WASHINGTON -- U.S. President George W. Bush last week formally approved the Additional Protocol to the nation's nuclear inspections agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency, the State Department announced (see GSN, Feb. 6, 2008).
(Jan. 5) -
U.S. President George W. Bush approved the IAEA Additional Protocol last week (Mohammed Jalil/Getty Images).
Bush's signed the protocol's instrument of ratification on Tuesday. The new program is set to take effect tomorrow when U.S. Ambassador to the IAEA Gregory Schulte submits the document to the Vienna-based agency, according to an IAEA official.
The need for the Additional Protocol emerged following the 1991 Gulf War when international inspectors in Iraq uncovered a massive, multipronged uranium enrichment program that Baghdad had successfully hidden from the agency for years while remaining in official good standing with its Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty obligations.
Over the course of several years, agency members developed the protocol to give inspectors more power to conduct short-notice inspections and to monitor environmental conditions that could reveal illicit nuclear activities.
However, just 89 nations have ratified the tool since a model protocol was completed in 1997, according to an agency fact sheet, and it has become contentious particularly in the Iranian nuclear crisis (see GSN, Dec. 24, 2008). Tehran has signed, but not ratified, the protocol, and for some time it allowed the agency to conduct some protocol-related measures. As the dispute over Iran's nuclear ambitions lingered, Tehran withdrew that voluntary cooperation and has opted to comply only with the minimal requirements of its agency safeguards agreement.
U.S. officials have repeatedly called for Iran to ratify the protocol, but their position was somewhat undermined by Washington's holdout status.
“By agreeing to implement the IAEA’s highest standard of verification, the president has shown our strong support for the IAEA and its critical role in preventing nuclear proliferation. We hope that our step will encourage other states to adopt and implement the Additional Protocol," Schulte told Global Security Newswire in a statement today.
The U.S. version of the protocol differs significantly from the version designed to ensure that non-nuclear-weapon states cannot move nuclear material from their civilian facilities to military activities without being detected. With its acknowledged nuclear-weapon stockpile, the United States plans for the protocol to provide agency officials with a better understanding of industrial-scale nuclear activities. Such understanding would give inspectors greater ability to detect covert activities in non-nuclear-weapon states.
The protocol had languished since the U.S. Senate approved it in 2004. Its champion, U.S. Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), has pressed the Bush administration to adopt the necessary regulatory structure needed to implement the measure.
"Senator Lugar very pleased that it's finally completed," his spokesman Andy Fisher said today.
One nonproliferation advocate praised Lugar's effort.
"Lugar deserves a lot of the credit for pushing the Bush administration to get this done. He has been persistent, to his credit," said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association.
Kimball, though, offered a more cautious opinion of the Bush action.
"It's a good thing this is finally done, but it falls far short of what the United States could be doing to strengthen the safeguards system," he said. "What the United states really needs to be doing to increase the number of states to have an Additional Protocol with the agency is to take concrete action towards reducing the number and role of U.S. nuclear weapons. That, more than ratification of the Additional Protocol, will increase our leverage vis-a-vis the Additional Protocol holdouts."