Is IAEA capable of monitoring Iran nuclear program?
Technological advances and lessons learned from previous clandestine nuclear programs provide confidence that Iran cannot violate the terms of a new nuclear agreement.
A key question in the aftermath of a new nuclear agreement with Iran is whether the international community has the wherewithal to monitor and verify Iran’s compliance. Officials in the Barack Obama administration and nonproliferation experts claim that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), bolstered by new technology and the intelligence resources of major powers, can provide the necessary assurances that Iran is abiding by restrictions on its nuclear capabilities and not trying to divert its declared program or build a covert facility to develop weapons.
“It’s not your grandfather’s IAEA,” said Thomas Shea, a veteran former official at the UN nuclear watchdog agency, to an audience at the Atlantic Council July 15. An expert for a quarter century in the IAEA’s Department of Safeguards, which monitors declared nuclear programs, Shea said that the agency had overhauled its practices in light of its failure to find nuclear weapons progress in Iraq and North Korea more than two decades ago and now has access to “100 different verification systems” that can detect even the smallest anomalies.
Where once the agency used rubber seals to prevent tampering with sensitive equipment and old movie cameras with film canisters that had to be manually changed every three months, the IAEA now uses “digital equipment with fiber optic connections that can be reviewed automatically and large-scale digital storage that is solid state,” said Shea. The agency is currently exploring live-streaming video. “It’s not what it was. You can’t diddle with it and expect you can defeat this equipment.”
The IAEA also has access to better commercial satellite imagery than the US government did 20 years ago, along with its own laboratory for environmental sampling and forensic analysis that can detect a pictogram — a million millionth of a gram of material — to identify possible radiation, Shea said. The lab is augmented by a “network of affiliated national laboratories,” Shea wrote in a forthcoming paper made available to Al-Monitor. In addition, foreign intelligence agencies and Iranian dissidents remain sources of possible information about clandestine activities, he said.
