Iran’s nuclear deal: Are IAEA protections “dangerously outdated”? | Business and Economic News

As U.S. and Iranian negotiators try to reclaim the 2015 nuclear deal, experts are sounding the alarm to regulate international guards who frequently inspect the world’s civilian nuclear facilities to ensure that materials with weapons are not targeted for military use.

A report (PDF) unveiled on Thursday, the NonPoliferation Policy Education Center (NPEC), a nonprofit in Washington, warned that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has long used obsolete references to detect the quantities of redirected nuclear materials needed to make them. The bomb had a destructive ability to compete with bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

These references are known as “significant quantities” or SQ values ​​for fissile materials. These SQ values ​​determine whether the IAEA inspects civilian nuclear facilities frequently to ensure that hazardous quantities of plutonium or uranium enrichment are not secretly directed to weapons programs.

As part of a two-year larger study to assess what will be needed to verify and enforce the nuclear proliferation pact in the coming decades, the report was released by the NPEC on Thursday, in line with recent talks aimed at reinstating the U.S.. In the Iranian nuclear treaty, it is also known as the Joint Plan Integral Action (JCPOA).

“The report highlights the problem that negotiators of Iran’s nuclear deal would be well addressed,” NPEC chief executive Henry Sokolski told Al Jazeera, adding that “this is aimed at detecting how much nuclear material is needed to make a bomb and whether or not the deal is inspected.” good reason to doubt. “

Protections based on weapons design in World War II in the 1970s

The IAEA’s SQ values ​​have greatly enriched eight kilograms of plutonium and 25 kilograms of uranium, which the agency considers sufficient to make a nuclear bomb with a yield of 10-20 kilotons. That is the explosive energy released by the bombs dropped by the US in Japan.

The NPEC warns in its report that these SQ values ​​are “not only old, but dangerously outdated,” because they were approved by the IAEA in 1977 and are based on outdated World War II weapon designs.

However, those references are linked to regimes that negotiated nuclear inspection agreements – including Iran’s nuclear deal, which the United States unilaterally ousted in 2018 by order of former President Donald Trump, with world powers, Sokolski said.

If the IAEA were to lower its SQ value, “it would have to increase the frequency of its nuclear inspections,” Sokolski said, noting that this would be costly and “resilient,” as “more than some states are concerned about being frequently inspected.”

Concerns about IAEA SQ values ​​have been around for decades.

Thomas Cochran is a retired nuclear physicist and is the former director of the council’s nuclear program for the defense of nonprofit natural resources. In 1995, he co-authored a report calling the IAEA’s SQ values ​​“technically indefensible,” which is how weapon designs were advanced from World War II onwards using less fissile material to increase the explosive performance of nuclear weapons, as well as availability. this technology to non-nuclear powers in “unclassified literature”.

At the time, Cochran argued that the IAEA should lower its SQ values ​​by eight factors for plutonium and slightly less enriched uranium – which he still believes today.

“SQ values ​​are about 70 years old,” he told Al Jazeera. “In the last 75 years people have been more intelligent in making nuclear weapons.”

The SQ values ​​for IAEA fissile materials are based on World War II weapons design and have not changed since they were adopted more than 40 years ago [File: Lisi Niesner/Reuters]

Asked why the IAEA has not lowered its SQ thresholds in four decades, the agency’s head of media, Fredrik Dahl, told Al Jazeera via email: “Although SQ values ​​have not changed, the IAEA’s protective measures and approaches include the Comprehensive Protection Agreement (CSA) and protocol. if an add-on (AP) is required, smaller amounts of nuclear material, i.e. less than 1 SQ, may detect the deviation in time and may avoid such deviation with the risk of early detection. “

Sokolski noted that Iran “has not yet acceded to the Additional Protocol,” which allows for additional verification tools for a guarantee agreement.

“But it’s worse than that,” he added, adding that Iran’s nuclear deal was “designed and sold” because it believed it would prevent “weapons from being diverted from nuclear material” in less than a year.

“If an agency prevents a weapon from diverting plutonium or highly enriched uranium, it has to be honest that those amounts are actually there,” Sokolski said. “In order to get to know and truly care for dogs, the IAEA needs to be honest owners. There is no dance around that ”.

Simulating destruction in cities in the Middle East

In addition to re-explaining the problem of SQ values, the NPEC promised MIT graduate and research analyst Eva Lisowski what would happen if the one-kiloton nuclear implosion device was “relatively crude and small” – the most common design for a nuclear fission weapon. it has exploded at ground level in five cities in the Middle East.

This device could only be built with 3 kg of plutonium or 8 kg of highly enriched uranium, the report says – well below the IAEA’s SQ levels.

The NPEC has selected Middle Eastern population centers for its case study because “over the past 36 months, political leaders in Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia have publicly suggested that their countries may acquire nuclear weapons,” Sokolski said. “This is unprecedented.”

Among the five cities, Cairo, Tel Aviv, Tehran, Riyadh and Dubai were chosen and chosen because they are among the most densely populated in the Middle East and “are in countries with some of the most important military forces in the region.” military conflict in the last half century, ”Sokolski said.

Two separate simulations were conducted for each city to provide estimates of deaths and injuries, considering whether the majority of the population was protected and closed at the time of the attack, both outside and unprotected.

The model only considered “rapid” radiation and fall effects. It does not increase the risk of cancer due to radiation exposure.

According to the simulation, when the destructive power of a one-kiloton (1 kt) nuclear bomb surfaced, it exploded or surpassed the massacre caused by a bomb dropped on Nagasaki (Japan).

External “unarmored” estimates put 82,000 dead and 31,000 wounded in Riyadh, 353,000 dead and 103,000 wounded in Cairo. The “armored” deaths within the city range from 32,000 to 146,000 in each city, respectively.

Tehran estimates that there are 137,000 dead and 49,000 injured if most of the city’s population were in the open air at the time of the attack, with 55,000 dead and 58,000 injured inside the home.

The death toll in Dubai was between 153,000 and 61,000, and in Tel Aviv from 92,000 to 42,000.

The report also said that depending on the weather conditions following the attack, the number of dead and injured could be significantly increased as a result of the nuclear crash as a result of the nuclear reaction.

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The NPEC report seeks to demonstrate that “when a 1-pound nuclear bomb explodes instead of starting at ground level at a 20-carat Nagasaki bomb (i.e. at ~ 1,600 feet), you can kill approximately as many people with radiation and falls,” Sokolski said. “This at least suggests that the IAEA would do well to reduce its significant amounts by more than half and conduct its inspections at least twice.”