Iran Nuke Q & A

(CBS)  U.S. and European diplomats are campaigning behind the scenes Thursday in a last-minute effort to gain consensus for reporting Iran to the U.N. Security council over concerns its seeking nuclear weapons. What the Security Council will do yet is not yet clear, but the Iranians are already threatening retaliation, CBS News Correspondent Sheila MacVicar reports. She answers questions about what this all means.

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If this goes to the Security Council, what does that mean?

Senior U.S. officials have told CBS News they have a majority of votes among the member nations of the IAEA to pass a resolution reporting Iran to the Security Council for failure to comply with its obligations under a Non-Proliferation Safeguards Agreement.

The Security Council, which U.S. Ambassador John Bolton presides over this month, is likely to agree to wait for a further, and more detailed, IAEA report due Mar. 6 before taking any action. In the intervening weeks, diplomats will try to persuade Iran to give the IAEA the information it requires. Otherwise the Security Council will begin to consider other options, including some form of sanctions. There's no agreement on what to do if Iran does not comply.

The Iranians, however, have all of their leadership speaking from the same page, and they have threatened to stop voluntary co-operation with the nuclear inspectors. They have already broken the seals on uranium enrichment equipment and say they are ready to re-start work on enrichment activities. (Their suspension was voluntary, and Iran does have a legal right to enriched uranium).

What impact will it have if Iran stops voluntary co-operation?"

The Iranians say that by law, if referred to the Security Council, they are obliged to end voluntary co-operation. That co-operation permits IAEA inspectors to demand to see more sites, ask more questions, examine dual use equipment and imports and exports. IAEA inspectors would be restricted to "declared sites," and would lose the broader sense, however limited, they now have of the Iranian program.

So what's the key question?

Are the Iranians really interested in only nuclear power and uranium enrichment for peaceful purposes ... or do they want The Bomb? There's no smoking mushroom cloud yet, but the IAEA inspectors, helped by intelligence provided by the US and others, have come up with some worrying evidence that suggests, in the words of the current IAEA report, a "military-nuclear" dimension.


Why didn't Iran just comply superficially with IAEA mandates and continue to covertly work on producing a nuclear weapon?

Simply put, they got caught. There have been rumblings for years in intelligence circles about what the Iranians were up to. In 2002, an Iranian opposition group exposed two secret facilities the government had not told the IAEA about. In Dec. 2002, the U.S. accused Iran of attempting to make nuclear weapons. That launched a more aggressive IAEA inspection regime, and by June 2003, the Director-General of the agency declared that Iran "failed to report certain nuclear materials and activities." We now know that was an understatement.

Why is the international community so suspicious of Iran?

It didn't take long for the IAEA to uncover evidence that for 18 years, at least, the Iranians were running a covert program they successfully concealed.

They mined and milled natural uranium without telling the IAEA, as they are supposed to.

They built a secret underground enrichment facility at Natanz. After it's existence was revealed, inspectors went there, and discovered the Iranians had removed the equipment.

On two occasions, in 1987, and again beginning in mid-1993, the IAEA now knows the Iranians were in contact with the covert network of the serial rogue proliferator, the Pakistani scientist and father of Pakistan's nuclear weapon AQ Khan. So far, the Iranians have produce one piece of paper with regards to the 1987 contact, and it details a lengthy shopping list. The Iranians insist "no other written evidence exists, such as meeting minutes, administrative documents, reports, personal notebooks."

Interrogations of some of those involved in the Khan networks and now awaiting trial in various jurisdictions have given the IAEA a pretty good idea of what the Iranians actually got.

There is evidence of highly enriched uranium, which the Iranians have yet to explain.

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