Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. Speaker, last month, Iran successfully tested the latest version of its Shahab-3 intermediate-range ballistic missile. According to Iran’s Defense Ministry, the flight was the culmination of Tehran’s efforts to improve the range and accuracy of the Shahab-3, which Western experts believe can strike targets anywhere within Israel and also threatens U.S. forces arrayed in neighboring Iraq and around the Persian Gulf.
Tehran’s ballistic missile program is worrisome in its own right, but coupled with the increasingly alarming details of Iran’s nuclear program, the danger is magnified.
For the past year, the United States and our European allies have been working through the International Atomic Energy Agency, the IAEA, to prevent Iran from continuing its pursuit of nuclear weapons. The IAEA is considering a draft resolution authored by Britain, France, and Germany that will give Tehran until November to reveal in detail its nuclear program.
Our Government has advocated a tougher approach by pressing the IAEA to set specific benchmarks for Iran and by asking the agency to refer the matter to the U.N. Security Council which has the power to take punitive action, including the imposition of sanctions.
Until Tehran sees that its continued nuclear activities have economic and diplomatic costs, they are unlikely to begin serious negotiations that might lead to the shutdown of their nuclear program. Unfortunately, there does not appear to be sufficient support in the IAEA for a tougher line with Iran.
Over the past 2 years, IAEA inspectors have discovered a number of undeclared nuclear activities in Iran that clearly point to a nuclear weapons development program, despite assertions by Iranian officials that one of the world’s leading oil exporters was building nuclear reactors to produce energy.
Inspectors have found evidence of unreported uranium imports from China, in 1991, as well as uranium enrichment programs using both centrifuges and lasers. The IAEA also uncovered Iranian efforts to reprocess plutonium and evidence of efforts to produce polonium 210, an isotope that can trigger a nuclear explosion.
In November of last year, the European Union secured an Iranian declaration that it would suspend all enrichment and reprocessing activities. Tehran also agreed to sign an additional protocol that would allow inspectors to provide more tough and unannounced inspections. But Iran reneged, and when challenged for its failures, it bridled, warning that it was likely to resume enrichment in the future.
In addition, there is evidence of continued centrifuge-related activities by private workshops, calling further into question its pledges to the EU.
Finally, Iran recently announced that it was prepared to convert approximately 40 tons of yellowcake into uranium exafluoride gas, which is the raw material for centrifuge equipment. This is a sufficient quantity to produce nuclear weapons.
There is no doubt that Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, along with the ongoing standoff with North Korea over its nuclear weapons program, constitute the gravest threat to American national security today. How we deal with this threat will shape our global security environment for decades. When coupled with the desire by terrorists to acquire and use these weapons against the U.S., the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran and North Korea is petrifying.
In his new book, Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, Graham Allison, founding dean of Harvard’s JFK School of Government, states that if a terrorist were to acquire a nuclear weapon, its delivery to an American target may be almost impossible to stop.
Since coming to the Congress, I have advocated strengthening the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program that seems to secure enormous amounts of fissile material in the former Soviet Union and to expand that effort worldwide.
While securing this material is one element of preventing the production of nuclear weapons, we also have to make structural changes in the global regime that controls the manufacture, transfer and use of fissile material for peaceful use by governments. Chief among these structures is the "grand bargain’’ of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the NPT, first articulated by President Eisenhower’s "Atoms for Peace"’ proposal.
In exchange for the commitment to forgo the acquisition of nuclear weapons and to agree to IAEA safeguards and inspections, the NPT guarantees non-nuclear weapons states who are parties to the Treaty assistance in developing nuclear energy. The problem with this bargain is that it allows nations like Iran and North Korea to access fissile material and technological know-how that are necessary precursors to a nuclear program. When the state feels confident it is ready to proceed with a weapons program, it simply opts out of the NPT. Unfortunately, the path of least resistance, the acquisition of a nuclear bomb, may run right through the NPT, not around it.
In February, the President gave a speech in which he proposed a series of tough steps. He asked, among other things, for the 40-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group not to sell uranium enrichment equipment and reprocessing equipment to countries that are not already in possession of those technologies. Months have passed. We have done little as a Nation in this area, and time, Mr. Speaker, is running out.