The previous month, the IAEA governing board condemned the Iranian government for failing to cooperate to its satisfaction with UN “inspectors” and insisted that Tehran abandon plans to build a nuclear power research facility. Washington wants the agency to refer the issue of Iran’s nuclear program to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions. The Iranian government says it seeks to develop nuclear power plants to help meet the country’s growing electrical needs.

Washington is also using the IAEA to pressure the government of Brazil into allowing unannounced inspections of its nuclear power facilities, including a new uranium enrichment plant. Agency officials say they want to make sure no uranium is being enriched beyond that which was declared. The Brazilian government has so far refused to allow such inspections. (See article on page 2.)

These actions by the International Atomic Energy Agency underscore how Washington and its imperialist allies have increasingly used that UN body to target semicolonial nations that seek to develop their electrical capacity through nuclear power.  
 
Original role of IAEA
The IAEA was established by the United Nations half a century ago. But it is only in the past decade that the imperialist powers have systematically used it as one of their tools to police and intervene in Third World countries, often tied to threats of diplomatic and economic sanctions or even military aggression. The turning point came with the 1990-91 U.S.-led Gulf War against Iraq.

The International Atomic Energy Agency was originally set up in the late 1950s as a UN body whose stated purpose was to supervise international collaboration for promoting the peaceful applications of nuclear energy.

The U.S. rulers unleashed the first nuclear weapons in 1945 with the annihilation of the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To this day, the U.S. government remains the only one to have used atomic weapons. Washington had a nuclear monopoly in the late 1940s and maintained a big lead into the next decade. The advance of the world revolution in China, Korea, and elsewhere pushed the U.S. rulers back, however, buying time for the Soviet Union to develop its own nuclear weapons. Since then, every advance in nuclear technology was aggressively initiated by Washington but quickly matched by the USSR, and the U.S. rulers had to recognize they would be unable to attack the Soviet Union militarily and win.

Moscow exploded its first atomic bomb in 1949. London and Paris followed suit in 1952 and 1959, respectively. Throughout the 1950s, it was still possible to believe that only major powers with a strong technological infrastructure could develop a nuclear weapons capacity. That imperialist hope was shattered the following decade as China exploded its own bomb in 1964. Subsequently the governments of Israel, India, and Pakistan acquired nuclear arms, and the list will likely grow.

The goal of the ensuing imperialist nuclear weapons buildup in the United States and Europe was to give Washington and its allies the freest hand possible to intervene militarily against the colonial revolution and against the extension of the socialist revolution around the world. At the same time, in face of its inability to maintain a nuclear monopoly, the U.S. government called for international control of both military and peaceful applications of nuclear energy under UN supervision.

In December 1953, U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower gave his “Atoms for Peace” speech before the UN General Assembly. Washington promised to provide nuclear technology, training, and know-how to those countries that would agree to restrict the application to peaceful purposes.

The International Atomic Energy Agency was established in 1957 under the aegis of the UN. In 1970 the UN Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) came into force. The treaty requires that the “Big Five”—the imperialist powers in Washington, London, and Paris, as well as the workers states in Moscow and Beijing—negotiate to take steps to reduce their nuclear arsenals, not furnish nuclear weapons to governments without them, and aid “non-nuclear” countries in the peaceful development of nuclear energy. In return, the latter countries must agree not to acquire nuclear weapons and to accept IAEA inspections of all relevant facilities.

In a feature article in the June 13 issue of the New York Times magazine, author James Traub contrasts the original role of the IAEA and how it has changed since 1991.

Traub states, “It was almost an invisible organization until the aftermath of the Persian Gulf war.” IAEA officials carried out routine administrative inspections of countries from Canada to Iraq and Iran, giving them a clean bill of health. “The IAEA had no intelligence-gathering capacity of its own, and the 35-nation board of governors was reluctant to let the agency use data gathered by national intelligence services,” he writes.  
 
Turning point with Gulf War
That changed after the first U.S.-led assault on Iraq. After the first Bush administration failed to overthrow the Iraqi government, the Clinton White House used a combination of aggressive tactics, including periodic bombing attacks and a UN-sponsored economic blockade, to set the stage for new attacks on Iraq. Washington began to use the IAEA as one more tool in its war drive.

From 1991 to 1998, UN “inspectors” were sent to Iraq as part of a newly created UN Special Commission (UNSCOM), supposedly to verify implementation of UN resolutions imposed on Iraq after the Gulf War demanding that it eliminate all “weapons of mass destruction,” including nuclear facilities. The purpose of the “inspections” by this allegedly neutral agency was to build up a propaganda campaign against Iraq and provide a rationalization for launching further military aggression against Baghdad.

The IAEA also began to be used increasingly as part of the imperialist campaign of military, economic, and diplomatic pressure against north Korea, focusing on that country’s nuclear power program. In 1993 the Clinton administration provided Hans Blix, then director of the IAEA, with U.S. spy photos of north Korean nuclear facilities. From that point on the agency began to make use of the information provided by the CIA and other imperialist spy agencies.

Washington has pushed to give the UN agency more aggressive policing powers. In 1997 it began using an additional protocol of the Nonproliferation Treaty allowing IAEA officials to visit any building they claimed might contain nuclear facilities and to conduct spot inspections with as little as two hours’ warning. The Bush administration has proposed a further step: that benefits from the Nonproliferation Treaty be made conditional on ratification of this protocol. ElBaradei has even proposed making the NPT mandatory, so that withdrawal would be sanctioned. A major target of this move is north Korea, which pulled out of the NPT in 1993 in response to provocative IAEA “inspections.”

As Washington accelerated its war drive against Iraq in 2001, UN inspectors were sent back into that country under the pretext of searching for “weapons of mass destruction.” The accusation that the Iraqi government had a secret nuclear program was one of the reasons given for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Following the assault on Iraq, the imperialist powers stepped up their offensive, targeting Iran and north Korea in particular. In both cases the spearpoint of this drive is the charge that these governments are developing nuclear bombs. Tehran has insisted that it has long been developing nuclear power, not to build weapons but to meet the need to expand the country’s electrical power and infrastructure. Voicing an argument made by proponents of Washington’s offensive against Iran, New York Times journalist Traub stated that “the bargain enshrined in the Nonproliferation Treaty” of receiving support for the peaceful use of nuclear energy in exchange for not acquiring nuclear weapons—“is effectively defunct. The distinction between peaceful and warlike uses of nuclear power has become hopelessly blurred. The threshold issue in nuclear nonproliferation is not the hardware… but the capacity to enrich uranium,” which is needed for nuclear power generating plants.

In an escalation of its aggressive campaign, Washington is pressing the IAEA to refer the question of Iran’s nuclear program to the UN Security Council in order to threaten it with sanctions.

ElBaradei has also proposed that the manufacture of enriched uranium for export be put under “multinational control” in order to block countries like Iran from making their own nuclear fuel.  
 
Piracy on high seas
In a further escalation, Washington is seeking to legitimize the boarding of ships in the name of “nonproliferation.” In January 2003 the Proliferation Security Initiative was launched. This is a set of agreements under which Washington and a select group of its allies work to track and seize materials, including by stopping and boarding ships on the high seas, allegedly destined for weapons programs in “states of proliferation concern.”

In October 2003, under the cover of the PSI, Washington intercepted a ship bound for Libya and claimed it seized centrifuge parts for nuclear facilities. This was the latest in a 20-year imperialist offensive against the Libyan government. In December of that year the government in Tripoli capitulated to these threats, announcing that it would dismantle its nuclear weapons programs and allow IAEA officials to verify compliance.The latest step by Washington in this direction was a boarding agreement with the government of Panama in June of this year. More ships fly Panama’s flag than that of any other country. The government of Liberia signed a similar agreement with the U.S. government in February.
 
 
Related article:
U.S. rulers target Brazil over use of nuclear fuel to expand electrification
Stance on nuclear power is a political, not technical, matter  
 
 
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