TO: Mohamed ElBaradei - Director General, IAEA

FROM: George Perkovich

RE: Handling Radioactive Facts

Let's be honest. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is not a household name. Many political leaders and pundits still garble the agency's abbreviation. But it is becoming increasingly difficult to deny the importance of the agency's work. Nuclear proliferation is a growing menace. The war in Iraq has revealed the difficulty of preventive wars of disarmament and thereby underscored the critical role the Vienna-based agency must play. Still, its recent record is mixed. Weak safeguards allowed Iraq to advance its nuclear-weapon program before the 1991 war, but agency vigilance in the 1990s -- authorized and supported by the U.N. Security Council -- ultimately helped eviscerate Iraq's nuclear program. IAEA inspectors discovered North Korea's secret, illegal diversion of plutonium for nuclear weapons in 1992 and more recently helped expose a long history of Iran's illicit attempts to create a nuclear-weapons capability.

The world's security now depends more on the IAEA than ever before. The agency has grown stronger under your leadership, but a confusing mandate created by states, limited investigative procedures, and an occassional aversion to publicizing unpleasant facts sometimes hamstring the agency. Your challenge, Mr. Director General, is to uncover and expose facts so plainly that states cannot duck the need to reform the rules safeguarding nuclear technology.

The IAEA's Split Personality
Your agency was born with an identity crisis. Developing countries supported the agency's establishment, based on the notion that the IAEA exists to spread the benefits of nuclear technology around the world. The agency's schizophrenia was encoded during the negotiation of its statute, following U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower's famous 1953 "Atoms for Peace" speech. Homi Bhabha, the charismatic leader of India's emerging nuclear program, marshaled anticolonial concerns to help ensure that IAEA rules would not prevent new countries from acquiring the capability to produce nuclear weapons altogether.

You now face Bhabha's spirit in Iran, and possibly soon in Egypt, South Korea, and other countries. Iran genuinely resists what it sees as U.S.-led nuclear colonialism, and it insists on its right to produce highly enriched uranium and separated plutonium that it claims will be used only for peaceful purposes. Iran and other countries, including Brazil, South Africa, and Malaysia, downplay the world's valid concern that technology acquired today could be used for non-peaceful purposes tomorrow.

The tension stems from a clash between the nuclear haves and have-nots. The have-nots won't endorse tougher nonproliferation rules if the countries with nuclear weapons don't do more to dismantle their arsenals. The haves, including the United States, won't agree to expand cooperation in nuclear-power development if the non-nuclear-weapon states don't agree to firm up the rules.

Just the Facts
It's not your job to resolve this tension. The IAEA should be neither a defender nor a prosecutor. Rather, you should be the world's leading nuclear fact-gatherer -- one not diverted or muzzled by concerns over where the facts might lead. The Bush administration's political brutalization of international inspectors in the run-up to the Iraq war, and the subsequent evidence that Washington was wrong, make it difficult for you to remain neutral. Many capitals are so resistant to the current administration's bullying that they urge you to cook the books to produce reports that will forestall another Iraq-style showdown. But you must resist and let the facts speak for themselves.

Unfortunately, some of the agency's recent work gives the appearance of political trimming. Your recent reports on Iran have neglected to mention by name countries that supplied Iran's nuclear capabilities, such as China and Pakistan. Then there was the ill-advised political judgment in your November 2003 report on Iran in which you opined that there was "no evidence that the previously undeclared nuclear activities and material" documented by agency investigators "was related to a nuclear weapon program." That line was probably intended to keep Tehran from cutting off further inspections and withdrawing from the Non-Proliferation Treaty. It may have been diplomatically shrewd, but it wasn't a statement of fact.

If you confine yourself to collecting and reporting facts with uncompromising vigor, leaving the interpretation to the Board of Governors, individual states, and the U.N. Security Council, you will minimize political controversy directed at the agency. As important, you will force member states and the Security Council to stop shirking their responsibilities for enforcement, as they did in 2002 when the agency reported North Korea's treaty noncompliance, but the Security Council, including the United States, did nothing. If other states don't like the way the United States pursues enforcement, they should do it themselves, not dump the hardest problems on the IAEA. And if China and Russia want to avoid having the Security Council authorize binding sanctions against states that break international rules, for fear their own behavior could be sanctionable someday, don't let them create the impression that it is the IAEA that is weak. Make the facts so clear that coalitions of the willing must then resolve crises, as Britain, France, and Germany are attempting with Iran. Your courage in taking slings and arrows from all sides is admirable. But international security ultimately requires states to take the lead.

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