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Yukiya Amano, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna on Tuesday. Credit Ronald Zak/Associated Press
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WASHINGTON — The nations controlling the world’s nuclear inspection agency voted on Tuesday to close its decade-long investigation into the work it suspected Iran of conducting to design a nuclear weapon, and instead to move ahead with fulfilling the deal signed in July to limit Iran’s production of atomic material for at least 15 years.
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The unanimous vote by the International Atomic Energy Agency’s board of governors ends the agency’s long-running, and largely unsuccessful, effort to get Iran to fully answer a series of questions about suspected activities.
“This closes the board’s consideration of this item,” said the resolution, which was drafted by the United States and its five partners in the negotiations with Iran — Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia.
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Iranian officials immediately hailed the vote and said it would allow implementation of the July accord, including the release, perhaps as early as January, of about $100 billion in frozen funds and an end to oil and financial sanctions that have crippled the Iranian economy.
“The fabricated issue of the so-called military dimension of Iran’s nuclear program is now history,” Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister and its chief negotiator on the nuclear deal, said on Tuesday, according to the Tasnim News Agency, a semiofficial government news outlet in Tehran.
The report left almost no one satisfied. Senate Republicans who voted against the nuclear accord — and all of them did — along with some Democrats who voted for it said the Obama administration had erred when it decided to close the books on the past in the interest of focusing the I.A.E.A. on inspections that will assure the new agreement is fully carried out.
The Obama administration has been relatively quiet about the resolution, but officials have said in background conversations that Secretary of State John Kerry did not want to give hard-liners in Iran an excuse to walk away from the nuclear deal.
Mr. Kerry said in a statement that the resolution allows the atomic energy agency “to turn its focus now to the full implementation and verification” of the new deal, “which prohibits the resumption of such nuclear weapons-related activities and provides comprehensive tools for deterring and detecting any renewed nuclear weapons work.”
He argued that the resolution would “in no way preclude the I.A.E.A. from investigation if there is a reason to believe Iran is pursuing any covert nuclear activities in the future, as it had in the past.”
Behind the scenes, there was significant debate inside the administration over whether to try to force Iran to conduct a serious excavation of its past.
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Some officials feared that if Iran was given a pass, it would send a signal to other nations — including North Korea — that their obligations to respond to international investigators could be negotiated away in a political deal. President Obama eventually concluded that the larger goal of halting Iran’s ability to produce a nuclear weapon for the next decade-and-a-half was more valuable than setting a precedent about the integrity of inspections.
Outside experts were largely unsatisfied. David Albright, the nuclear expert who founded the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington research group, concluded in a report last week that “Iran did not provide the I.A.E.A. with anywhere near a full declaration about its past nuclear weapons-related activities, and it did not provide the kind of transparency and cooperation required for the I.A.E.A. to conclude its investigation.”
Michael Singh, a critic of the nuclear deal who served on the National Security Council under President George W. Bush and is now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, argued that allowing Iran to leave doubts about the history of its huge nuclear effort was a fundamental mistake.
“By protecting its nuclear secrets, accepting only temporary constraints” on its production of nuclear material and “advancing its missile program, Iran is keeping its nuclear options open for the future,” Mr. Singh said in an op-ed article Monday in The Wall Street Journal, written with Simond de Galbert, a visiting fellow to the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
Yukiya Amano, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna on Tuesday. Credit Ronald Zak/Associated Press
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WASHINGTON — The nations controlling the world’s nuclear inspection agency voted on Tuesday to close its decade-long investigation into the work it suspected Iran of conducting to design a nuclear weapon, and instead to move ahead with fulfilling the deal signed in July to limit Iran’s production of atomic material for at least 15 years.
From Our Advertisers
The unanimous vote by the International Atomic Energy Agency’s board of governors ends the agency’s long-running, and largely unsuccessful, effort to get Iran to fully answer a series of questions about suspected activities.
“This closes the board’s consideration of this item,” said the resolution, which was drafted by the United States and its five partners in the negotiations with Iran — Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia.
Continue reading the main story
Related Coverage
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Iran Meets Atomic Agency Deadline for Material on Past ActivitiesOCT. 15, 2015
Iranian officials immediately hailed the vote and said it would allow implementation of the July accord, including the release, perhaps as early as January, of about $100 billion in frozen funds and an end to oil and financial sanctions that have crippled the Iranian economy.
“The fabricated issue of the so-called military dimension of Iran’s nuclear program is now history,” Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister and its chief negotiator on the nuclear deal, said on Tuesday, according to the Tasnim News Agency, a semiofficial government news outlet in Tehran.
The report left almost no one satisfied. Senate Republicans who voted against the nuclear accord — and all of them did — along with some Democrats who voted for it said the Obama administration had erred when it decided to close the books on the past in the interest of focusing the I.A.E.A. on inspections that will assure the new agreement is fully carried out.
The Obama administration has been relatively quiet about the resolution, but officials have said in background conversations that Secretary of State John Kerry did not want to give hard-liners in Iran an excuse to walk away from the nuclear deal.
Mr. Kerry said in a statement that the resolution allows the atomic energy agency “to turn its focus now to the full implementation and verification” of the new deal, “which prohibits the resumption of such nuclear weapons-related activities and provides comprehensive tools for deterring and detecting any renewed nuclear weapons work.”
He argued that the resolution would “in no way preclude the I.A.E.A. from investigation if there is a reason to believe Iran is pursuing any covert nuclear activities in the future, as it had in the past.”
Behind the scenes, there was significant debate inside the administration over whether to try to force Iran to conduct a serious excavation of its past.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
Some officials feared that if Iran was given a pass, it would send a signal to other nations — including North Korea — that their obligations to respond to international investigators could be negotiated away in a political deal. President Obama eventually concluded that the larger goal of halting Iran’s ability to produce a nuclear weapon for the next decade-and-a-half was more valuable than setting a precedent about the integrity of inspections.
Outside experts were largely unsatisfied. David Albright, the nuclear expert who founded the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington research group, concluded in a report last week that “Iran did not provide the I.A.E.A. with anywhere near a full declaration about its past nuclear weapons-related activities, and it did not provide the kind of transparency and cooperation required for the I.A.E.A. to conclude its investigation.”
Michael Singh, a critic of the nuclear deal who served on the National Security Council under President George W. Bush and is now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, argued that allowing Iran to leave doubts about the history of its huge nuclear effort was a fundamental mistake.
“By protecting its nuclear secrets, accepting only temporary constraints” on its production of nuclear material and “advancing its missile program, Iran is keeping its nuclear options open for the future,” Mr. Singh said in an op-ed article Monday in The Wall Street Journal, written with Simond de Galbert, a visiting fellow to the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
