UN Security Council Needs to Bolster IAEA

I wrote in my last post that one of the major hindrances preventing Iran from being referred to the UN Security Council (UNSC) are both Russia and China's close economic ties to Tehran (Russia in weapons, China in oil). It will be up to EU3 and United States to convince Russia and China that Iran is in fact, attempting to produce nuclear weapons.

Should China and Russia agree to bring Iran in front of the UNSC there is still the possibility that one or both could exercise their veto power preventing sanctions. If Russia or China should decide to exercise this authority, then the present situation in Iran remains in status quo. In other words, the situation doesn’t change. The IAEA would still consider Iran in violation of "non-compliance" under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), and hostilities between Tehran and those who are opposed of Iran possessing nuclear capabilities will continue to escalate.

I proposed in my last post that the problem was with the UN and the subsequent divisions among its five permanent members, but after reading Pierre Goldschmidt's short, yet informative article titled, "The Urgent Need to Strengthen the Nuclear Non Proliferation Regime” published in the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, I realized that my analysis was broad in scope.

While the solution also concerns the UNSC and the involved cooperation of its five permanent members, Mr. Goldschmidt, who by the way is the former Deputy Director General of the IAEA and head of its Department of Safeguards from 1999 to June 2005, suggests that the problem of nuclear nonproliferation could be solved in more peaceful terms. The solution would be to bolster the activities and effectiveness of the IAEA.

He recommends:

“action by the United Nations (UN) Security Council to adopt a generic binding resolution that would establish three peaceful measures for containing crises when a state is found by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to be in non-compliance with its safeguards obligations. These measures are strengthening the IAEA’s authority to conduct the inspections necessary to resolve uncertainties, deterring the noncompliant state from thinking it could withdraw from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and then enjoy the benefits of ill-gotten material and equipment, and suspending sensitive fuel-cycle-related activities in the state.”

In brief, Mr. Goldschmidt’s paper attributes the problems in North Korea and Iran stemming from the weaknesses of the NPT and the IAEA’s inadequate enforcement of its safeguard systems. This makes complete sense since the problem of nuclear nonproliferation starts from the IAEA’s inability to enforce its standards on non-compliant states. The international community, as Mr. Goldschmidt suggests, must “strengthen the authority of the IAEA to exercise its improved capacity in precisely the situations where it is most necessary: when a state has been found to be in non-compliance with its safeguard undertakings.”

I am not going into further details here; Mr. Goldschmidt does a more eloquent job in explaining the specifics. I welcome the reader to visit the above link.

The bottom line is that the trouble with the IAEA emerges as a systems problem. It highlights the growing importance of public administration in international and institutional studies, especially in a global world; tackling the problem at its origin before it escalates.

While Mr. Goldschmidt’s recommendations (to bolster the IAEA) may very well turn out to be the means to achieve a peaceful process in this already serious situation, it cannot be accomplished unless all five permanent members of the UNSC agree to it. Thus, this does not underscore the importance of cooperation among the five permanent members of the UNSC which still determines the stability of the world.