IAEA Dirty Nuclear Secrets

Nuclear Secrecy Feeds Concerns of Rogues Getting Weapons

Iranian centrifuges

By Jonathan Tirone

October 22, 2014 9:12 AM EDT

As the world’s nuclear monitor tries to prevent weapons-grade material getting into the wrong hands, its determination to keep its methods secret is raising concerns among analysts that it may be risking a fatal mistake.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has increased its role trying to vouch for the safety of nuclear materials in Iran, North Korea and Syria, just as investigators have become less forthcoming about how they reach their conclusions. By feeding the distrust between the nuclear powers whose collaboration is required to keep the world safe, the agency may unwittingly aid countries seeking weapons, said Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Washington-based Non-proliferation Policy Education Center.

“The IAEA is taking a wrong turn,” Sokolski said in a telephone interview. Openness “is needed not only to assure that IAEA safeguards are improved and don’t get oversold but also to reassure the world that IAEA nuclear technical projects are steering clear of helping anyone make bombs,” he said.

The IAEA, which is charged with both promoting the peaceful use of nuclear power and controlling fuel that could be used in weapons, is holding its quadrennial safeguards meeting behind closed doors for the first time in at least 12 years this week in Vienna. The agency also decided to withdraw information about nuclear projects that have led to proliferation risks.

The IAEA is restricting access to this week’s symposium, which began on Monday, so participants aren’t “inhibited,” spokeswoman Gill Tudor said in an e-mail while noting that the opening and closing ceremonies will be public. Information about technical cooperation, which has been progressively restricted since 2012, will be made available again in the “coming weeks,” IAEA public-information director Serge Gas said in an e-mail.

The militants from Islamic State operating in Iraq, a country invaded in 2003 on nuclear-weapon suspicions and Syria, another nation suspected concealing atomic work, highlight the risks faced by policy makers that nuclear material may slip into terrorists’ hands.

The agency’s secrecy is hindering attempts to improve its safeguards, Russian envoy, Grigory Berdennikov, said on Oct. 20 in remarks broadcast from the opening of the IAEA meeting before the debate was closed to the public. Russia has reservations about how the IAEA handles information from third parties, Berdennikov said.

The debate about improving safeguards has been marked by “suspicion and distrust directed at the secretariat, triggered by perceived lack of transparency,” Laura Rockwood, a former IAEA lawyer, wrote last month in Arms Control Today. “This mistrustspawned further suspicions about the real intentions.”

To be sure, some IAEA members such as Iran would like to see the agency impose even greater controls over information. President Hassan Rouhani’s government asked the IAEA in a Sept. 19 open letter to investigate leaks of confidential data that it said could violate the interim agreement it signed with world powers last year.

Iran’s stance shows the agency is guilty of a double failure, according to Tariq Rauf, a former IAEA official who is now a director at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. While the public is increasingly excluded from the scientific debate that shapes policy decisions, “the agency routinely allows secret information about nuclear programs to be given to select Western countries, which then leak it out,” he said.

Access to technical information is vital in order to ensure that knowledge and financing aren’t accidentally used to help nuclear scofflaws build weapons, says Sokolski. The U.S. Government Accountability Office said in a 2011 report it’s wary about IAEA help to Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria.

Past IAEA technical assistance probably wound up helping Pakistan discover and mine the uranium that went into its nuclear weapons. In Syria, the agency developed a uranium-ore production facility that later drew scrutiny after the Middle East country allegedly built a secret reactor.

Whether the IAEA can address everybody’s concerns through transparency alone is debatable, according to Kjell Andersson, a Swedish consultant hired by the agency to look at issues of openness and public involvement.

“Of course politicians and citizens need to be informed but people are already over-flooded with information,” Andersson said last month at a conference in Vienna. “More information may reinforce negative opinions.”

The IAEA’s inspectors check uranium inventories in more than 150 countries, seal nuclear materials and review video footage to try and detect if fuel is being diverted from its officially sanctioned purposes. IAEA inspectors were at the heart of last year’s accord between Iran and other nuclear powers, verifying that the government in Tehran had capped some nuclear activities in exchange for limited sanctions relief.

Scientists at this week’s meeting will explain how they can use rooftop sensors to sniff out the gases given off during plutonium production, according to the meeting agenda. Others will look at new ways to analyze satellite imagery, more sensitive methods for measuring traces of radioactivity and the difficulties in keeping track of nuclear material at places like Japan’s $20 billion plutonium-separation facility in Rokkasho.

Without letting stakeholders know how those developments will affect them, the technological advances may end up leading to a less effective safety net for nuclear materials, said Rauf, the former IAEA official.

“The agency’s public information policy and engagement has been an unmitigated disaster,” he said. “There should be a presumption of openness and transparency rather than denial of information.”