UN nuclear watchdog seen aggressively pursuing violations

PRAGUE -- As the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency gains more authority and develops greater capabilities to investigate suspected proliferation activities, more countries will be found to have violated the rules, according to diplomats and analysts.

Egypt joined that expanding list of nations this month as reports emerged that the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency was investigating Cairo for conducting a series of small, but undeclared, atomic experiments decades ago.

Over the past two years, IAEA probes have also helped uncover varying degrees of unauthorized nuclear activity by Iran and South Korea, as well as overseeing Libya's disarmament. Additionally, Abdul Qadeer Khan, the founder of Pakistan's nuclear program, admitted early last year to providing atomic secrets to Tehran and Tripoli, as well as to North Korea, since the late 1980s. The flood of disclosures and confessions that have shed light on previously clandestine nuclear activities is partially the result of expanded inspection powers the IAEA has acquired over the past decade as well as a new investigative culture that has emerged at the agency, diplomats and weapons specialists said.

"The IAEA is changing the way it does business and it is creating shock waves," said David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector who heads the Institute for Science and International Security, a think tank in Washington. "It is making it harder for countries to hide even small efforts."

Egypt's alleged nuclear experiments -- which diplomats say mostly took place before 1982, although some may have been conducted later -- involved making uranium metal and carrying out the first steps of uranium enrichment by making uranium tetrafluoride, or UF4. Although these activities could be pointers to a nuclear program, nonproliferation officials say they see no evidence of this.

"Our people have concluded that this is more likely the result of sloppiness in reporting" the enrichment activities than deliberate "concealment" of nuclear activities, a senior Western diplomat in Vienna close to the IAEA said.

Enriching uranium is allowed under the 1970 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty as long as it is reported to the IAEA and open to inspections to assure it is for peaceful purposes. Egypt ratified the treaty in 1981, pledging to forgo nuclear weapons and provide the IAEA with a declaration of past nuclear work.

Diplomats say the undeclared experiments were minor compared with those of Iran, which concealed a massive uranium enrichment program from the IAEA for nearly two decades and which Washington believes is trying to develop nuclear weapons.

Egypt has denied developing nuclear weapons and is cooperating with the agency, but IAEA officials say they are nevertheless determined to look thoroughly into the matter, as well as any others that emerge as new information comes to light.

"The strengthened safeguards regime we now have in place has allowed us to pick up evidence of past technical failures," the senior Western diplomat close to the IAEA said. "These skeletons in the closet are from a time and place when the safeguards culture was different."

The changes at the agency can be traced back to the aftermath of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when weapons inspectors learned that Iraq had managed to develop a fairly advanced covert nuclear weapons program despite being subject to IAEA monitoring and inspections. That alarming discovery led nonproliferation officials to conclude that the provisions of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty were insufficient.

The treaty allows only the five declared nuclear powers -- the United States, Russia, China, France, and Great Britain -- to possess atomic weapons. All other signatories must submit their nuclear programs to IAEA inspections to assure they are exclusively for peaceful purposes.

The inspections, however, could take place only at declared nuclear sites, meaning that countries could potentially conduct secret and illegal atomic weapons research elsewhere with minimal fear of detection.

Following the discoveries in Iraq, IAEA officials pushed for a treaty amendment, "Additional Protocol," that provides for tougher snap inspections not limited to declared nuclear facilities.

Additionally, the agency's safeguards department, which runs inspections, began to employ more sophisticated inspection measures and more active investigative and detection techniques to try to uncover undeclared nuclear activities.

"Our inspectors were bean counters before with no obligation or authority to look beyond the beans," the senior Western diplomat in Vienna said. "Now countries need to account for every gram of nuclear material and for their plans into the future. The information is voluminous."

The most extensive, and alarming, unauthorized nuclear activity the IAEA has uncovered involves Iran, which admitted in October 2003 to conducting 18 years of covert atomic experiments.

To avoid being reported to the UN Security Council, Iran pledged in November to suspend uranium enrichment activities and to open up its nuclear facilities to stringent inspections.

In December 2003, Libya admitted to harboring a secret nuclear weapons program, and agreed to dismantle it under supervision of the UN nuclear agency.

Brazil says it is producing enriched uranium for peaceful purposes, but secrecy regarding its nuclear capabilities has alarmed nuclear-control advocates.

Following an IAEA investigation, South Korea admitted in September that its scientists conducted unauthorized tests to extract plutonium in 1982 and experimented with enriching uranium in 2000 -- two potential pointers to a nuclear weapons program.

Seoul, which says it has no intention of building nuclear weapons, said researchers carried out the experiments without the government's consent and it vowed full cooperation with the agency. In November, the IAEA's board of governors rebuked South Korea, although it stopped short of reporting them to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions.

North Korea, meanwhile, has refused to return to six-country talks on dismantling its nuclear program unless Washington drops what Pyongyang calls a "hostile policy."

"The rules of discovery have changed and more things are coming out," said Stephen P. Cohen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution specializing in foreign policy and proliferation issues. "Are there things that even this better investigative process have not revealed? We don't know," Cohen added. "In cases where there is a clear motive and suspicious activities we should be concerned."

Despite the recent successes, many officials say they would still like to see the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty strengthened. IAEA chief Mohammed ElBaradei, for example, has repeatedly called to have the nuclear fuel cycle placed under international control to prevent further proliferation.

On Friday, ElBaradei called on countries to freeze building facilities for uranium enrichment for five years. "We have enough capacity in the world for enrichment or reprocessing," he said in remarks published by the Japanese daily newspaper Asahi Shimbun.