Provisions to Limit Future Iranian Illicit Procurements for Its Nuclear Programs

As six world powers, the so-called EU3+3, or “The Six”--the United States, Britain, France, Germany, China, and Russia--negotiate a comprehensive agreement with Iran, it will be vital for them to maintain sanctions and controls on proliferation-sensitive goods, while at the appropriate time creating a verifiable procurement channel for Iran’s legitimate nuclear programs. Proliferation-sensitive goods are those needed in Iran’s nuclear programs and nuclear weapon delivery systems, the latter typically interpreted as covering ballistic missiles. The most effective means available of accomplishing this goal is to maintain the controls on goods in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions and mandates, and the associated national implementing legislation that controls such goods, during the duration of the comprehensive deal. This approach would leave intact the UNSC and multilateral infrastructure created to implement these sanctions, including domestic and UN sanction designations of entities violating the resolutions and aggressive efforts to detect and disrupt Iran’s illicit procurement efforts. At the same time, however, a legitimate procurement channel may need to be created to funnel required goods to Iran’s authorized sensitive nuclear programs. A challenge will be creating and maintaining an architecture that exempts imports of goods to Iran’s legitimate nuclear programs and possibly later to its civilian industries, while preventing imports to a banned or covert military nuclear program. Many proliferation sensitive goods are dual-use goods, which have applications both in nuclear and non-nuclear industries and institutions.

The creation of the architecture should be accomplished during the negotiations of the long-term agreement. It will be important that the architecture, whether or not implemented later, be established at the very beginning of the implementation of the long-term agreement in order to adequately deal with this issue. In essence, the implementation of the architecture should not be left to later.

A divisive issue among those who commented on this paper involved exports to Iran’s civilian sector. Those who supported providing proliferation-sensitive goods to the civilian industry thought it best to limit implementing this exemption only after a significant amount of time had passed after implementation has occurred for the monitored procurement channel for authorized nuclear programs. The concern was that an exemption for Iranian civilian industries could be exploited by Iran to procure for banned programs, including missile and other military programs. Moreover, establishing the necessary controls beyond those applied to a dedicated nuclear procurement channel will be very difficult and would depend on achieving some level of confidence that Iran is no longer conducting illicit nuclear trade.

The text of the full paper can be downloaded below.