“Which brings me to another major concern with the JCPOA, namely the issue of Iran coming clean about the possible military dimensions of its nuclear program. For well over a decade, the world has been concerned about the secret weaponization efforts Iran conducted at the military base called Parchin.The goal that we have long sought, along with the international community, is to know what Iran accomplished at Parchin — not necessarily to get Iran to declare culpability — but to determine how far along they were in their nuclear weaponization program so that we know what signatures to look for in the future.
“David Albright, a physicist and former nuclear weapons inspector, and founder of the Institute for Science and International Security, has said, ‘Addressing the IAEA’s concerns about the military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear programs is fundamental to any long term agreement… an agreement that sidesteps the military issues would risk being unverifiable.’ The reason he says that ‘an agreement that sidesteps the military issues would be unverifiable,’ is because it makes a difference if you are 90 percent down the road in your weaponization efforts or only ten percent advanced. How far advanced Iran’s weaponizing abilities are has a significant impact on what Iran’s breakout time to an actual deliverable weapon will be.
“In a report to the U.N. Security Council, by a panel of experts, established pursuant to U.N. Security Council Resolution 1929, the experts state The Islamic Republic of Iran possesses two variants of ballistic missiles that, according to experts, are believed to be potentially capable of delivering nuclear weapons. One, the Ghada missile, is a variant of liquid-fuel Shahab-3, with a range of approximately 1,600km. The other is the solid-fuel Sejil missile, with a range of about 2,000km. To put that in perspective, the Ghada missile has a 650 mile range which puts Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Cyprus, Georgia, India, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, and Yemen in their sites.
“The Sejil missile has a 1,250 mile rage which includes Albania, Belarus, Bulgaria, China, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Greece, Hungary, Kosovo, Libya, Macedonia, Moldova, Nepal, Romania, Serbia, Somalia, and Sudan.
“With so much at stake, the IAEA — after waiting over ten years to inspect Parchin, speak to Iranian nuclear scientists, and review additional materials and documents — are now told they will not have direct access to Parchin. The list of scientists the P5+1 wanted the IAEA to interview were rejected outright by Iran, and they are now given three months to do all of their review and analysis before they must deliver a report in December of this year. How the inspections and soil and other samples are to be collected are outlined in two secret agreements that the U.S. Congress is not privy to. The answer as to why we cannot see those documents, is because they have a confidentiality agreement between the IAEA and Iran, which they say ‘is customary,’ but this issue is anything but customary.
“If Iran can violate its obligations for more than a decade, it can’t then be allowed to avail themselves of the same provisions and protections they violated in the first place. We have to ask: Why would our negotiators decide to negotiate access to other IAEA documents, but not these documents? Maybe the reason, as some members of Congress and public reports have raised, is because it will be the Iranians and not the IAEA performing the tests and providing the samples to be analyzed, which would be the equivalent of having an athlete accused of using performance enhancing drugs submit an unsupervised urine sample to the appropriate authority. Chain of custody doesn’t matter when the evidence given to you is prepared by the perpetrator.