10/18/13 – Barbara Slavin – The Scott Horton Show

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I'm Scott Horton, this is the Scott Horton Show.
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Next up is Barbara Slavin.
She writes for Al Monitor and other places as well, or at least used to.
Here she is.
She's got the scoop of the week, at least.
Iran's new nuclear proposal.
Welcome back to the show, Barbara.
How are you doing?
Fine, thank you.
And let me just say I have a piece of Iran's nuclear proposal.
I don't have the PowerPoint that was presented in Geneva.
I have something that an Iranian source who has usually proved reliable says is the essence of Iran's proposal.
So I want to caveat that.
I have not seen the actual PowerPoint presentation.
But it is a piece of paper, at least, not just hearsay.
It's not a piece of paper.
It's information that I was given from an Iranian source who has usually proved reliable.
Okay.
So listeners should have that caveat.
That said, some of it has also been reported by Michael Adler.
And the substance of the proposal sounds quite reasonable to me.
Yeah.
Well, it's really something.
I was going to say if it's a piece of disinformation, at least they did hard work on putting it together.
They did.
It sounded legit to me.
It was written in such a way that it sounded completely like a logical proposal.
So, you know, this is a source I've known a long time, usually proven reliable.
And, you know, it's caused a great consternation, apparently, in Iran and in various other circles.
And I see I'm being denounced on Facebook, this time as a Saudi tool, which is interesting.
But I'm very happy to discuss what I've learned and also just to discuss the negotiations in general.
Right.
Okay, great.
Well, the good thing is, is the audience of this show is pretty familiar with, you know, what's at issue.
In other words, you know, you can talk about the Fordow facility and 20 percent rich uranium without having to get all the way down into, you know, explaining it from 101 on, which is nice.
But yeah, please do go ahead and give us the overview of what we're looking at here.
All right.
Well, this is what I was told, and I'm going to actually call up my story on Almonitor so I can basically read that back to folks, if you want to just give me a second here and make sure that I have it exactly as written.
No problem.
Again, it's called Iran's New Nuclear Proposal at almonitor.com.
Right.
It's on almonitor.com.
The proposal would – well, let's start with the overall background.
And this I know from extremely good Iranian sources that Iran wants to see the end game before they even begin down this road.
So the idea is to have a two-stage proposal, six months in each stage.
Iran knows what the end game is going to be, and then it begins down the road of confidence-building measures in return for concessions from the United States and its negotiating partners.
So in the first stage, the Iranians have said that they would stop producing uranium enriched to 20 percent U-235, and they would convert the stockpile that they have entirely into fuel for the Tehran research reactor, which produces medical isotopes.
Now, the way my source put it was that they would try to convert their stockpile.
I understand that the Iranians, while they have converted some of this enriched uranium into a powder form, they don't really know how to make a fuel rod for the Tehran research reactor, so they might need some assistance.
But this is a very important concession to stop producing uranium that's enriched to 20 percent.
That's very close, very easy to continue to enrich that to weapons grade.
They also say that they will not stop work on another project.
This is the heavy water reactor at Arak.
That's A-R-A-K, not I-R-A-Q.
But that they would let the IAEA come and monitor the completion of the facility, and that when it's done, they would reach an arrangement to handle the spent fuel, which is similar to the arrangement they currently have for their only functioning civilian nuclear power reactor, which is at Bushehr.
The Russians provide the fuel and take back the spent fuel.
This is important because the Arak heavy water reactor could yield plutonium, which is another potential bomb fuel.
Now, of course, Iran does not have a reprocessing facility to turn that into bomb fuel, but this would be an extra confidence-building measure to turn over the spent fuel from this.
They also promise more full monitoring of the underground enrichment plant at Fordow, which would be turned into a research center, to limit the scale of production at their Natanz enrichment plant, and they promise to ratify the additional protocol of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which now allows unannounced inspections of nuclear sites.
So taken together, I mean, it's a fairly coherent proposal, and they're not asking for the moon in return.
They understand that the U.S. Congress is not going to give them sanctions relief, certainly not at the beginning, and so they're looking for things that are within the purview of the executive branch, that the White House can do on its own to ease the impact of sanctions on the Iranian people.
Now, this proposal, if it is accurate, and I can't swear 100%, as I said, it was given to me by somebody who's proven reliable in the past, this proposal would be an opening negotiating bid, and obviously subject to negotiations with the P5-plus-1, and there are elements of it, frankly, that I think would be unacceptable to the United States and its negotiating partners.
So we'll have to see where it goes.
Well, I can certainly see why even all of the Western negotiators from the Security Council were very optimistic coming out of the meeting earlier this week, and were talking about, hey, this is perhaps really the basis of something that they could work with, and, of course, there's been all kinds of other reporting, which we don't have to go back over, about the lack of bluster on both sides, and how important that was, that they actually were really willing to talk about.
But this really does sound like almost a dream come true, not quite what the Americans were asking for, but...
No, I wouldn't go that far.
I really wouldn't go that far.
As I say, there are people who want...
Well, I mean, they want a closing down of Fordo, and these guys want to convert it into a research facility.
So that's pretty good, right?
Yeah, but look, you know, as long as they're enriching uranium, they're going to be people who think that the Iranians want to build a bomb, and that this is all a big hoax, and they're just trying to fool the West, and so on.
And then there are going to be people in Iran who say these are too many concessions.
Iran should not convert its 20 percent uranium, and should not allow this kind of intrusive monitoring.
So this proposal is one that would not satisfy, frankly, the hardliners on either side.
And according to what U.S. diplomats have said, will require a great deal more work.
You know, I should point out that the Russians actually pooh-poohed all this.
The Russian deputy foreign minister who was at the Geneva talk said there was nothing to applaud about here.
So, you know, this is still early days.
A lot more is going to happen.
Wendy Sherman, the head of our delegation, has to brief Congress on what was achieved.
I'm sure we're going to see more leaks from the U.S. side going forward, as well as from the Iranian side.
And, you know, perhaps in the end we will finally see the full proposal.
Or maybe we won't, because it will have been changed by the time any kind of agreement is reached.
Well, you know, it just seems to me like, I mean, obviously the hawks are never going to be satisfied on either side, not with any deal that is possible to be reached by the middle.
So the goal is to see if you can come up with an agreement that will be enough where the middle, in this case Obama and Rouhani, will be able to tell their hawks, yeah, but look what we got out of it.
That's pretty good.
You know, they have to have a good enough argument to win.
But it seems like this, that's what I meant by dream come true, is that, you know, they really have, I think, based on that outline, again unverified, but this outline of this proposed deal, seems like they've neutralized all of the biggest points, like the 20% enrichment, the plutonium that will be left over from Iraq.
There are still people who don't want Iran.
It doesn't say anything about the 5% and under enriched uranium.
And they have a very large stockpile of that.
They have, in fact, a huge amount of that.
And there are many people who don't want them to continue to have that stockpile and to continue to enrich uranium.
They have something like over 20,000 pounds of low enriched uranium.
So, you know, it's a reasonable proposal from my point of view.
It's a reasonable start in the story.
I quote Darrell Kimball, who's executive director of the Arms Control Association.
He called it a genuine, serious response to the P5 plus 1 proposal, the last one that they made.
And, you know, but others will disagree.
I mean, Rob Satloff of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy put on his Twitter feed, you know, that this was basically useless, but the only good thing about it was that it was in English.
You know, it didn't have to be translated.
So, you know, I think there's going to be a lot of negotiating, a lot of negotiating that's going to have to happen.
Well, just don't hire WNEP to do the negotiating, and I think it might work.
They've got their point of view.
Everybody has a point of view.
Everybody has an axe to grind.
Me, I'm just a journalist.
I'm trying to report what I hear and trying to be accurate and trying to be constructive.
Sure, no, I understand.
And you do great work, too.
I mean, this is a hell of a story that you've got here.
And you had another good one the other day that was, you know, it seemed to be an opinion piece, the one where you were talking about how this is not Munich and that kind of thing.
But it was almost 99 percent just factual reporting and news analysis, as it is anyway.
Well, thank you very much.
I certainly appreciate that about you.
Thank you.
That's a real bugaboo, you know, that people use these analogies.
I mean, Iran is Iran.
It's not Nazi Germany.
It's not Maoist China.
It's not the Soviet Union.
It's not North Korea.
Iran is Iran.
Why is that so hard for people to figure out?
And, you know, this idea that somehow merely negotiating with the Iranians is like dealing with Nazi Germany in 1938.
I mean, give me a break.
You know, who's the Adolf Hitler here and what countries is Iran invading?
Iran is actually more isolated than it's been in decades and certainly hurting under economic sanctions.
It doesn't have a particularly powerful conventional military.
And, you know, it's just a ridiculous peril that tries to, you know, raise the idea that Iran is out to exterminate Jews and take over the world.
And this is apparently fantasy.
Clearly.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, now, so as far as American politics, obviously there's a lot to it.
And you've already alluded to the fact that a lot of these sanctions would have to be lifted by Congress, that the president doesn't even have the authority to the leeway to make some of those decisions himself, which I'm very glad to hear that the Iranians are accepting that fact up front and are being cool about it and are, you know, limited in their demands for what they're asking for in return there.
But I wonder if you think that as far as their side of negotiations, you mentioned there's no mention of Natanz here.
Obviously, something's going to have to be worked out about the 3.5 percent.
There is a mention that they would reduce, you know, the production, the scale of production there.
But I haven't seen any specifics.
And I don't know that they actually have given any specifics.
And they haven't said anything, at least in what I was shown, about the stockpile, as I mentioned, of low enriched uranium.
I'm sorry.
And that was what I meant to refer to there was what they've already enriched to 3.6 percent or thereabouts.
Anyway, so my question, though, was going to be, do you think that it's really even possible if Obama is really trying to do this?
Do you think it's even possible or do you think that even he or his team would recognize or, you know, accept enrichment to 3.6 percent at Natanz, even under, you know, assuming the additional protocol and the rest of these things?
Or are they still going to stick with the U.N. resolutions that they pushed back in the Bush era that say you must freeze all enrichment?
You know, I think it depends on what the whole package is.
If the stockpiles of 20 percent are removed, if the Iranians stop producing to that level, if the IAEA is given even more access than they already have, and they already have a fair amount of access, by the way.
There are inspectors in Iran every day of the year now, and they go to these facilities at least once a week.
But if they allow, you know, remote monitoring with cameras 24 hours a day, various kinds of things like that, it's possible.
It's possible.
But Iran is also going to have to satisfy the international community in terms of the past history of the program.
There are certainly a lot of reports that Iran had a nuclear weapons research program at one point, and they've never entirely satisfied people's questions about that.
So, as I say, this is early days, and, you know, we're going to have to see a lot more.
By the way, have you talked with any experts who can clarify how long that stockpile of 3.6 percent enriched uranium that they already have might last, if it was fueling Bushehr, for example?
Well, you know, that's the irony of this.
Iran gets the fuel for Bushehr from the Russians.
Iran has no other civilian power reactors, which is why people say, why are they enriching uranium?
And Iran, frankly, would do much better with wind and solar rather than nuclear reactors, given the fact that this is a country that's prone to earthquakes.
Dare I say the word Fukushima?
So, you know, I think the Iranians have this program for a lot of reasons that have very little to do with generating electricity.
I think it's deterrence and national pride and inertia, because they have all these nuclear scientists who've been working on this stuff so long.
You know, and they want to trade it for something.
It's a bargaining chip.
They want to get something for all that they've put into it.
But in terms of actually generating electricity, I really don't think that's the main reason.
Yeah, you know, Ali Gharib thought that, he said on the show a couple of weeks back, that he thought that really the main reason they've pursued it all along was just so they could negotiate it away to be brought back in from the cold.
I guess I had thought that they would never abandon enrichment entirely, just for national pride reasons that you've just mentioned.
But he thought, nah, they might do that, you know?
That's a tough one.
I think they would want to keep some elements of the program, as we see from this proposal.
They would want to keep as much of it as possible.
They certainly want to keep their research reactor, the Tehran Research Reactor, or a replacement.
The question is, do they have to enrich fuel for it?
Do they have to make the fuel rods for it?
And there, you know, they'll say, well, they want to be self-sufficient.
They can't trust the rest of the world.
It's kind of a vicious cycle.
You know, the world doesn't trust Iran.
Therefore, they feel they have to make this stuff on their own.
Well, if they had a better relationship with the rest of the world, maybe, you know, they wouldn't have to worry so much.
Right.
Yeah, it is a chicken and the egg kind of thing.
Even going back to the 90s, where Clinton had stopped the Russians and the Chinese from providing some nuclear facilities and turnkey equipment and whatever.
So, they went ahead and got it from AQ Khan and the black market from Pakistan.
That kind of stuff.
Right.
They made their own.
Right.
But, yeah.
So, anyway, well, I sure do appreciate this journalism that you do here.
I read you all the time.
I follow you on Twitter.
And we were all wondering exactly what's in there.
And I guess we don't really know, but we got a much better idea of what's being proposed here, thanks to you.
So, thank you, Barbara, very much.
My pleasure.
Anytime.
All right.
That is Barbara Slavin at AlMonitor.
That's almonitor.com.
Iran's new nuclear proposal.
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