The opening Monday of a monthlong United Nations conference to strengthen the main treaty meant to halt the spread of nuclear arms is likely to be dominated by Iran’s president denouncing the West and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warning that if Tehran gets the bomb, the rest of the Middle East will soon follow.
But far less visibly, the Obama administration has been mounting a country-by-country campaign to go beyond the treaty and ensure that Iran’s push toward atomic mastery does not ignite a regional nuclear arms race. In recent months, diplomats have been holding meetings in Washington and shuttling to the Middle East in pursuit of agreements that will let countries develop nuclear power while relinquishing the right to make atomic fuel that could be turned into bombs.
Since the 189 signatories of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty last gathered in New York five years ago, many of the world’s oil-rich nations have begun thinking about or ordering nuclear power plants, arguing that the reserves that made them rich will not last forever. But the United States worries that their fear of an Iranian bomb could lead them to use the same nuclear-fuel technology to develop weapons of their own.
The American strategy, begun during the Bush administration, is to pre-empt that possibility. “We think that’s the right formula for the Middle East,” Ellen Tauscher, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, said in an interview on Friday.
Late last year, the Obama administration closed the first deal, with the United Arab Emirates, which is preparing to build a $20 billion reactor complex on its Persian Gulf coast. Diplomats are negotiating similar agreements with Jordan and Bahrain and have the outlines of a deal with Saudi Arabia.
Most everyone, including President Obama’s aides, agrees that the United Nations conference will not fix the glaring weaknesses in the nonproliferation treaty, which have let Iran move to the edge of a nuclear-weapons capability. Rewriting the treaty is “harder than changing the U.S. Constitution,” Gary Samore, Mr. Obama’s top adviser on nuclear arms, said last week.
Instead, the administration is trying to entice Middle Eastern states out of enriching uranium for reactor fuel and later scavenging spent fuel for plutonium, a step known as reprocessing. Both are allowed by the treaty, and both can become clandestine means of making atom-bomb fuel. Instead, the countries would buy the fuel from international suppliers, reducing the chance of conversion to bomb-grade material.
“The less enrichment and reprocessing the better,” Ms. Tauscher said.
David A. Kay, a nuclear specialist who led the fruitless search for unconventional arms in Iraq, applauded the strategy. “It’s an attempt to close up the holes in the N.P.T.,” he said in an interview. “Equally, if not more so, it’s an attempt to isolate the Iranians.”
Iran and some other nations at the United Nations conference, including Egypt, have a different agenda: to force the region’s one nuclear-weapons state, Israel, to acknowledge its atomic arsenal and sign on to the nonproliferation treaty.
Egypt has championed a proposal to make the Middle East a zone free of nuclear arms, a goal that the Obama administration says it supports, but only in the context of a broader regional peace.
Egypt, which has announced plans for several nuclear power reactors, is pressing for a conference on the nuclear-free zone next year. Its president, Hosni Mubarak, has spoken out bluntly about the alternatives, implying that his country might feel the need to develop nuclear weapons. “We don’t want nuclear arms in the area, but we are obligated to defense ourselves,” he said in 2007 after discussing the Iranian nuclear program with Israel’s prime minister then, Ehud Olmert. “We will have to have the appropriate weapons.”
Today, of the world’s 430 operating nuclear power reactors, none are in the Middle East. One reason is that the area’s oil reserves led many countries to consider nuclear power superfluous. But there is another reason: when countries began to build reactors, suspicions ran so high that they usually got bombed.
In 1981, Israeli jets bombed an Iraqi reactor at Osirak. Sixteen years later, in September 2007, they destroyed a reactor secretly under construction in Syria.
In both cases, Israel feared the purpose of the reactors was to produce plutonium that could fuel bombs.
But Israel was not alone. During the Iran-Iraq war in the mid-1980s, Saddam Hussein repeatedly ordered the bombing of an Iranian reactor project at Bushehr. Later, Iraq also fired missiles at a reactor that Israel built in the 1950s at Dimona to make plutonium for warheads. The Iraqi missiles missed.
Only now is Iran preparing to switch on a reactor at Bushehr. Under an agreement worked out during the Bush administration, Russia is providing the fuel, and all the spent fuel is to be shipped back to Russia. Few believe Bushehr will provide Iran a path to a bomb, as long as the deal with Russia remains in force.
But beyond Bushehr, the history of Iran’s nuclear program underscores the weaknesses of the nonproliferation treaty. It also explains the rationale behind the American effort to persuade countries to renounce the making of atomic fuel.
While the treaty puts no limits on the making of atomic fuel, it requires countries to forswear all military goals and submit to a range of international inspections. Cheating, though, has proved difficult to detect and almost impossible to punish. What has provoked demands for Iran to halt enrichment — along with three rounds of United Nations sanctions and the threat of another — is its history of deception and continuing refusal to answer central questions about its nuclear program.
Iran is enriching uranium at two plants at Natanz, is building a third near the city of Qum and has announced its intention to build 10 more. Iran says it needs them to fuel 20 future reactors.
It would be far cheaper, though, for Iran to buy the fuel on open markets. Iran has also admitted to experiments in reprocessing and scavenging plutonium. Its intent, it says, is not to make weapons but to acquire radioisotopes for nuclear medicine.
For these and other reasons, many of Iran’s Arab neighbors, along with Israel and the West, believe that its true goal is having a weapons ability. And so to many analysts, the growing interest among Persian Gulf nations for nuclear programs reflects a desire for a military edge.
Still, there is another motivating factor: the economics of oil.
When prices are high, gulf countries would prefer to sell their oil at great profit rather than burn it for power. A study done by the International Atomic Energy Agency and a group of gulf states concluded that nuclear power made sense for the region when the price of oil exceeded $50 a barrel. Today it is above $80, and with the world economy gradually recovering, many expect it to go higher.
Every country in the region except Lebanon is planning to build nuclear reactors or has declared an interest in doing so.
This year, Turkey signed deals with Russia and South Korea for preliminary studies of a complex on the Black Sea and another on the Mediterranean, with total power of up to 10,000 megawatts — equal to 10 large reactors.
Last month Jordan announced a competition between three bidders for a 1,100-megawatt reactor. And Saudi Arabia announced the establishment of an atomic city, named after the king, to promote nuclear power.
The gulf nation furthest down the atomic road — and the one that the United States calls the “gold standard” for nonproliferation — is the United Arab Emirates.
In April 2008, the Emirates signed a tentative agreement with the Bush administration to give up enrichment and reprocessing in exchange for access to the global market in nuclear technologies. A year later, the Emirates signed an accord that gave the International Atomic Energy Agency the right to search nuclear-related facilities throughout the country. Iran has withdrawn its agreement to the same accord.
The Obama White House endorsed the Bush administration accord and sent it to Congress, which approved it last summer. On Dec. 17, the Emirates and the United States signed an agreement that made it legal to sell advanced nuclear technology to the country.
Ten days later, the Emirates awarded a South Korean company the contract to build four 1,400-megawatt reactors — quite large by industry standards. They are to begin making power between 2017 and 2020.
The reactors are to be hardened against military and terrorist strikes. The Emirates has said nothing publicly, though, about whether it plans to set up antiaircraft or antimissile batteries, as Israel has done around its Dimona reactor and Iran around Bushehr.
The Obama administration has been taking its case to academics and other Middle East specialists. In January, Ms. Tauscher spoke at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. And in March, the deputy energy secretary, Daniel B. Poneman, told the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, “As countries in the Middle East look at developing civil nuclear programs, the United States can promote the highest standards for safety, security and nonproliferation.”
