many questions. It seems that Solana, a skillful negotiator, does not really know what he wants from Iran. In turn, Iran is playing the same game -- it does not know what the world should expect from it.

After the first round of the talks in Ankara, Turkey, in the latter half of April, Larijani and Solana reported progress in drawing up a common Iran-EU position. It is clear what progress Larijani had in mind. Since last March Iran has increased its nuclear-enrichment capacity by five times!

Moreover, Tehran adamantly rejects the idea of resuming talks with strings attached -- Iran is supposed to stop all uranium enrichment if it wants to return to the negotiating table. The more centrifuges go into operation, the more confident and uncompromising Tehran's tone becomes.

But what did Javier Solana have in mind when he talked about progress?

Maybe he thinks like ElBaradei, and for him progress means that he has also realized that it is no longer urgent to demand that Iran cease nuclear enrichment activities.

earlier related report
Walker's World: U.S.-Iran discord By Martin Walker - UPI Editor Emeritus Washington (UPI) May 29 - The mood music from Tehran on the eve of the long-awaited bilateral meeting with the United States Monday could hardly have been more discordant. The reality was almost as bad.

The talks Monday between U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Iranian Ambassador Hassan Kazemi Qomi (which also included Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari) were officially meant to cover only matters of internal security in Iraq. According to U.S. diplomatic sources, Crocker intended to raise Iran's support for militant groups and supplying them with weapons, as well as Iranian interference in the political process in Iraq.

Crocker did so, with little effect, and dismissed the Iranian proposal to establish a Council of Three, Iran, Iraq and the United States, for ongoing security discussions. He also made it clear that the United States did not find helpful the other Iranian proposal, to strengthen the current Iraqi government with Iranian arms and training.

To sweeten the atmosphere, the United States last week announced that its Iran-Syria Policy and Operations Group had been disbanded. This inter-agency task force, which included the CIA as well as the U.S. Treasury and State Department, coordinated attempts to isolate Syria and Iran, to disrupt their access to the international banking system, and to pressure the regimes to reform or change.

The group met weekly throughout last year and at least until March of this year in conditions of some secrecy, and was modeled on a similar group that coordinated actions to bring pressure on Iraq before the 2003 war.

It was thus seen by Damascus and Tehran as an attempt to destabilize their societies and to bring about regime change through "soft" subversion. Those suspicions were reinforced by the recent ABC-TV news reports that the United States was covertly supporting anti-Tehran Baluchi rebels in eastern Iran, close to the Pakistani border.

So it should not have come as a great surprise that Iran's Intelligence Ministry last week announced that it had "succeeded in identifying and striking blows at several spy networks comprised of infiltrating elements from the Iraqi occupiers in western, southwestern and central Iran."

"These spy networks were operating under the guidance of the occupiers' intelligence services and with the support of some influential Iraqi groups and factions," the statement, broadcast on Iranian state TV, went on.

Most ominously for the U.S-Iran talks, Tehran's Intelligence Ministry related this supposed U.S. plan to subvert the regime to the arrest of the Iranian-American scholar Haleh Esfandiary, who directs the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. (Interest declared: This reporter is a senior scholar of that same institution and Haleh is a friend as well as a colleague.) Haleh is one of five Western-based scholars and NGO officials who have now been detained.

"In primary interrogations, she (Haleh) reiterated that Soros Foundation has established an unofficial network with the potential of future broader expansion, whose main objective is overthrowing the system," the Intelligence Ministry said. (All quotations come from the official IRNA news agency report.)

"According to those elaborations, some of those foundations send invitations to Iranian thinkers to give lectures, participate at seminars, or to present research projects, allocating budgets to such activities ... trying to choose active partners in our country and link them to the decision maker circles and organization in the United States. In this respect the unseen key role played by certain intelligence agents and undercover officials in pushing forth the objectives of such projects is to be noted."

"Although the short term objectives of the above mentioned foundations are mainly linked to their apparent activities, their mid-term objectives include a type of culture making, foundation making, and network establishment in the country, and their expansion in the long run, that is seriously pursued," the Intelligence Ministry said, citing parallels with the work of western-backed NGOs in the Rose revolution in Georgia and the Orange revolution in Ukraine.

"The ultimate goal of those foundations, too, is to fortify those networks at fields that are of interest for them and reaping the fruits of such activities in due time, that is nothing but people's confrontation with the system. This U.S. designed model is aimed at soft overthrowing of the system."

The Iranians, it should be recalled, have assumed since they were listed by President Bush in 2002 as a charter member of the "axis of evil" that they were targets for regime change. So the overall prospects from the Iranian side did not look promising for Monday's talks.

And while the United States has made the significant gesture of disbanding the Iran-Syria Policy and Operations Group, the Iranians are looking at other aspects of U.S. policy, including the deployment in the Persian Gulf for "war games" of two aircraft carrier task forces, with 17,000 personnel aboard and 140 aircraft.

The Iranians are assumed by U.S. policy-makers to be divided between the hard-liners of the Intelligence Ministry, the Revolutionary Guards and the nuclear program officials, and the more reasonable moderates in the Foreign and Economic ministries. The U.S. strategy of talks and war games, or hard cop and soft cop approach, is thus aimed at exploiting the differences between hard-liners and moderates.

But the Iranians see a similar split in the Bush administration, between the moderates at the State Department and in Congress, and the hard-liners around Vice-President Cheney and in the Pentagon. The Iranians in turn seek to exploit those differences, just as they seek to exploit differences between the United States and its European allies, and between them and the Russians and Chinese on the United Nations Security Council.

In the meantime, according to the international Atomic Energy Agency, Iran now has 1,300 centrifuges running in cascade a the Natanz plant to produce nuclear fuel, allegedly for a nuclear power stations that has yet to be completed.

And Natanz is now well protected. In January this year, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov announced that Russia had completed the delivery of Tor-M1 anti-aircraft missiles to Iran in an estimated $1.4 billion deal. Ivanov stressed that the missiles were "100 percent defensive weapons" and that Russia did not violate any international agreements by selling them, adding "if Iran needs other defensive armaments, we are ready to cooperate."

Iran's hard-liners thus feel somewhat more secure and somewhat less ready for a compromise, even if Monday's talks failed to overcome the ominous mood music and find some common ground that could help resolve this worsening crisis. The only good news from this long-awaited encounter was that at least the two sides are talking. And there are many in Tehran and in Washington who have their doubts about even that.

earlier related report
Hill Urges NKorea To Start Shutting Down Reactor
Jakarta (AFP) May 29 - North Korea needs to "get moving" on shutting down its nuclear reactor while a complicated banking dispute is being resolved, US envoy Christopher Hill said here Tuesday. Hill said resolving the banking row blocking a nuclear disarmament accord with North Korea was proving "very difficult" and lengthy.

But he said Pyongyang should not wait until the issue was resolved, and instead invite international nuclear watchdog inspectors into the nation, a major step to shutting down its reactor.

"What the DPRK (North Korea) needs to do is get moving on denuclearisation, start implementing the deal," Hill told reporters in the Indonesian capital Jakarta.

"They know that we are working very hard on this matter, on the banking issue.

"But it's important that the DPRK get on with their role, invite the IAEA inspectors back into North Korea to shutdown the reactor and begin the process of getting out of the nuclear business," he said, referring to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

North Korea carried out its first nuclear weapons test last October. It has promised to start shutting down its nuclear reactor in exchange for fuel oil under the first stage of an accord reached at six-nation talks in February.

But the North refuses to move until it recovers 25 million dollars in funds that were frozen in Macau's Banco Delta Asia after Washington blacklisted the bank in 2005 for allegedly laundering illicit funds.

Hill is leaving Indonesia later Tuesday for China for discussions with Beijing officials on ways to resolve the issue.

"I can't make a predication on when it's going to be resolved. I'm looking forward to our talks in Beijing, we have come up with some ideas," he said.

"The whole process would be helped immeasurably if the North Koreans simply left it to us to work on this and got on with their task, which is to get the IAEA in there and shut down the facility that has caused the problem in the first place."

The United States said it had lifted the restrictions on the frozen funds in March. But the North has had problems arranging a transfer since banks have been unwilling to touch apparently tainted money.

The first phase of the February deal was supposed to have been completed by April 14. The six-nation talks include host China, the two Koreas, the United States, Japan and Russia.

Hill, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, has been in Jakarta for four days meeting Indonesian officials on investment issues and strengthening military ties between the two nations.

(Pyotr Goncharov is a political commentator for RIA Novosti. This article is reprinted by permission of RIA Novosti. The opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.)

Email This Article

Related Links
International Atomic Energy Agency
Learn about nuclear weapons doctrine and defense at SpaceWar.com
Learn about missile defense at SpaceWar.com
All about missiles at SpaceWar.com
Learn about the Superpowers of the 21st Century at SpaceWar.com

Memory Foam Mattress Review

SPACE MEDIA NETWORK PROMOTIONS Solar Energy Solutions Tempur-Pedic Mattress Comparison ... Newsletters :: SpaceDaily :: SpaceWar :: TerraDaily :: Energy Daily XML Feeds :: Space News :: Earth News :: War News :: Solar Energy News