Nuclear deal a challenge for Rouhani as Iran hardliners close in, Parisa Hafezi, ANKARA (Reuters) 4 May 18 – Iran’s hardliners are preparing to bring President Hassan Rouhani to heel if U.S. President Donald Trump scraps Tehran’s nuclear deal with major powers, officials and analysts believe.
Trump has threatened to abrogate the 2015 agreement by not extending sanctions waivers when they expire on May 12, if Britain, France and Germany do not “fix” its “terrible flaws”.
This sets the stage for a resurgence of political infighting within Iran’s complex power structure, Iranian officials said.
Annulment of the accord could tip the balance of power in favor of hardliners looking to constrain the relatively moderate Rouhani’s ability to open up to the West.
While the spotlight is on Trump’s eventual decision there will be a display of unity in Tehran, a senior Iranian official told Reuters, on condition of anonymity.
“But when the crisis is over, hardliners will try to weaken and sideline the president,” the official said.
Nor can the president expect any weakening of Iran’s system of clerical rule as a result of the uncertainty surrounding the nuclear deal, meaning “Rouhani will be in a no-win situation”, said a relative of Khamenei.
For Rouhani the stakes are high. If the deal falls apart, he could become politically vulnerable for promoting the 2015 accord, under which non-nuclear sanctions were lifted in return for Tehran curbing its nuclear program.
“It will also lead to a backlash against the moderates and pro-reformers who backed Rouhani’s detente policy with the West … and any hope for moderation at home in the near future will fizzle out,” said political analyst Hamid Farahvashian.
It is a delicate balance. Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei knows that Iranians, many of whom took to the streets earlier this year to protest against high food prices, can only take so much economic pressure.
Yes, Iran Lied About Its Nuclear Capabilities. But So Did Israel
Netanyahu’s arrogant theatricals exposed Israel’s lack of current incriminating evidence on Iran – and Israel’s hypocrisy about its own nuclear capabilities, Haaretz, Avner Cohen and Ben McIntosh
If anything, the fact that Iran preserved, archived and sealed away its early work on nuclear weapons development is compelling evidence that Iran is following both the spirit and the letter of the agreement. Indeed, the International Atomic Energy Agency has consistently certified Iran’s full compliance with its provisions. Under the deal, Iran treats its past weapons work as something to be preserved in a historical repository.
On the other hand, one should realize that Iran did not, and will not, “forget” its existing nuclear knowledge. If the deal is to be abandoned, Iran almost certainly will try to resume that work.
The plain truth is that while the nuclear deal, like any deal, is admittedly imperfect in some areas, it is far better than the situation we were in when it was signed, arguably six months from a first Iranian nuclear weapon.
Furthermore, none of Netanyahu’s specific “archival” items are dated. He presented no single item dated later than 2003. He presented no “proof” of any current Iranian incriminating nuclear activities; all the archival evidence is rooted in pre-2003 weaponization activities.
As far back as 2007, the United States issued a National Intelligence Estimate that drew a similar conclusion: Iran had run a dedicated nuclear weapons program, but that program was dismantled or halted in 2003 and Iran was no longer in pursuit of those weaponization activities in a centralized and methodic fashion…..
…. Netanyahu repeatedly told his audience that Iran lied about its past activities and therefore the Iran deal must be abandoned.
Yes, Iranian leaders did lie. Yes, Iranian officials did not provide the IAEA with true and complete information on past “possible military dimensions” of its nuclear program. This is well-known.
Welcome to Israeli Nuclear Weapons 101 The National Interest, Daniel R. DePetris, September 20, 2015
1.The Number is in Doubt:
While everyone believes that the Israelis possess a sizable nuclear arsenal, no one really knows how big that arsenal is. In 2008, President Jimmy Carterestimated that Israel probably had a minimum of 150 weapons in stock ready to use if the most dire circumstances warrant. Six years later, the former President revised that estimate and put the figure in the 300 range, which—based on Carter’s calculations—would mean that Israel doubled its arsenal from the 2008-2014 time-period. Iranian foreign minister Mohammad JavadZarif told reporters at the United Nations at the height of the P5+1-Iran nuclear talks that Israel is “sitting on 400 nuclear warheads.” The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists believes Zarif’s figure is far too large and unrealistic given the fact that Israel’s weapons are designed for deterrence purposes rather than actual hire-trigger use. A better figure, the board writes, is “sixty-five to eighty-five warheads” as cited in a Rand Corporation study.
To put it bluntly, the world doesn’t have a clue about how many nukes Israel possesses. And that’s precisely the point for the Israelis: the guessing game swirling over the proliferation community keeps Israel’s enemies in the region on their toes.
2. Israel Fooled the U.S. to Get Its Program Off the Ground:
The Iranian Government has been caught building enrichment facilities by western intelligence agencies twice before. In 2002, a dissident Iranian group provided information to the United States pointing to a large-scale enrichment facility at Natanz. In 2009, U.S. and European intelligence uncovered another enrichment facility at Fordow buried deep into a mountain. But Iran isn’t the only country that has deliberately deceived the United States and the international community in order to provide time for a full-on nuclear program; the Israelis, as Walter Pincus wrote in a Washington Poststoryearlier this year, “blazed [the] trail decades ago.”
In the 1950s and early 1960s, the Israeli Government repeatedly stonewalled U.S. requests for information on possible weapons development and at times purposely lied to their U.S. allies in the hope of giving the nuclear program more room to breath. In 1960, Israel referred to its Dimona reactor both as a “textile plant” and as a “metallurgic research installation” to the U.S. State Department. Foreign minister Shimon Peres assured President John F. Kennedy in a 1963 meeting in the Oval Office that Israel would “not introduce nuclear weapons to the region.”
President Kennedy was so concerned about a possible Israeli nuclear weapons program that he demanded Israel admit American inspectors into Dimona to snoop around. The Israelis agreed to those requests, but made sure that those visits would not lead to anything incriminating: U.S. inspectors, according to a long-read investigative report in The Guardian, were not permitted to bring their own equipment or collect samples at the site.
3.Why Israel Wanted a Bomb in The First Place:….
4. The World Has Long Wanted Israel to Join the NPT:
Ever since 1995, when signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty officially called for the “establishment by regional parties of a Middle East zone free of weapons of nuclear and all other related weapons of mass destruction,” the United Nations has attempted to convince Israel that signing the NPT and allowing IAEA inspectors into its facilities is the best way to accomplish that objective. Israel, however, has refused to grant those requests and has long argued that Israel’s nuclear weapons program (which the country continues to neither confirm nor deny) is not nearly the biggest threat to the Middle East’s security.
Reality turned upside down: Nuclear Israel points at non-nuclear Iran as danger, By Nathalie HriziLiberation News, 4 May 18 In a not unusual display of utter hypocrisy in a televised appearance, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu argued on April 30 that Iran is a “danger” and is violating the nuclear deal formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
Iran has no nuclear weapons.
Immediately following Netanyahu theatrical performance the International Atomic Energy Agency released a statement saying “that the Agency had no credible indications of activities in Iran relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device after 2009.”
Because of the JCPOA, Iran is a highly inspected country. The IAEA has a presence in that country at 18 nuclear sites and nine other locations. From 2013 to 2017 they increased surveillance activities by 152 percent and inspectors spend 3, 000 days in the field each year.
In fact, Israel is the real nuclear danger.
In 2017, it was estimated that Israel possessed 80 nuclear warheads. It has never signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and has indicated that it has no intention of doing so.
Not only is Israel armed with nuclear weapons and an entire military primarily funded by U.S. tax dollars, but it has consistently attacked its neighbors in the Middle East. Israel maintains a blockade and constant aggression against the Palestinians. It has bombed or invaded Iraq, Jordan Lebanon and Syria and Egypt without provocation. It consistently threatens Iran today. ……https://www.liberationnews.org/reality-turned-upside-nuclear-israel-points-non-nuclear-iran-danger/
Retired US Colonel: Israel Is Dragging the United States Into World War III, Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired army colonel who now teaches at Washington-area universities, didn’t hold back in his critique of where the status quo is leading the United States via its client state, Israel. Mintpress News, 12 March 2018 by Darius Shahtahmasebi
Israel is in the process of plunging America into a war with Iran that could destroy what’s left of the Middle East and ignite a third world war, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, warned in Washington approximately a week ago.
Wilkerson, a retired army colonel who now teaches at Washington-area universities, didn’t hold back in his critique of where the status quo is leading the United States via its client state, Israel.
At the annual Israel lobby conference at the National Press Club, sponsored by the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and Institute for Research: Middle East Policy, Wilkerson explained that Israel is headed toward “a massive confrontation with the various powers arrayed against it, a confrontation that will suck America in and perhaps terminate the experiment that is Israel and do irreparable damage to the empire that America has become.”
One of the principal antagonists begging for a war with Iran that Wilkerson identified was none other than Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s Russian-born Defense Minister. Wilkerson stated:
ieberman will speak in April in New York City at the annual conference of the Jerusalem Post. The title is, ‘The New War with Iran.’ It is clear that he’s [at] the forefront of promoting this war.
And nowhere does my concern about such a war focus more acutely at the moment than Syria. As [the] president of France Emmanuel Macron described it recently, ‘The current rhetoric of the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Israel is pushing the region toward conflict with Iran.’”
Despite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s incessant denigrations of Iran, including claiming the greatest danger facing the Jewish state is the Islamic republic — a country he accuses of fanning the flames of anti-Semitism — Wilkerson blew these accusations out of the park using simple logic. He said:
This antisemitism bit, of course, as we’ve heard today, is almost always a weapon of choice for Israeli politicians under stress hurled, in this case, at the country whose Jewish population — by the way, the largest in the Middle East outside of Turkey and Israel — lives in Iran in reasonable peace.”
He continued:
And don’t forget that these words were uttered by the man who, as we’ve heard today, is doing everything he can to expel dark-skinned African refugees largely from Eritrea and Sudan from Israel, where most have come as legitimate refugees.”
……..But why is there a danger that the U.S. will be dragged into this war, and why does Israel need America’s help? As Wilkerson explains:
I believe the answer is fairly clear once you push aside the cobwebs that surround it. The legitimacy of great power is what I call it. And that is precisely what Netanyahu and Lieberman desire.
“It’s also what Riyadh desires, especially with the new boy king Mohammed bin Salman, now an erstwhile ally of Israel.
“In short, the IDF could defend Israel but it could not attack Iran. Not successfully, anyway. And were it to do so, it would be damned internationally and thus isolated even more than it already is today, perhaps devastatingly so.”
Last year, a top Israeli general tasked with writing his country’s defense policy admitted that Israel cannot take on Iran’s military alone if the day should come that the regional powers face off in a direct military confrontation, saying they would need to rely on the U.S. for assistance
Iran will not ‘renegotiate or add onto’ nuclear deal – Daily Mail
Iran says will not renegotiate nuclear deal, warns against changesANKARA (Reuters) 3 May 18– Iran’s foreign minister said on Thursday U.S. demands to change its 2015 nuclear agreement with world powers were unacceptable as a deadline set by President Donald Trump for Europeans to “fix” the deal loomed.
Trump has warned that unless European allies rectify the “terrible flaws” in the international accord by May 12, he will refuse to extend U.S. sanctions relief for the oil-producing Islamic Republic.
“Iran will not renegotiate what was agreed years ago and has been implemented,” Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said in a video message posted on YouTube.
Britain, France and Germany remain committed to the accord as is, but now, in efforts to keep Washington in it, want to open talks on Iran’s ballistic missile program, its nuclear activities beyond 2025 – when key provisions of the deal expire – and its role in Middle East crises such as Syria and Yemen.
A senior adviser to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei also warned Europeans on Thursday over “revising” the nuclear deal, under which Iran strictly limited its enrichment of uranium to help allay fears this could be put to producing atomic bomb material, and won major sanctions relief in return.
“Even if U.S. allies, especially the Europeans, try to revise the deal…, one of our options will be withdrawing from it,” state television quoted Ali Akbar Velayati as saying.
The European signatories to the deal have been trying to persuade Trump to save the pact, reached under his predecessor Barack Obama. They argue it is crucial to forestalling a destabilizing Middle East arms race and that Iran has been abiding by its terms, a position also taken by U.S. intelligence assessments and the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency.
Zarif said: “Let me make it absolutely clear and once and for all: we will neither outsource our security nor will we renegotiate or add onto a deal we have already implemented in good faith.”
Encouraged by Netanyahu, the US could soon withdraw from the agreement – which would spell the end of hopes for reform
Benjamin Netanyahu’s amateurish PowerPoint presentation in Tel Aviv this week – “Iran lied” flashed up behind him in huge letters – was in fairness a great improvement on the cartoonish diagram of an atomic bomb the Israeli prime minister held up at the UN general assembly in September 2012. But it served much the same purpose: to show that Iran can’t be trusted, and is poised to unleash nuclear havoc across the region. The “half-ton cache” of documents he presented as evidence that Iran hid a weapons programme predates the 2015 nuclear deal. John Kerry, one of its architects, tweeted that it represented “every reason the world came together to apply years of sanctions and negotiate the Iran nuclear agreement – because the threat was real and had to be stopped. It’s working!”
This is why, together with Kerry, European powers led by France, Germany and Britain made substantial efforts to push back against Netanyahu’s performance. In contrast, Mike Pompeo, Trump’s secretary of state, lauded it. In the words of Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard, “the Bush administration was better at inventing a phoney case for war with Iraq than the Trump team is at conjuring up a phoney case for war with Iran. But doesn’t mean they won’t eventually succeed.”
Others find it hard to take Netanyahu seriously: he has been warning that Iran is close to acquiring nuclear weapons for more than 20 years. In 1992, he said the country would have a nuclear bomb in three to five years. In 1993, he predicted it would happen by 1999. He made similar remarks in 1996, 2002, and many times since, as the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has pointed out. Not only are his warnings repetitive, they are hypocritical. Ordinary people I talk to are shocked when they realise Iran does not have a single bomb and has been a party to the treaty on the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons since 1970. Israel, in contrast, has never signed it (meaning that the International Atomic Energy Agency has no inspection authority there) and is estimated to have more than 200 nuclear warheads. Let’s be clear: Netanyahu’s files did not show that Iran has violated the agreement. The IAEA has verified 10 times, most recently in February, that Tehran has fully complied with its terms.
Arguably, if anyone has the right to complain, it is Iran. It has unplugged two-thirds of its centrifuges and shipped out 98% of its enriched uranium, but has not seen the economic benefits it was promised. Nearly three years on, not a single tier-one European bank is prepared to do business with Iran. The country’s currency crisis last month showed the extent of its economic vulnerability. Trump’s controversial Muslim travel ban has targeted Iranians and hampered the growth of tourism.
Perhaps more importantly, the collapse of the deal would be seen by the Iranian people as a huge betrayal. In 2013, Iranians brought the era of Holocaust-denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (despised at home after a fraudulent re-election in 2009), to a close. They put their trust in the reform-minded Hassan Rouhani, who subsequently fulfilled his promise to them of resolving the nuclear dispute with the west. Iran’s tech-savvy young people are by and large more progressive than previous generations. Last year, 24 million Iranians re-elected Rouhani by a landslide in an endorsement of his work on the deal. Yet just as the agreement is beginning to deliver, and with Iran fully complying, a new US administration seems set on scuppering it.
Of course, the fact that Iran is fulfilling its nuclear obligations does not mean it has been a good actor elsewhere. But the agreement was not supposed to address Iran’s regional behaviour or its missile programme, and should not be junked on this basis. In Syria, Iran is arguably making its biggest foreign policy mistake since the revolution. It has long defined its foreign policy as defending the oppressed, but for the first time it is clearly supporting the oppressor.
Even with Syria, however, the situation isn’t entirely straighforward. Vali Nasr, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington DC, argued in an essay in the latest issue of the Foreign Affairs that Tehran’s role in Syria could be understood as a form of “forward defence”, a way to survive the collapse of the old order in the Arab world following the US invasion of Iraq and widespread civil unrest. Washington’s efforts to roll back Iranian influence, he says, have failed to restore that order and may inadvertently have made Iran – worried that it has been outgunned by its traditional rivals – bolder: “The more menacing the Arab world looks, the more determined Iran is to stay involved there.”
The chances of a military conflict with Iran are not high for the moment, so long as Tehran has Russia’s backing. But the collapse of the deal would, even so, have terrible consequences. It would destroy the moderates and reformists in Iran for the foreseeable future. This is particularly important since the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is 78, and there has been speculation over his health. The time may soon come when a successor takes his place – the biggest political change in decades. Rouhani has already been under intense pressure from his opponents. The failure of the deal will only embolden hardliners, who are resposible for outrageous human rights abuses, such as the ongoing detention of dual nationals like Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe.
While the reformist president Mohammad Khatami was in office, George W Bush undermined him and shattered Iranians’ hopes of rapprochement by labelling the country part of the “axis of evil”. Trump could be about to make exactly the same mistake with Rouhani.
A team of Greek scientists have called on the government, the European Union, the International Atomic Energy Agency, NATO and other international organizations to take measures that will halt the creation of nuclear power facilities in the seismically active region of Akkuyu in neighboring Turkey.
The 18 scientists made their appeal in a letter against the backdrop of an agreement struck by Moscow and Ankara for the installation of four nuclear reactors in Turkey.
Listing a series of possible consequences, the scientists raised the alarm, saying that “Turkey plans to obtain 10 nuclear reactors by 2030.”
some skeptics think the whole energy argument coming out of Riyadh is merely a cover for its military ambitions.
Trump might be distracted by the prize of winning multibillion-dollar contracts for US nuclear construction companies in desperate need of business. The temptation to settle for a deal that gives the Saudis a path to the bomb might just be too great to overcome.
Saudi Arabia is an outstanding candidate for using solar energy to power much of the country. Its vast and extremely sunny deserts are naturally suited to providing electricity to the country during the day.
Given that Saudi Arabia can build solar power facilities and produce solar energy at incredibly low costs, Romm says, it “doesn’t make a lot of sense from an energy point of view” that Saudi is leaning so much toward the nuclear option, which is notoriously expensive.
The power play shows that the world’s most iconic oil giant is serious about reducing its near-total reliance on oil — and it’s also raising questions about whether the country intends to seek out nuclear weapons in the future.
Saudi Arabia says it’s looking to expand its energy portfolio. If it uses nuclear reactors to generate electricity, that will allow the Gulf country to export more of its oil rather than consume it at home. More exports mean more money for the country’s government.
Energy experts say that Saudi Arabia is trying to make money from its oil reservesas quickly as possible because global demand is expected to decline in the future, with breakthroughs in renewable energy technology and the eventual ubiquity of electric cars. In the long run, it’s aiming to diversify its economy away from oil to generate revenue from sectors like tech and entertainment services.
Currently, Riyadh is in talks with firms from more than 10 countries about buying nuclear technology to build its first two reactors — and American firms are top candidates. But before any US sale, the Trump administration needs to strike a nuclear cooperation pact, known as a “123 agreement,” with Saudi Arabia. In those agreements, countries make promises about how they will and won’t use the powerful nuclear equipment they could buy from the US in the future.
Talks between the Trump administration and Saudi Arabia about such a deal are already underway — US Energy Secretary Rick Perry met with Saudi officials in London earlier this month to discuss the matter, and President Trump almost certainly discussed it during his meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman last week.
But nuclear proliferation experts and US lawmakers from both parties are deeply worried about the deal. They’re concerned that Riyadh could try to use the technology to start a nuclear weapons program and make one of most volatile regions in the world even more unstable. In fact, some skeptics think the whole energy argument coming out of Riyadh is merely a cover for its military ambitions.
It’s more than just a hunch. In an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes on March 18, the Saudi crown prince, widely known as MBS, openly admitted it was a possibility: “Saudi Arabia does not want to acquire any nuclear bomb, but without a doubt, if Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible.”
The Trump administration can try to ensure that never happens. In the 123 agreement, it can get the Saudis to make a legally binding pledge that they won’t pursue uranium enrichment or spent fuel reprocessing down the road — the activities that would allow it to build nuclear weapons.
But the Trump administration is reportedly considering allowing Saudi Arabia to enrich uranium in current negotiations. Experts say there are two main reasons the president may do this.
Second, Trump might be distracted by the prize of winning multibillion-dollar contracts for US nuclear construction companies in desperate need of business. The temptation to settle for a deal that gives the Saudis a path to the bomb might just be too great to overcome.
Saudi says it wants nuclear power for energy purposes. That may not be the whole story.
Saudi Arabia has generally described its ambitions for a civil nuclear energy program as a way to increase energy production and said it doesn’t want to use the program to build weapons.
“Not only are we not interested in any way to diverting nuclear technology to military use, we are very active in non-proliferation by others,” Saudi Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih said at a joint press conference with Secretary Perry in December.
Energy experts say that it certainly makes sense for Saudi Arabia to look into new ways to generate energy so that it can export more of its oil before the value of oil plunges in the future. But they also say that it’s strange that the country is focusing so much on nuclear, rather than renewable, energy.
Joe Romm, a former assistant secretary of the Department of Energy during the Clinton years, told me that Saudi Arabia is an outstanding candidate for using solar energy to power much of the country. Its vast and extremely sunny deserts are naturally suited to providing electricity to the country during the day.
Given that Saudi Arabia can build solar power facilities and produce solar energy at incredibly low costs, Romm says, it “doesn’t make a lot of sense from an energy point of view” that Saudi is leaning so much toward the nuclear option, which is notoriously expensive.
Comparing Saudi Arabia’s plans to invest in renewable energy versus its planned investments in nuclear energy, Romm estimated that Riyadh would be trying to generate at least three times more electricity from nuclear reactors than from renewable energy.
And American foreign policy and nuclear nonproliferation experts generally think that the motive behind emphasizing one program over the other is obvious: building weapons.
“I think a main driver, if not the main driver [of Saudi Arabia’s nuclear program], is its security competition with Iran,” Kingston Reif, a nonproliferation expert at the Arms Control Association, told me.
Iran is Saudi Arabia’s archrival in the Middle East, and Saudi Arabia is worried that Iran could use its civil nuclear program to make weapons in the future, and tip the balance of power in the region in its favor. The nuclear deal that Iran signed on to in 2015 heavily restricts Iran’s ability to make the materials required for a nuclear bomb, but crucial restrictions in the agreement begin to expire around 2030.
Since MBS has openly admitted that Saudi Arabia would feel compelled to chase after a bomb if Iran did, it’s clear that it must see a civil nuclear program as a potential military asset.
Can Trump actually make a strong deal with the Saudis?
The Trump administration is currently in ongoing talks with the Saudis about a nuclear cooperation agreement, and it probably came up when the crown prince met with Trump at the White House on March 20. (Neither Saudi Arabia nor the US’s official readouts of the meeting explicitly mention the nuclear cooperation agreement, but both allude to “new commercial deals.”)
Recent reports suggest that the White House may allow Saudi Arabia to enrich uranium as part of the arrangement. A country can enrich uranium to produce fuel for its nuclear reactors, but that same process can also be used to make an atomic bomb — and that has US lawmakers on both sides of the aisle very concerned.
“The Crown Prince’s interview just last week is reason enough to have the administration pump the breaks on the negotiations and insist that there will be no 123 agreement that includes enriching and reprocessing,” Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa, said in a statement on Wednesday.
“Unfortunately, from the little we do know from the administration, it is looking at this deal in terms of economics and commerce, and national security implications only register as a minor issue, if at all,” she said.
Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has told the administration that there’s bipartisan opposition in Congress to a 123 agreement that allows for enrichment.
The White House has to submit the agreement to Congress for review, and lawmakers have the option to pass a joint resolution of disapproval to block it.
But if that were to happen, it could ultimately backfire: The Saudis might turn to Russian or Chinese bidders for nuclear tech if they’re rebuffed by the US. And analysts say the Russians and Chinese are less likely to be stringent about restricting Saudi Arabia’s enrichment or reprocessing ambitions. For that reason, some analysts argue that Washington might have to consider a compromise with Riyadh.
“I would prefer to have America’s nuclear industry in Saudi Arabia than to have Russian or China’s, so I think it’s useful that we’re reengaging with the Saudis. We should try to get the best restraints on enrichment and reprocessing, including a ban for some significant length of time, say 20 or 25 years,” Robert Einhorn, a former State Department adviser for nonproliferation and arms control, told the Washington Post. “We should show some flexibility.”
Saudi Arabia considers the ability to enrich uranium its “sovereign” right, and it wasn’t able to settle on a 123 agreement with the Obama administration precisely because President Obama refused to grant them that capacity.
Alexandra Bell, an Obama-era State Department arms control expert, told me that the Saudis won’t budge “without high-level pressure from the White House.” That means sustained pressure from people like the president himself or top officials like Energy Secretary Perry are key to extracting any kind of concession on enrichment from Saudi Arabia.
But Trump might not be all that interested in staying focused on that goal. He looks at the issue through a different lens than his predecessor — the prospect of boosting American business could eclipse security concerns for him. Last year, when Trump struck his enormous $110 billion arms deal with the Saudis, he was eager to sell it to the public as a way to create “jobs, jobs, jobs” for the US.
In this case, a deal to build nuclear tech with the Saudiswould provide a boost to struggling US nuclear construction companies. Westinghouse, the most prominent US bidder,is currently going through bankruptcy proceedings and has shed thousands of US jobsbecause of it.
When the Saudis negotiate with the Trump administration in the coming weeks, they’ll probably consider Trump’s eagerness to claim another job-creating deal to be a source of leverage.
Israeli claims on Iran divide US, allies WP, By Associated PressMay 1 JERUSALEM— The Latest on the Israel’s allegations that Iran concealed a nuclear weapons program before signing a deal with world powers in 2015 (all times local):
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s latest accusations about Iran’s past nuclear activities have received a warm welcome in Washington but a far cooler reception in Europe.
The claims appear to have deepened divisions among Western allies ahead of President Donald Trump’s decision on whether to withdraw from the international nuclear deal later this month.
6:45 p.m.
German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas says the International Atomic Energy Agency should quickly follow up on allegations by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who claims that Iranian leaders covered up a nuclear weapons program before signing a deal with world powers in 2015.
Maas told the Bild daily on Tuesday that “the IAEA must as quickly as possible get access to Israeli information and clarify if there are indeed indications of a violation of the deal.”
…….. Netanyahu provided no direct evidence that Iran has violated the 2015 deal, which it signed with the U.S., Germany, Britain, France, China and Russia.3:55 p.m.
Britain’s foreign minister says the alleged new evidence presented by Israel about Iranian nuclear intentions shows why the international nuclear deal with Iran must remain in place.
…… British Foreign Minister Boris Johnson, however, said the presentation “underlines the importance” of keeping the deal’s constraints on Iran in place. He says the deal is not based on trust about Iran’s intentions, but instead is based on verification and inspections.3:30 p.m.
The U.N. nuclear agency says it believes that Iran had a “coordinated” nuclear weapons program in place before 2003, but found “no credible indications” of such work after 2009.
The agency issued its assessment on Tuesday, a day after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released what he said was a “half ton” of seized documents proving that Iran has lied about its nuclear intentions.
The documents focused on Iranian activities before 2003 and did not provide any explicit evidence that Iran has violated its 2015 nuclear deal with the international community.
Tuesday’s IAEA assessment, which repeated an earlier 2015 report, did not directly mention Netanyahu’s claims.
But it noted that in its 2015 report, its board of governors “declared that its consideration of this issue was closed.”
Trump should strengthen the Iran nuclear deal, not blow it up https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2018/05/01/trump-should-strengthen-the-iran-nuclear-deal-not-blow-it-up/?utm_term=.cbcfee8d797eBy Max BootMay 1 Credit Israeli intelligence for another coup: Its agents smuggled 100,000 pages of documents out of Iran about that country’s nuclear program. The mullahs will now have to patch a major security leak. But the revelations contained in those papers are not quite as newsworthy as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed in a made-for-American-TV presentation on Monday. “I’m here to tell you one thing: Iran lied. Big time,” Netanyahu said. So what did Iranian leaders lie about? That they had a secret nuclear-development program called Project Amad … that was shelved in 2003.
No kidding. Iran’s nuclear-weapons development program was widely known — and it was, in fact, the justification for the United States, Russia, China, the European Union, Germany, Britain and France to conclude the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran in 2015, imposing strict limitations on Iran’s ability to enrich and reprocess fissile material.
Netanyahu claims that Iran has violated the JCPOA, a.k.a. the “Iran nuclear deal.” But on that score his evidence is thin. “In 2017,” he said, “Iran moved its nuclear weapons files to a highly secret location in Tehran.” It’s possible that Iran did not come clean about its past nuclear activities, as it was supposed to do under the deal, but no one ever expected that the agreement would eradicate Iran’s nuclear know-how. It was only supposed to stop the actual development of nuclear weapons. Netanyahu is clearly eager to torpedo the nuclear deal, and if he had compelling evidence of Iranian violations he would have presented it — but he doesn’t and didn’t.
There is nothing in Israel’s revelations that contradicts that assessment of the U.S. intelligence community that Iran is complying with the terms of the nuclear deal. In February, Dan Coats, director of national intelligence, stated that “the JCPOA has extended the amount of time Iran would need to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon from a few months to about one year” and that it “has also enhanced the transparency of Iran’s nuclear activities.” Just last week, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told Congress that, after reading the entire text of the nuclear agreement three times, he was impressed that “the verification, what is in there, is actually pretty robust.”
These sober assessments hardly justify President Trump’s hyperbolic claims that the Iran nuclear agreement is the “worst deal ever.” It is, in fact, a successful deal that appears to be constricting Iran’s nuclear development — just as intended.
There were, of course, real limitations on the scope of the nuclear deal, which is why I and other critics argued that President Barack Obama should have held out for tougher terms. It doesn’t allow unfettered inspection of all Iranian military bases. It doesn’t ban Iranian nuclear development in perpetuity; the caps on centrifuges will begin expiring in 2026. It doesn’t ban ballistic missile testing. And it doesn’t prevent Iran from destabilizing its neighbors.
But that’s not an argument for blowing up the JCPOA, as Trump seems intent on doing as early as May 12 (the next deadline for reimposing sanctions lifted under the deal). That’s an argument for strengthening it. French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in their visits to Washington last week, offered Trump a way to accomplish this goal by negotiating a side agreement with the Europeans. The United States and European Union could state their intent to apply sanctions on Iran if it tests ballistic missiles, continues destabilizing its neighbors, dramatically expands the number of working centrifuges, or attempts to weaponize its nuclear program at any point in the future. The United States could also declare that it will keep troops in eastern Syria to contain Iranian power — something Trump is loath to do.
The beauty of a side agreement is that it would not require the assent of Iran, Russia and China — which is unlikely — and it would give Trump the ability to boast, truthfully, that he had increased the pressure on Iran. But it would require him to cease his incessant denigration of the nuclear deal, which he seems to hate mainly because he wasn’t the one who negotiated it, and force him to admit that he failed to rewrite it.
That would be the grown-up thing to do, which is why our juvenile president is unlikely to do it. As Macron said, he is likely to “get rid of this deal on his own, for domestic reasons.” Netanyahu’s performance on Monday night, clearly coordinated with the Trump administration, is intended to give the president the excuse he needs to act on his impulse.
But has Trump thought about what comes next? Silly question, I know. If the United States reimposes nuclear sanctions on Iran, even though there is no evidence that Iran is cheating on the nuclear deal, Iran may continue abiding by its limitations — or it may not. The Europeans may go along under threat of secondary sanctions — or they may not. No one knows what will happen next, but the likelihood is that nuking the JCPOA will undermine, rather than strengthen, attempts to limit the Iranian threat.
Trump is already dealing with one nuclear crisis in North Korea. It is hard to know why he wants to start another one in the Middle East.
Transcend 30th April 2018 , Iraq was the fertile crescent of antiquity, the vast area that fed the
entire Middle East and Mediterranean, and introduced grains to the world.
It was Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization, which propelled us forward
with its invention of writing, domestication of animals and settled life.
Now its groundwater and soil store the radioactivity of 630 tons of
depleted uranium weapons. The waste that has been thrown onto civilian
targets has permanent consequences. It pollutes southern Iraq, Kuwait and
Saudi Arabia with uranium oxide dust that spreads as far as 26 miles,
blowing with sand, weathering into water.
Uranium 238, with a half life 4 ½ billion years, lies on the region in the scattered tons of wreckage.
Contamination is permanent. Its radiological and chemical toxicity exposes
the population to continuous alpha radiation that is breathed into lungs,
absorbed through the skin, touched by the unwashed hands of kids who roam
the scrap metal yards for parts to sell to help their families.
France’s Macron and Iran’s Rouhani agree to work on saving the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, CNBC, 29 Apr 18
French President Emmanuel Macron and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani spoke by telephone on Sunday and agreed to work save the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement.
Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel were in Washington last week, tyring to persuade President Trump not to pull out of the Iran deal.
https://www.rferl.org/a/iran-nuclear-deal-us-pompeo-israel/29199116.htmlSpeaking to journalists alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu while visiting Tel Aviv on April 29, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said President Donald Trump had “directed the administration to try and fix” the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPoA) — a multilateral agreement reached in 2015 to curb Iran’s nuclear program. Should that prove impossible, Pompeo said Trump was “going to withdraw from the deal.” (Reuters)
“My view is… that he will get rid of this deal on his own, for domestic reasons,” said French President Emmanuel Macron at the end of a three-day state visit to the U.S.
France is a party to the agreement between Iran, the United States and four other nations. Macron has tried to convince Trump to stay in. But the president has continued to criticize the deal and has to decide by May 12 whether or not the U.S. will withdraw and reimpose sanctions. That action could lead to the deal’s collapse.
“Any rapprochement between the United States and Iran — such as the nuclear agreement under President Obama — is viewed with intense suspicion and fear as it threatens the Saudi position as the leading American client in the region.”
Al-Rasheed is a visiting professor at the London School of Economics and is the editor of “Salman’s Legacy: The Dilemmas of a New Era in Saudi Arabia.
She says the reimposition of sanctions would, in the Saudi view, constrain Iran’s influence across the Middle East. “The Kingdom seeks the shrinking, even the collapse, of the Iranian economy under sanctions,” she says.
Domestic Politics Drive Hostility
The hostility toward Iran by the Saudi government, under its powerful crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, is being driven primarily by domestic politics. “Prince Mohammed knows that a fearful enemy is a key to his own strength,” al-Rasheed says. “The crown prince has used the rivalry with Tehran to deflect attention from the complexity of his own domestic uncertainties.”
“He rubs out the criticism of his domestic policies by reminding the marginalized royals and the commoners that he is fighting an existential threat from expansionist Iran,” according to al-Rasheed.
Kingdom Seeks Economic Advantage
Saudi Arabia also seeks to maintain its economic superiority over its neighbors, she notes. The reimposition of sanctions by the United States, and possibly the United Nations, limit economic competition from Iran.
“For domestic reasons, Saudi Arabia is fundamentally trying to mitigate the possibility of the reintegration of Iran in the global community,” al-Rasheed says. “The conflict between the two countries will dissipate only if the domestic uncertainties subside or fade away.”
7pm Central Time (8pm ET, 6pm MT, 5pm PT) UTC – 5 From NRC & DOE Deregulation to Techno-Fascist Billionaires Going Nuclear, Plus a Few Songs from Atomic Cabaret REGISTER
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