IAEA presents 'devastating' report on Syria to Security Council
The International Atomic Energy Agency has presented the United Nations Security Council with a 'devastating' report on Syrian attempts to develop nuclear weapons. And it feels like deja vu all over again. The Security Council would take action but China and Russia are opposed. The International Atomic Energy Agency board of governors voted in June to report Syria to the council, rebuking it for stonewalling an agency probe into the Dair Alzour complex, bombed by Israel in 2007 [pictured above. CiJ].Read the whole thing.
Western countries said Thursday's closed-door briefing by Neville Whiting, head of the IAEA safeguards department dealing with Syria and Iran, had made clear that Syria had a secret nuclear plant. They said the council should pursue the issue, but suggested it might not discuss it again before September.
Russia and China, allies of Damascus who can veto any council action, queried whether the council should be involved, as the Syrian complex no longer exists.
US intelligence reports have said the complex was a nascent, North Korean-designed reactor intended to produce plutonium for atomic weaponry, before Israeli warplanes reduced it to rubble. Syria has said it was a non-nuclear military facility.
British Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant told reporters Whiting had given a "devastating briefing ... from which you could only draw one conclusion -- that Syria did have at Dair Alzour a clandestine nuclear plant."
Damascus had "tried to conceal the purpose of that plant ... misled the IAEA about what the purpose was and ... failed to cooperate effectively with the IAEA in following up the questions that the IAEA put to them," he said.
This is highly relevant despite the fact that the al-Kibar reactor has been destroyed, allegedly by Israel. The reason it is still relevant, which the article does not mention, is that Syria has three other sites that they are refusing to allow the IAEA to examine.
What could go wrong?
Labels: al-Kibar, China, IAEA, Russia, Syria, Syrian nuclear program, UN Security Council
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:53 PM
1 Comments:
When China and Russia shut down UNSC action to protect allies (or business partners) there isn't all that moral fluster and dithering and barely contained sense of dread and angst we get from Obama's need to attach condemnations of Israel to vetoes or preclude vetoes by caving in advance to adversaries.
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