by CKR
Many people are questioning the effectiveness of the NPT. The usual crowd on the right sees it as one more impediment to the US’s doing anything it wants. The more thoughtful are concerned that, because North Korea and Iran seem to be testing the limits of the treaty, it may be outdated or useless.
There are some problems with the NPT that the situations with Iran and North Korea are making obvious. Article IV, which allows peaceful nuclear power to signatories, needs to take into account that the full nuclear fuel cycle also can be used to manufacture bombs. Compliance may be a problem, too. Penalties for noncooperation are not spelled out in the treaty. The procedure is to refer the case to the Security Council.
But having an NPT is better than not having it. The contortions that the United States went through to deal with Israel’s nuclear ambitions, before and as the NPT was being developed, stand in stark contrast to what the IAEA can now do in its inspections.
The French helped Israel build Dimona, but the United States became concerned about Dimona’s purpose. When President John F. Kennedy found out about Dimona, he insisted on inspections. The United States had not supplied any part of the Dimona reactor, and Kennedy had to base his demands on the overall US security relationship with Israel. That security relationship consisted mainly of arms sales. Kennedy had proposed inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, but Israel refused, and Kennedy felt that some inspections were better than none.
Kennedy, in a letter to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol of 5 July 1963, crafted the conditions for the visits well:
First, the initial site visit must take place before the start-up phase—that is, before fuel was loaded into the reactor. Second, American visitors should have “access to all areas of the Dimona site and to any related part of the complex, such as fuel fabrication facilities or a plutonium separation plant.” Third, “sufficient time [should] be allotted for a thorough examination.” Fourth, the visits should be conducted “at intervals of six months.” (Cohen, p. 176)Seeing the reactor before fuel was loaded would give the inspectors a baseline from which to judge observations of subsequent visits. The six-month requirement fit with when fuel might be replaced if the reactor were being used to produce plutonium.
The inspections were sharply limited by Israel. Three US officials with technical backgrounds conducted the inspections. Israel never allowed inspections more frequently than once a year. Israel scheduled the visits on Saturdays, when most workers were home for the Sabbath, and limited the time available to the inspectors both procedurally and by scheduling other activities.
The US visits to Dimona were based on a political agreement between Kennedy and Eshkol, not on international agreements. At the time Kennedy negotiated them, there was no such thing as the NPT, although the IAEA was available for inspections. Israel’s severe limitations on the inspections succeeded in hiding its reprocessing plant, which was located in the lower floors of the reactor complex.
During this time, the Arabs, particularly President Gamel Abdul Nasser of Egypt, were threatening war if they found that Israel was making nuclear weapons. The US put itself, inadvertently, in the position of guaranteeing the non-weapon nature of Dimona to the Arabs. Reports were issued after each inspection. The reprocessing plant, the key to recovering plutonium for a bomb, was never discovered and therefore never mentioned in the reports.
However, as the visits continued, the inspectors had more and more questions. There were suspicious discrepancies, like a fuel fabrication facility and a uranium metal plant that seemed oversized for Israel’s stated purposes (Cohen, p. 179). Also, Dimona seemed superfluous in Israel’s stated purpose as a research reactor in view of Israel’s acquisition of a research reactor from the United States, located at the Nachal Soreq Nuclear Center.
Kennedy was determined that the United States should not become Israel’s primary conventional arms supplier. At the time, much of Israel’s conventional armaments came from Europe, but Israel wanted the more advanced US models, particularly in aircraft. Israel was able to use its leverage to allow or deny inspections to press the United States for more armaments.
Lyndon Johnson was not as strongly concerned about proliferation as Kennedy was, but he continued the inspections, which were ended by Richard Nixon in 1970. By then it was obvious that Israel had hoodwinked the US through the inspections and had nuclear weapons. That was also when the NPT came into force.
The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty really does make a difference.
The IAEA would not have felt the political need to portray Dimona to the Arabs in a positive light. Wanting to prevent war in the Middle East contributed to the US’s validating Israel’s misleading claims about Dimona’s purpose.
Countries can evade inspectors unless surprise inspections are possible and the inspectors control the agenda. The special UN missions to Iraq in the 1990s were far more empowered to conduct their inspections than were the US inspectors sent to Israel, and there were many more of them. We now know that they were the best source of information about Iraq’s nuclear programs. Although IAEA inspections are usually not as intrusive as those missions, they are more empowered and numerous than the US-Israel inspectors.
In the mid-1990s, NPT signatories were encouraged to sign additional protocols (pdf), which allow for more intrusive inspections. Iran has signed an additional protocol, but it is not yet in force.
In striking contrast to the results of the US-Israel inspections, the latest IAEA report on Iran’s facilities is extremely detailed (via ArmsControlWonk) and raises a number of questions.
None of this is to say that Iran has no nuclear weapons ambitions. However, being able to take samples, as the IAEA inspectors did in Iran and the US-Israel inspectors were not allowed to, gives much more information. Analytical technologies like mass spectroscopy have improved over the last forty years so that “environmental samples,” most probably swabs from the inside of the containers, can give meaningful data. (Does that help, Jeffrey?)
So the NPT is making a difference. The question is what national leaders do with the information the IAEA and special verification teams do with the information.