Saturday, November 28, 2009

Iran: ‘NPT has no benefit but damage and restriction’

by Mark Pyruz

A day after the board of the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency passed a resolution demanding Tehran immediately stop building its newly disclosed nuclear facility near the holy city of Qom and freeze uranium enrichment, Iranian legislators and analysts are now openly questioning the benefits of being a signatory of the NPT, and signaling it may be in the national interest of Iran to withdraw from the nuclear treaty.

If Iran withdraws from the treaty, its nuclear program would no longer be subject to oversight by the U.N. nuclear agency.

"The parliament, in its first reaction to this illegal and politically-motivated resolution, can consider the issue of withdrawing from the NPT," Mohammad Karamirad was quoted as saying by the official IRNA news agency, referring to the treaty. "The parliament ... (also) can block the entry of IAEA inspectors to the country.

Another lawmaker, Hossein Ebrahimi, was quoted by IRNA as saying that Iran's parliament will discuss the IAEA resolution on Sunday and will make a decision on how to react.
Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran's chief delegate to the U.N. nuclear agency, was also defiant Saturday in the face of the agency's fresh demands, saying in television interview that Iran will limit its cooperation with the U.N. watchdog to its treaty obligations and will not cooperate beyond that.

"Our first reaction to this resolution is that they (the IAEA) should not expect us to do what we did several times in the past few months when we cooperated beyond our obligations to remove ambiguities," Soltanieh said.

He added that the country's nuclear activities will not be interrupted by resolutions from the IAEA, the U.N. Security Council or even the threat of military strikes against the facilities.
Ali Shirzadian, spokesman of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, said his agency his ready to proceed with its nuclear projects.

"Technically speaking, we are fully prepared to produce fuel required for the Tehran reactor. To begin this we are waiting for the order from top authorities," Shirzadian told the Borna news agency.

The Iranian news agency also quoted political analyst Mahdi Mohammadi as saying that the U.N. agency's resolution was forcing Iran to reconsider its membership in the nonproliferation treaty.

"The attitude of the agency is gradually bringing Iran and the rest of the developing nations to the conclusion that membership in NPT has no benefit but damage and restriction. In this case, the question that will be raised seriously is will continuation of this path serve Iran's national interests?" IRNA quoted him as saying.

From the Iranian perspective, membership in the NPT is not delivering anywhere near the technical assistance it promises to provide, yet at the same time it is being used against Iran as a means of politically motivated coercion. Non-NPT states such as India are “rewarded” with seemingly unbounded nuclear cooperation, and non-NPT Israel has never been put through the political hassles Iran is now enduring. At this point, the Iranians are confronted with the obvious hypocrisy of their situation and are asking themselves:

“Why are we even in the NPT, when all it brings us is pain and no gain?”

12 comments:

Winston said...

Are you the same Pyruz of the infamous anti-Semitic forum ACIG.ORG?

Paul Iddon said...

you're claiming the Air Combat Information Group are anti-Semitic???

maybe it's just me but that sounds completely ridiculous!

Mark Pyruz said...

Winston, are you aware of the fact that ACIG.org is hosted in Germany? It's been operating for ten years now. Do you honestly think it would be possible to do so, for so long, given Germany's explicit laws regarding anti-Semitism?

Your comments are usually welcome here, Winston. But please don't slander other sites or forums at Uskowi on Iran.

Mark Pyruz said...

Anonymous:
Your URL is defective. A working URL for the report is:

http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/rc/papers/2009/06_iran_strategy/06_iran_strategy.pdf

As you've pointed out, reports such as these (in addition to intelligence) are what constitute the "soft power" threat that leaders of Iran's security forces refer to. Iran's security forces have responded with manuals and pamphlets of their own, and what is now transpiring is a result of that being put into practice.

This topic would actually make for a good future blog post.

Mark Pyruz said...

For some reason, the URL cut off on my comment as well. Sorry, but readers will just have to google the title plus "pdf" to access the working link.

Anonymous said...

iran will increase his inreachment from this week from 3kg aday to 10 kg a day in new plan which ahmadinijad put in order from now to next 2 years increase capacity to 300 to 500 tn annually the plan has been approved to day and instalation will be effected by next week they will used ir3 center fuses which is 6 times faster then ir1,2 .

Anonymous said...

Mark Pyruz, it would be good if uyou could open up a discussion on the brookings int. report that was put out before the elections and what appears to be a haphazard overnight response from iranian leaders to deal with it.

Anonymous said...

here is hassan abbasi's new video on youtube about the brookings' report!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6_e5OyrqUM

Anonymous said...

I do think Iran should leave the NPT as soon as possible.

Anonymous said...

Nr, pyruz: Are you a member of IRGC??

Author: Galen Wright said...

Just quickly i'd like to say that, for Iran, this might be a case of "the devil you know is better then the devil you don't. While being a party to the NPT hasn't granted Iran any amount of good, through assistance rendered, it at least superficially grants them the cover of a non-weaponized program. Should they withdraw from that, particularly in this politisized atmosphere where we are all watching Iran with bated breath, it would appear to much of the world as if Iran was blatantly declaring its intent to develop nuclear weapons.

Mark Pyruz said...

@Ayyash

Agreed. I'd also add that nothing would please anti-Iran forces more were it to withdraw from the NPT, and the Iranians know this. The game being played by anti-Iran hawks is to see if Iran can be provoked into assisting with its own isolation, by it suspending all cooperation with the IAEA and withdrawing from the NPT. However, Iran's initial defiant response to the resolution is symbolic: it has made public elements of a projected scope for its expansive nuclear program.