Valdai Club

As soon as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was signed in Vienna a new major problem occurred regarding how to keep Iran from becoming a real, as opposed to a virtual, nuclear weapons state after the constraints in JCPOA expire.

Whatever the goals of the current leadership in Tehran, we need to consider how Iranian intentions might change a decade from now when Iran has greater latent nuclear weapons potential. For example, Russia, China, and the United States must cooperate with other countries and with international nonproliferation bodies to ensure that Iranian procurement remains within legal channels. Some calculations indicate that as much as 90 percent of Iran’s ballistic missile and nuclear technology imports passes through Chinese ports. We need to consider whether it makes sense to focus controls and enforcement on a limited set of highly proliferation sensitive technologies even though Iran has shown skill at using or upgrading low-grade dual-use components for its nuclear program. In addition to influencing the flow of civilian nuclear technologies and materials to Iran, such countries as Russia, China, and the United States will likely remain leading players in the Middle Eastern and Central Asian security and nonproliferation architectures. For example, the three countries might want to encourage Iran to join the Central Asian Nuclear Free Zone or accept other nonproliferation obligations in return for full membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

An immediate challenge for the JCPOA will be ensuring that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has sufficient resources and great power backing to enforce the agreement (the IAEA has been spending about one billion extra euros each month to enforce the 2013 P5+1 agreement, which remains in force). The Agency first needs to complete its inspection of Iran’s nuclear program to establish a baseline for future monitoring. It must then widen its mission to detect any undeclared nuclear activities in Iran. The country’s large size, extensive nuclear activities, and proven skill at sophisticated concealment and sanctions circumvention will present a major challenge for monitoring its nuclear program despite Iran’s provisional adoption of the Additional Protocol and pledge to allow IAEA monitoring of its entire nuclear supply chain—from mining and milling, to conversion and enrichment, to nuclear reactor operations and spent fuel storage. Russian, Chinese, and U.S. cooperation could prove critical for achieving a successful IAEA mission, particularly if Tehran rejects an Agency request of access to its suspect nuclear sites. Furthermore, though the IAEA will likely have access to Western intelligence and detection technologies, the Agency would benefit from Russian technologies and data regarding Iranian nuclear activities and Chinese sources on Iranian dual-use procurements.

Monitoring Iran will tax the Agency’s overall nonproliferation potential. The Agency will have at its disposal a wide array of advanced detection technologies such as new environmental sampling techniques to ensure that Iran does not breach the terms of the JCPOA but it is impossible to tell at this point how well these measures will perform. In many cases, the IAEA inspectors will learn as they go. The same will prove true regarding the effectiveness of societal means of verification in an authoritarian regime, which restricts access to social media and advanced information technologies. Notwithstanding these constraints, several of the most important revelations regarding the Iranian nuclear program came from dissidents and opposition groups, including the first information about the Natanz enrichment plant, which originally alerted many observers to the dangerous extent of the Iranian nuclear enterprise. Success would bolster confidence in the Agency, while the Iran project will help build the IAEA’s capacity to manage the expected growth in the global use of nuclear energy in coming years. Technological advances and geographical expansion means that demands on the Agency’s monitoring, verification, and safeguards systems are becoming more complex. Meanwhile, the IAEA’s budget has not been increasing sufficiently fast to compensate for the expansion. Russia, China, and the United States are best positioned to directly support and galvanize other states to provide resources to the Agency. The United States has been the largest contributor to the IAEA Nuclear Security Fund, and provides equipment, experts, and trainers to countries. Washington also provides almost two-thirds of extra-budgetary contributions that support the IAEA’s Peaceful Uses Initiative to finance activities that promote peaceful uses of nuclear technologies. China recently has started to make voluntary contributions to the IAEA. Increasing support from China and Russia is important for making these programs more stable by diversifying their funding sources. For this reason, it is necessary to contain the dispute between Moscow and the Agency over the IAEA’s report on the nuclear facilities in Crimea, which many of the Agency’s member governments consider Ukrainian territory.

Supporters of the Iran deal hope that it will encourage and even provide a pathway for North Korea and other countries to constrain their own nuclear weapons potential without the use of force or crippling sanctions. The day after the July 14 nuclear deal, the newspaper of the ruling Chinese Communist Party, The People’s Daily, said the result “show[ed] that dialogue and negotiation were the only correct and effective path to appropriately resolve the Iran nuclear issue, and that certain countries threatening to use force on Iran and imposing unilateral sanctions are not acceptable.” Anton Khlopkov, the director of the Moscow-based Center for Energy and Security Studies (CENESS), asserted that the resolution of the Iranian nuclear issue “lay a good foundation to activate efforts on resolving the crisis in [the] DPRK” and showed that “the importance of joint international efforts and the efficacy of using political and diplomatic instruments instead of military ones in resolving crises.”

On the one hand, widespread adoption of the JCPOA-style intrusive inspections, with continuous surveillance and complete access throughout the production chain, and mandatory application of the IAEA Additional Protocol (AP) would prove generally welcome and decrease Iranian irritation at being singled out indefinitely. The AP, a voluntary supplement to the IAEA’s traditional comprehensive safeguards agreement, requires parties to submit to the IAEA additional information on nuclear-related activities, including regarding R&D activities, the production of uranium and thorium, and nuclear-related imports and exports. The Protocol also provides IAEA inspectors with greater rights of access to suspect sites, such as short-notice visits, environmental sampling, and use of remote monitoring techniques to detect illicit activities. President Obama rightfully boasted that the JCPOA offers “unprecedented verification,” but now the precedent has been established and must be applied more widely.

Conversely, if we are not careful, the JCPOA could set a bad precedent, compounding the impact of the India-U.S. nuclear deal, by reducing objections to states pursuing enrichment and reprocessing (ENR) and other sensitive nuclear technologies. A better standard for nuclear technology transfers is that of the 123 Agreement for Peaceful Civilian Nuclear Energy Cooperation between the United Arab Emirates and the United States in which the UAE voluntarily agreed not to possess ENR technologies. Although the United States has had difficulty securing consensus in the NPT and the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) on this principle, Russia, China, and the United States can insist on ENR renunciation in their bilateral civil nuclear cooperation. Moscow already helpfully requires that countries receiving enriched uranium fuel for their reactors repatriate the spent fuel to Russia, though technological and financial impediments have prevented Moscow from pursuing its own reprocessing on any large scale.

Despite understandable aspirations, it is by no means clear what the lessons the Iran negotiations and the JCPOA accord offer for North Korea’s more determined nuclear weapons aspirations. Pyongyang has an even worse record than Tehran in meeting its international obligations and agreements. Unlike Iran, North Korea has already tested several nuclear explosive devices and has produced both weapons-grade uranium and plutonium. Pyongyang has called any comparison with Iran “illogical” since North Korea “is a nuclear weapons state both in name and reality” and wants to negotiate arms control rather than denuclearization agreements. Meanwhile, certain aspects of the South Korea-U.S. relationship could complicate their joint management of proliferation issues including the differences between Seoul and Washington over their renewal of their civil nuclear cooperation agreement and South Korea’s acquisition of longer-range ballistic and cruise missiles. U.S. tensions with Russia and China have likely made Pyongyang bolder in resisting meeting its nuclear disarmament obligations. Nonetheless, while the North Korean government has obstinately refrained from renouncing its nuclear weapons ambitions, international pressure combined with Pyongyang’s interests in improving relations with at least Moscow seems to have discouraged any DPRK nuclear or long-range ballistic tests since 2013. Although Pyongyang’s relations with Washington remain frozen and its ties with Beijing are not noticeably better, the North Korean leadership has shown interest in developing ties with Russia. Since we are in a race between the time when the DPRK develops a credible nuclear deterrent and moment when the regime in Pyongyang ends, Russia and the United States should join other countries in considering how they might follow the Iran playbook and cooperate with Moscow as well as Beijing in pushing for North Korean nuclear disarmament.