REPORTS THAT China is now willing to support expanded United Nations sanctions against Iran over its nuclear programme make such measures a real prospect. Ambassadors from the fivepermanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany will sit down in New York over the next few days to begin discussions on a draft resolution. However US hopes that sanctions could be in place “within weeks”, notably ahead of the Non-Proliferation Treaty conference in May, may be optimistic. Both Russia and China are likely to want to take their time.
Iran continues vigorously to insist that its nuclear programme is not military and that a civil programme is a sovereign right. But its stance is simply not credible and its acquisition of nuclear weapons would be a dangerous and destabilising threat to the region.
The revelation last September by the US, Britain and France of a substantial hidden enrichment site at Qom has been followed by further credible claims that the Iranians are working on two further secret sites. And, in its bluntest statement yet, the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which has complained repeatedly over non-co-operation with inspections, said for the first time in February that it has extensive evidence of “past or current undisclosed activities” by Iran’s military to develop a nuclear warhead. It also concluded that Iran’s weapons-related activity apparently continued “beyond 2004”, contradicting a US intelligence assessment two years ago that suggested work on a bomb was suspended in 2003.
Ireland rightly accepts the IAEA’s evidence of a military programme as authoritative, and is part of an EU political consensus on the need to press for further sanctions. If those are not forthcoming, the EU is likely to press ahead with its own. The US-drafted UN proposal would expand the existing travel and contact blacklist with a new focus on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and firms it controls, reflecting perceptions that the guards have been central to a silent coup led by President Ahmadinejad. The draft also calls for the expansion of existing arms trade curbs into a full weapons embargo with an inspection regime similar to North Korea, and a blacklist on several shipping firms.
The alternative – to do nothing – would be to send a signal to Iran, and to others in the region, of the toothless nature of global collective security. Most dangerously it would leave the field to those who argue such threats can only be dealt with by military means.