Arms Control Wonk

It’s been a long time since I last guest blogged on ACW, and it feels good to be back. I’m glad to see that my avatar still looks stern and angry.

As some may have noticed, last week’s IAEA General Conference ended without member states being able to agree on a safeguards resolution. Reuters put the blame on some member states, quoting two Western envoys. This story was picked up by Global Security Newswire on 27 September. While there is some truth to the story, it doesn’t pick up on all the complexities of the debate.

I followed the safeguards discussion for at least three years, during a time when there was no problem for non-governmental delegates to attend. In fact, I remember being pulled into the room by a colleague from an important Western state who said, “all the action is in this room, and the rest of the conference is boring”.

It was a quiet time, not many non-governmental organizations were roaming the hallways, and the only non-IAEA colleague I can remember was Mark Hibbs, who then worked at Platts Nuclear Fuels. For the last two years, however, I have been too busy with bilateral meetings and those other matters that take up a director’s time. Since then, I have lost touch with the people in that room (for they were always the same crowd) and their mission to come up with the perfect formula.

Now, I understand the Secretariat, pushed by a few member states, has become much stricter in controlling access to this room. This is unfortunate, since it allows for subjectively biased information to appear unchallenged in the open domain. In addition, some of our younger colleagues have also been ejected rudely from the rooms in a way that, if these young friends have recollected correctly, has reflected badly on the Secretariat. Indeed, less discontent – not more – is needed in the hallways of the M-building. And while I hope that this is not a continuing trend, my intuition tells me attitudes will become worse before they become better.

But let’s go back to the safeguards resolution. Over the years, the main struggle has principally been between states who wish to reflect and promote the development of a stronger safeguards standard, and those who want to block collective support of this. Indeed, earlier in the week, there was even a tendency by a minority to resist the idea of “information driven safeguards”. There is also resistance against any language that hints that the Additional Protocol may become the new safeguards standard. That intrusiveness is not welcomed, nor thought needed, by all states. This division was reflected in the safeguards resolution.

Indeed, the debate may be at its fiercest in this little room at the General Conference, but the shockwaves can be felt beyond its walls, for instance throughout the NPT Review Conference cycle. Anyone examining the final document of last year’s conference will find scars of this disagreement running throughout. The discussions in Austria are not new, and the outcome, frankly, not that surprising.

So, disarmament language may have been one source of discontent this year, but it is not the main battle ground, and I dare say that it will not be for the foreseeable future. Indeed, the objection to including disarmament language, and I remember such language being suggested more than two years ago, is mostly procedural. The safeguards resolution ought to deal with safeguards matters, the argument goes. Other roles of the IAEA should be dealt with through other means. True, there is a minority of nuclear weapon states that may resist the inclusion on substantial grounds (and I think we know who they are), but their views have never been fully articulated. There are also those that believe that nuclear disarmament indeed falls under the Agency’s safeguards mandate. After all, the IAEA Statute refers to “safeguarded worldwide disarmament”. Also, the mandate in Article III.A.5 does not exclude an Agency role in safeguarding weapons usable material. On the contrary, it seem to foresee it.

Personally, though, I agree with the first view. Over the years, the word safeguards have come to mean instruments deployed mostly in non-nuclear weapon states. Its usage has been strongly associated with non-proliferation. Altering the meaning now is bound to lead to resistance, and perhaps confusion.

In addition, the safeguards resolution is already too clumsy, too long, too vague, and too meaningless to matter that much. After a long preamble, one would expect to find some exciting operative language. Alas, the resolution simply continues with more preamble language, making the entire document one long tiring list of ideals, soft welcoming statements, with one or two twists embedded for show. As the years have passed, revisions have been added to revisions, suggestions interbred with suggestions, and confusion squared with confusion. I stopped reading it some time ago and I’m not surprised that some Agency officials just shrugged at its absence this year.

Some will see this is a great setback. Others, to paraphrase a close colleague in Vienna, will simply see this as an accurate reflection of the state of affairs and the divergence of views in the house. I see this is a great opportunity.

It would be wise for those who care deeply about the Agency to use the coming year to rework the resolution into a text that is cleaner and more reflective of state views. Most delegates in the safeguards resolution working group are passionate supporters of the Agency, and its role. It would also be sensible by those same delegates to think of ways in which the debate on the Agency’s role in broader verification is allowed to flow freely throughout the corridors of its General Conference.

This is a crosspost from my own blog, and from the VERTIC blog. Apologies if you’re receiving multiple notifications.

Many years ago, I managed to convince VERTIC’s then Executive Director, Michael Crowley, to send me on a two day trip to Vienna just to meet with our friends at the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization. During those days, the treaty’s verification regime was still half built, and the building was buzzing with activity. The Public Information Section of the organization’s Legal and External Relations Division, then headed by Ambassador Daniela Rozgonova, invited me on a grand tour of the building.

One meeting in particular stand out from those days. I met with a member of the International Monitoring System Division, who took me through how the system works. He started off with this brilliant presentation – a slideshow that I really think should be placed on the CTBTO website – which made everything perfectly clear. I realized that for all its complexity, the verification regime is actually based on simple assumptions. There was a clean beauty hidden in its simplicity. There was also something remarkably touching to see ancient earth science techniques mated with the latest in 21st century processing, analysis and communication.

Now anyone can get that experience. The CTBTO has recently started a new course on the treaty and its verification regime. It covers the verification system, of course, but also offers more, much more. It may be too late to apply to the present round, but those interested in a similar experience may want to contact the Secretariat to inquire about the next round.

And don’t despair if you cannot get there in person. It’s all going to be streamed. Live.

The long-running dispute over IAEA inspector designations stands out in the latest report on Iran. Iran rejects inspectors. The IAEA is not happy with it. But who is right and who is wrong? As so often, there are no easy answers.

Paragraphs 9 and 85 of the Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement (INFCIRC/153) details how inspectors are selected. In practice, the Agency suggests a roster of inspectors to the state. The inspected state does have the right to object to any of the suggested names. If it does so, the IAEA has to propose an alternative name. This procedure aims to minimize the risk that intelligence officers, or perhaps corporate spies, infiltrate the inspectorate with a view to gathering classified or sensitive data.

However, the state’s right to refuse inspectors is not unrestricted. If a state refuses designations repeatedly, and that refusal should “impede the inspections” carried out by the Agency, the Director-General has the choice to refer the matter to the Board for consideration and action. The text doesn’t spell out who should decide that a repeated refusal impedes inspections. An ordinary reading strongly suggests that it is the Secretariat itself that makes that determination. It cannot be the state, because that would make the entire paragraph meaningless (it would never admit that its behavior impedes inspections). It also cannot be the Board of Governors, since that would make the language on referral irrelevant.

The paragraph is likely to target behavior when the state is trying to obstruct the inspection process. It does not have a problem with the names on the list. Rather, it has a problem with the inspections themselves. In the present case, Iran is trying to use the mechanism to put pressure on the Secretariat to curb leaks of the Director-General’s reports to the media. While Iran’s irritation is understandable, its objections, as reported, have little to do with the inspectors themselves. After all, we’ve not seen a repeat of the Chris Charlier story.

The Director-General’s impatience is also clear. The latest report reveals that the IAEA met with Iran’s Ambassador to the Agency on 20 July 2010 to discuss this particular matter. According to the report, the IAEA held that Iran’s “repeated objection … hampers the inspection process and thereby detracts from the Agency’s capability to implement effective and efficient safeguards in Iran.” This language, forcefully put, closely resembles the wording of the Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement. The Director-General does not clearly ask the Board to consider the matter at its meeting next week. So the report’s language is probably meant to be a shot across the bow.

However, even if the Board were to discuss the matter, there’s not much it can do. It could call on Iran, under paragraph 18 of the Agreement, to accept the Secretariat’s inspector designations “without delay.” Whether Iran, in such a case, complies with the Board’s request is another matter entirely.

I wouldn’t make a spot bet on it.

Some readers noted errors in my previously posted calculations (Enriching Salehi’s Statement, 25 June 2010). My assumptions were quite wrong. I’ve now, finally, found some time to sit down and revisit my numbers. And as it happens, on the same day as Mr. Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of the AEOI, have announced that his outfit has now produced about 20 kilograms of ‘higher enriched uranium’.

Again, according to the latest IAEA report on Iran:

• One cascade is presently enriching uranium to ‘higher grade’. This cascade comprises 164 IR-1 machines.

• Between 9 February 2010 and 21 May 2010 (that is, for 101 days), a total of approximately 172 kg of low enriched UF6 was fed into the first cascade. This gives as approximate feed rate of 1.703 kg/day.

• On 7 April 2010 (after 57 days), Iran withdrew 5.7 kilograms hexafluoride gas enriched to 19.7 per cent U-235 (the Agency assay indicates an enrichment level of 19.3 per cent). This gives us an approximate product rate of 100 grams per day.

• The tails are set to 2.0 wt% U-235 (and not 0.2 wt% as assumed in the previous post). Iran intends, by connecting the second cascade, to bring the tails down to 0.7 wt% (that is natural uranium).

Under these parameters, a feed of 172 kilograms of 3.5 per cent enriched hexafluoride gas should equal about 14.54 kilograms of 19.7 per cent enriched material. As noted above, Iran withdrew much less than half of this on 7 April 2010. In order to make approximate sense of that numbers, the tails setting must be close to 2.5 wt% (this assuming that material were fed at a constant rate from 9 February to 7 April). Also, under that assumption, the machines operated at about 0.63 SWU/machine and year, not by any means an impressive figure.

However, the numbers make more sense in the aggregate. I ran the known average feed and product per day through statistical software, and came up with some interesting numbers, but only after making two assumptions. First, in order to produce 20 kilograms of enriched gas, the total feed for the period would need to be 236.7 kilograms. Second, I had to assume that the additional material has been fed into the cascades after 20 May 2010. This actually leads to a drop in the feed rate (down to 1.2207 kilograms per day). I’ve put it all in a graph.

Running all 156 data points leads to some interesting conclusions. The mean feed flow rate, under all these assumptions, becomes about 1.536 kilograms per day (with a sigma of about 230 grams and a deviation of 218 grams). The mean product flow rate becomes about 129 grams, with a sigma of about 22 grams and a deviation of about 21 grams).

Extrapolating the mean value over a year gives a feed of 560.64 kg yield a product of about 47.09 kg. All things being equal, this would require a tails setting of 2 wt%, which is precisely what Iran has declared. The total separative investment would be 154.4 SWU/year. This would mean that the machines are running at 0.94 SWU/machine/year.

The cascade solution would look something like this:

So, to sum up, I can draw three conclusions:

First, I was definitely wrong in accusing Mr. Salehi of misleading us;

Second, in fact, his figures may well be right; and

Third, playing around with these figures are inherently dangerous, since there are many assumptions that have to be made, especially regarding tails enrichment.

Iran’s enrichment effort continues to move forward as their scientists and technicians continue their relentless pursuit of ever higher enrichment levels, and ever more effective centrifuges. At least that’s the official story, eagerly broadcast by Iranian officials.

Few have probably missed the 23 June claim by Mr. Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, that Iran has produced 17 kilograms of 19.75 per cent enriched uranium hexafluoride gas. He also said that his outfit can produce as much as five kilograms a month. ISIS has pointed out that Mr. Salehi’s statement does not square neatly with the IAEA’s latest report on Iran.

The report suggests that the product flow rate between 9 February and 7 April has been precisely 100 grams a day (according to the IAEA logs, the Iranians withdrew 5.7 kilograms after 57 days). If Mr. Salehi’s production claim is true, the flow rate for the period 9 February to 23 June has in fact been about 127 grams a day.

If you think that most of the 11.3 remaining kilograms of uranium hexafluoride gas was produced after 7 April, the product flow rate of the facility jumped from 100 to about 147 g/day. That is [still] a remarkable increase in productivity.

Mr. Salehi does say the cascade can produce that much. He’s claiming that Natanz can gear up to around 164.5 grams a day. This, to me, sounds optimistic.

If the P-1 machines were running at their theoretical limits, one 164 machine cascade should not be able to achieve a higher product flow rate than about 112 g/day. This is assuming 2.2 SWU/machine, an average feed enrichment of 3.5 wt %, and a tails enrichment of 0.2 wt %. Increasing the tails to, say, 0.5 wt % could pump up the flow rate to about 155 g/day, which still falls short of Mr. Salehi’s statement, and well short of 200 grams a day.

Indeed, on a single cascade, the tails would need to be set to 0.6 wt %, all other variables being equal, to achieve the stated capacity. In other words, the cascade would have close to natural uranium in its tails, flowing out at 934 g/day. I leave to others to judge whether this is an economical way to run an enrichment plant.

This leaves the alternative that Iran has put both cascades into action. Having two cascades of P-1 centrifuges, again at peak performance, will increase the flow rate to 224 g/day, assuming a 0.2 wt % tails setting. Mr. Salehi’s estimate of 164.5 g/day makes sense in that context. However, the latest Agency report reveal that as of 24 May, the second cascade was not put into operation. Even if it were put on-stream the following day, it is unlikely that the two interconnected cascades can have brought the balance up to 17 kilograms.

It should be said in closing that diversion risks are tiny when material balances are this small, provided the IAEA is allowed to apply safeguards as it considers right. Rumblings from senior Iranian officials that Iran may in fact reduce its cooperation with the IAEA are therefore unfortunate. How Iran intends to draw down on cooperation is also fundamentally unclear, since they presently seem to cooperating at the bare minimum.

Update: A friend of the wonk has pointed out that increasing the feed rate would result in reduced enrichment. So if Iran would have bumped up the feed rate, it would in fact dilute the product quite a bit. That’s something to ponder indeed.

Update 2: Thank you Ataune for spotting a calculation error. 11.3 kg / 77 days is 146.8 grams per day. The post has been revised accordingly.

Update 3: Thanks for all comments, both on and off-line. The general thrust is that although SWU calculations – on which this post is based – can be useful, a cascade calculation will yield better results. In fact, the tails are most likely LEU and not DU as posted here. When I get back from Wilton Park, I’ll revise the post to in light of all comments. This is a truly remarkable readership – none mentioned none forgotten.

These days, the dignified art of arms control verification is both lauded and lambasted in the conference rooms of UN Headquarters. Having spent a week in New York, I feel fairly ready to tell a tale of mild schizophrenia in States’ attitudes towards confidence-building through transparency and verification.

The CTBT and its verification regime has received much well deserved attention. The UK-Norway Initiative is frequently discussed in very favorable terms. The US decision to reveal its stockpile numbers was welcomed. However, the IAEA safeguards system seems to be treated quite roughly.

Some have insisted on increased transparency in the nuclear weapon states while at the same time resisted attempts to strengthen verification standards for the non-nuclear weapon states.

At stake is, of course, an attempt to make the additional protocol the contemporary safeguards standard. The chances of achieving this is slim. The half-dozen or so most important holdouts are hard cases from the global south, and include states such as Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, Iran and Syria (see the IAEA’s stylish map here).

Since 2005, 35 more nations have subscribed to the protocol. While progress has been made, it remains important for the conference still to view the protocol as the safeguards standard, and the ultimate goal should be to make it a prerequisite for the supply of nuclear fuel. Some want to go further. As my new staffer David Cliff wrote in Trust & Verify 128 back in March:

One argument is that Additional Protocols should not be voluntary anyway. The text of [the Additional Protocol] is silent on this, but as John Carlson—director of the Australian Safeguards and Non-Proliferation Office—has pointed out, non-nuclear-weapon states have agreed to accept the agency’s ‘safeguards system’, not specifically the measures set out in [a Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement] (which had not even been negotiated when the NPT came into force). As the contemporary safeguards standard, a joint [CSA] – [Additional Protocol] arrangement can thus be plausibly argued to represent the current embodiment of the ‘safeguards system’ referred to in the treaty.

It’s a subtle argument and, as such, it doesn’t get around the positions of many states in Middle East and South Asia that stubbornly refuses to grant the IAEA further inspection authority. One Middle Eastern diplomat I listened to explained that the protocol is a bargaining tool. Western powers could not expect his country to “strip naked and sit in Central Park begging richly dressed nuclear powers for political favors”. Other states in the region clearly just want to avoid close scrutiny of their nuclear affairs, most likely because they have something to hide.

It all leaves the nuclear nonproliferation regime in a rather unpalatable condition.

Perhaps this was on the mind of a western academic I talked to in New York. He held that the bargain of “semi-nuclear disarmament vis-a-vis semi-nuclear nonproliferation” cannot be upheld much longer. Timelines for disarmament should be discussed, no doubt, but only if similar timelines can be set for bringing the safeguards standard up to contemporary requirements. Similar ideas were also briefly raised by some senior Western officials I talked to.

We will know the outcome of the conference in two weeks. It’s making good progress, and the prospects for consensus is good. Whether the Additional Protocol forms part of that consensus, however, remains to be seen.

When talking to Jeffrey earlier today, I said that I was planning to write a post or two from the Review Conference. However, as Rebecca Johnson and Carol Naughton are already covering the meeting excellently at their Acronym Institute Blog, I thought it’s probably better to direct traffic their way instead of my repeating the same story.

What I’ll do instead is to write up some seventh-inning thoughts on what I think this conference will mean for us verification wonks. I’ll do that on Saturday, after I’ve had the time to talk to some of the intergovernmental folks I’ve seen wandering around in the hallways.

Meanwhile, I’ll take this opportunity to do some shameless self-promotion. I’m holding an event together with the Norwegians and the “Blue and Yellow Brits” on Thursday. All are invited to hear us out.

The United Kingdom and Norway Initiative (UKNI): Research into the Verification of Nuclear Warhead Dismantlement

On Thursday May 13, Norway and the UK are presenting work on their joint initiative to the 2010 NPT Review Conference. The non-governmental organisation VERTIC is providing independent observations.

The UKNI is a unique collaboration between a Nuclear Weapon State (UK) and a Non-Nuclear Weapon State (Norway). It is the first joint work of this nature in this field of research. Confidence building and transparency measures, including verification, will be critical to moving towards a world free from nuclear weapons. This poses significant technical, financial and policy challenges. The project was designed to develop new technologies, methods and procedures for the verification of future dismantlement.

What: Presentation of the NPT Working Paper ‘The United Kingdom-Norway Initiative: Research into the Verification of Nuclear Warhead Dismantlement’

When: Thursday May 13 at 13:15-14:45

Where: Conference Room 2 (TNLB), United Nations headquarters, New York

With introductory remarks from Ambassador Steffen Kongstad, Director-General of the Department for Security Policy at the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Head of the Norwegian NPT delegation and Ambassador John Duncan, Permanent Representative to the Conference of Disarmament in Geneva and Head of the UK NPT delegation.

VERTIC will also deliver a presentation with an initial analysis of the project from an independent perspective.

Media Contact: Emma Kwesiga Lydersen, Press Counsellor at Permanent Mission of Norway to the UN in New York, ekly [at] mfa.no / +1 646 642 9910 (cell) / +1 212 310 1527 (landline)

Emma is really cool. Give her a call if you require more information. I’ll return on Friday with some musings on the IAEA and the CTBTO.

Update 07:10 EST

You can also download the factsheet here and the UK-Norway Working Paper here

Trevor Findlay’s Canadian Centre for Treaty Compliance has just released a report on Nuclear Futures which makes for excellent reading. In the report, there is a brief paragraph on information driven safeguards.

The Agency claims it is pursuing what it describes as “information driven” (IAEA, 2007b: 16) safeguards, supported by a modern “knowledge management system” (including a database that records the experiences of all safeguards inspectors). However, there remain concerns that the IAEA inspectorate’s “culture” has still not entirely changed from one of examining a narrow range of information to one that considers each individual state’s activities holistically. Further concerns have been expressed about the lack of transparency and openness within the Agency that permits vital information about state compliance to be too tightly held within certain offices, thereby defeating the purpose of the holistic approach (ICNND, 2009: 91-92)

Beyond doubt, the last few decades have seen a transformation of the safeguards business. Until about 20 years ago, the International Atomic Energy Agency only corroborated states’ nuclear material on declared nuclear sites. They did this through measurements and observations. They quantified the nuclear material, they counted fuel rods, and inspectors even watched how materials flowed through the plants themselves.

The inspectors of the 1970s and 1980s realized the limits of the system they enforced. It doesn’t take much to figure out that the easiest way to defeat safeguards is to bypass them. All proliferative states have had to figure out how to deal with one form or another of safeguards on their territories.

Most states seeking to develop nuclear weapons have found that it is best to conduct forbidden activities well away from the prying eyes of the international inspectorate. Iraq’s strategists, for instance, only felt that they could divert its HEU at Tuwaitha after IAEA inspectors had been expelled. And Sweden’s cold warriors felt that they could only convert the R-3/Adam reactor to military use once it had been purged of safeguarded heavy water. Even the most primitive IAEA safeguards works as an ‘area denial’ tool and this is a benefit not to frown on.

In the last two decades, the IAEA has faced ever increasing expectations on what it is able to deliver. Many expect the organization to become nuclear detectives where it has once been nuclear accountants. This is by no means a bad idea, as some have suggested.

The IAEA has moved rapidly towards a system of state-level evaluations. This regime itself is indistinct, and descriptions of it are coached in management language such as “information driven” and “knowledge management system”.

In a nutshell, the IAEA has started to use the large information flow given to it by the Additional Protocol and other knowledge sources to its advantage by feeding it into analytical tools such as the physical model (see one description here). The IAEA has also, over the years, started to realize the power of open source information and satellite imagery analysis. One plan is to feed all this information into a central repository which, well, looks a bit like an internal Wikipedia. I have seen the demo, and it is impressive.

All of this may give the folks in Vienna the potential to describe and understand the entirety of the country’s fuel cycle. Once they are allowed to do that, it will become increasingly difficult to hide away a parallel fuel cycle. But reform does need a change in attitude within the IAEA. Some serving or former safeguards inspectors still like to point out how slowly the organization has changed, and how much work remains to be done.

Be that as it may, the most important thing is that work has started.

Yesterday, I attended a meeting with the International Law Association in Brighton, and the Swedish nuclear programme was raised again. It is interesting that so much international attention has been given recently to what, essentially, is a but a side note in the broader Cold War narrative. Perhaps it’s because Carl Bildt, the Swedish Foreign Minister, reportedly likes to talk about it at meetings. Or perhaps it’s because Jeffrey has given me leeway to write about arcane and, for the most of you, uninteresting topics?

A while back, a friend from a Swedish ministry also asked my why I had not, in my previous posts on the Swedish programme, had not mentioned the Swedish delivery vehicle, SAAB project 1300, or the A36 tactical bomber.

I’m an aviation enthusiast. My father was, for many years, an employee of the Swedish Fortifications Administration. I spent a fair share of my childhood around air-force bases, and got familiar from an early age with the wonderful machines that SAAB has produced over the years. Of course, the SAAB J-35 Draken (‘Kite” or “Dragon’) is a favorite, and so are the JA-37 Viggen (‘Thunderbolt’) and the JA-39 Gripen (‘Griffin’).

Some of you know that I also used to have a glider certificate. I’m not sure if that makes my a lapsed pilot. But my father once managed to get a friend of his to let me fly the JA-37 simulator at the F13 flotilla for one hour. As this counts as experience, I was allowed to log this as flight time in my logbook (I did manage to land the fighter safely. My father, however, crashed and burned).

The Swedish Nuclear Bomber

So I decided to find out more about the A36 bomber. This was a single seat, single engine, delta-wing design. The company planned to use the RR Olympus engine, used in the Vulcan and later used in the Concorde, to give the plane some speed. It was, after all, only supposed to make a quick dash over the Baltic, hit the Soviet embarkation ports, and then make a fast escape back to Sweden.

The aircraft was designed to carry one free-fall nuclear weapon (carried in an internal bay). The weight of the weapon was given as no more than 800 kilograms (or 1760 lb.). Some sources puts the weight of the payload to 600 kilograms (or 1320 lb.). The internal bay was only put into design due to concerns of accidental detonations caused by high air friction.

This was a fast plane, designed to hit Mach 2.2 at high altitudes and at least Mach 1.2 at lower runs. Urban Fredriksson, a Swedish X-Plane enthusiast, has modeled the aircraft and tried it out in the simulator. According to him, the plane “flies better than OK and very close in speed and range to what it should be and it has to be landed very nose high in the manner typical of deltas.” According to one of the designers of the aircraft, the main problem the SAAB engineers faced was the shape of the canopy, which had to be “narrow and pointy” to be feasible.

The project was submitted in 1952 but was cancelled in 1957, to allow for more resources to go into the JA-37 project.

Effects testing

In 1956 and 1957, the Swedish military conducted a number of massive conventional explosions for research purposes at Nausta in Northern Sweden. The first test serious was given the code-name ‘Sirius” and involved three benyl charges (633, 6,040 and 61,000 kilograms). The military wanted to study intense pressures, and were, for some reason, also interested in the height of the mushroom cloud. According to some sources, they noted heights of between 350 and 1,020 meters.

The second series, code-named ‘Vega’, involved two benyl charges (5,000 and 36,000 kilograms). These tests aimed to explore weapons effects, and the military had therefore deployed a number of vehicles, airframes and other materials at the site.

More images from the test series are available here.

I am aware that there might be a number of new publications on the programme coming out in English sometime in the future. I listed a number of primary sources in post here but for some reason all the links are broken. They must have been moved to another part of the site.

However, if you Google, you shall find.

I was going to revisit Natanz in my 14th post on the Wonk, but something more interesting came my way. I could not help noticing that Dan Joyner, a member of the powerful International Law Association, has written a response of sorts to James Acton’s article Iran Violated International Obligations on Qom Facility (Proliferation Analysis, 25 September 2009).

In a nutshell, James argues that subsidiary arrangements in INFCIRC/153-type safeguards agreements are legally binding instruments, in essence contracts between the IAEA and the state. Dan, on the other hand, concludes that subsidiary arrangements may not carry any legal force, that they have a ‘non-binding legal character’.

To be clear, both James and Dan reaches the same conclusion, that Iran’s behaviour is a cause for concern. Dan, however, looks at the problem from a structural perspective, and readily agrees there are worrying consequences for the safeguards system if his interpretation is correct.

I would probably subscribe to the view that subsidiary arrangements are part and parcel of the safeguards agreement itself. Without them, the safeguards agreement would not be meaningful. Their legal force is not explicitly stated, but the safeguards agreement is littered with functional references to its subsidiary arrangements.

For instance, paragraph 32 requires the state to set up certain measures (such as procedures for taking a physical inventory), as specified in the subsidiary arrangements. Paragraph 39 states that “provision should be made for the possibility of an extension or change of the Subsidiary Arrangements by agreement between the Agency and the State without amendment of the Agreement”. In other words, that they can be changed without having to go through the ratification procedure again. In addition, like any other contract, subsidiary agreements enter into force (see paragraph 40).

As an intergovernmental organization, the IAEA has what we lawyers call “legal personality”. This means that it has right to enter into agreement with states or, for that matter, non-state actors. And it has the right, as any sovereign state has, to expect that agreements are kept. The question is whether Iran has kept its agreement with the Agency.

And that is something that is debatable.