Examination of Witnesses (Questions 199
- 219)
WEDNESDAY 28 NOVEMBER 2007
DR KIM
HOWELLS MP, ANTONY
PHILLIPSON AND
PAUL ARKWRIGHT
Chairman: Good afternoon everybody. I
ask members of the public to switch off their mobile phones.
Kim and your colleagues, welcome. As you know,
the Committee is undertaking an inquiry into Iran. We had an interesting
visit there two weeks ago, some details of which will no doubt
come out in the questioning. Obviously, now is an important topical
time, and we might touch on some neighbouring countries and related
issues in our question session.
Kim, we are pleased that you are able to be
with us yet again. We remember fondly the sessions that took place
last year. Perhaps you would introduce your colleagues to us,
and I will then begin questions.
Dr. Howells: Thank you very much,
Mr. Gapes. It is a pleasure to be back here. On my right—and
to your left—is Antony Phillipson, our Iran co-ordinator.
Antony has been playing a leading role in all matters Iranian.
He will be on the Committee of Experts, which will meet in Paris
on Saturday to attend the meeting of E3+3 Political Directors.
Paul Arkwright is head of our counter proliferation department.
He comes with great experience. Of all our proliferation worries
at the moment, this is probably the most worrying.
Q199 Chairman: Absolutely. On that
point, what is the Government's assessment of Iran's current nuclear
capabilities? What is your assessment of Iran's nuclear intentions?
Dr. Howells: A lot of my answer
has to be instinct rather than what we know from intelligence—that
is, the bare facts. We think that we know something of the capability
of the Iranians at the moment. We believe that they have gone
some way down the enrichment track. We do not think that they
have a large amount of highly enriched uranium, and we hope very
much that our reading of that—more importantly, Dr. el-Baradei's
reading of it—is accurate.
We think that the Iranians have a long way to
go before they get the enrichment process right, and that means
that there is time for them yet to engage with the international
community and not go down that path to accumulating sufficient
highly enriched uranium to have enough to create an atomic bomb
of some sort or other. Their declared intentions are for a civil
nuclear programme, and we do not have a problem with that. In
fact, part of the E3+3 offer has to been to help them to develop
a civil nuclear programme, with the offer of help with light water
nuclear reactors, for example. However, everyone else, including
their neighbours, seems to believe that they in fact want to develop
a nuclear weapon. That is our reading too, and it is very difficult
to try to square some of the technical developments that have
been going on in Iran with wanting a purely civil programme.
I think it was Javier Solana who said last week
that developing or enriching uranium to the degree that the Iranians
seem to be pressing for is like trying to manufacture petrol before
you have taken your driving test or even bought a car. It does
not make much sense. There is only one civil nuclear reactor being
constructed at the moment, and that is the one at Bushehr, being
constructed by the Russians, who have already told the Iranians
that the very highly engineered fuel rods that will be required
for that reactor will be supplied by Russia. So, it is very difficult
to see what the Iranians would require highly enriched uranium
for, other than a nuclear bomb programme.
Q200 Chairman: You said that it might
take some time, but is it not true that Dr. el-Baradei has said
that the Iranians now have almost 3,000 centrifuges at Natanz,
and that if it were working properly, it could produce enough
highly enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb within approximately
a year or so. Is that not the case?
Dr. Howells: Dr. el-Baradei is
certainly very worried about the potential for what some people
call industrial-scale production of highly enriched uranium. However,
3,000 centrifuges sounds a lot, but it is not in fact an awful
lot, if you want to produce sufficient quantity to be able to
engineer an atomic bomb. You need more than that. More importantly,
you need to be able to make them work properly.
We have certainly seen from Dr. el-Baradei's
reports that the Iranians, like many others who have tried, have
had a lot of difficulty with this centrifugal system. The centrifugal
cascades are not easy to operate. The engineering has to be incredibly
precise, and I doubt whether there has ever been a nation on Earth
that has tried it that has not experienced great problems with
it. However, it depends on whose assessment you read or listen
to on this. Some Israelis, for example, are telling us that they
think it could happen within a year or two, but the time lines
in Dr. el-Baradei's report are much longer. It is a possibility.
I do not think that any of us has detailed intelligence on this
so as to be able to say that the Iranians could create a bomb
within a year, or three years, or 10 years.
Q201 Chairman: Is not the problem
the fact that, since the decisions were taken to have the two
sanctions resolutions at the Security Council, the Iranians have
reduced their co-operation with the International Atomic Energy
Agency, and as a result, we have less information now about what
they are up to than we had before.
Dr. Howells: Yes, Dr. el-Baradei
says that it is difficult to monitor exactly what is going on
inside at least some of the plants—particularly Natanz and
Esfahan, and in Arak, of course, where a heavy water reactor is
being worked on—and the ability to monitor is diminishing.
Q202 Mr. Keetch: Minister, the west's
record in identifying and calculating nuclear programmes—of
identifying where there are nuclear programmes, and how advanced
they may or may not be—is, let us be honest, not a particularly
good one. However, I want to draw you back to the correct point
that you made that it is one thing to create nuclear fusion, but
a very different thing to put that into a mechanism that can then
be delivered to be used as a bomb.
Going back even to the early attempts by the
Nazis to form nuclear weapons, we know that they had their delivery
systems far more advanced than their fusion programmes and the
miniaturisation to put the two together. Is there any evidence
that Iran is not just seeking to do what you have already described
and what Dr. el-Baradei has described, but trying to build the
mechanism to take the fusion into a bomb form that can then deliver
that bomb as a weapon?
Dr. Howells: There is a question
about some plans that were found by Dr. el-Baradei's team some
time ago—I am sure that Antony could tell us the exact year—which
described how to engineer uranium metal into hemispheres. That
looked like the design for a warhead or bomb. You also need lots
of other things, of course, including trigger mechanisms and all
manner of very sophisticated technology, to be able to do that.
The delivery system is a separate issue.
The Iranians have announced just this week—or
made a claim—that they have a rocket that is capable of
reaching Israel, for example, and delivering a payload, which
presumably they are claiming is heavy enough for a very substantial
bomb of some sort or other. I have not been able to deduce whether
it is an atomic bomb or not.
The Iranians need a lot more technology and
it is not easy to engineer such a thing. It is still, we believe,
a long and difficult process. I think that that has to be added
to Mr. Gapes's point. Further to his question about how close
are they to getting enough highly enriched uranium, at the moment
I doubt whether they are much past getting a component that has
within it about 20% of highly enriched uranium of the correct
isotope—U235, I think—let alone getting it up to 90%,
which is what you need for an atomic bomb. You can create a dirty
bomb, of course, with much lower amounts of irradiated material.
Q203 Mr. Purchase: We have recently
been to Tehran and Washington, and frankly the rhetoric from both
ends is pretty worrying. It is difficult to discuss these matters.
Not many round this table—or, I suspect, elsewhere—could
enter into an intelligent discussion about nuclear physics or
just what state of play obtains in Tehran. We are, regrettably,
given our experiences in Iraq, using guesswork, which some call
political game playing.
I am trying to understand things. From what
I heard in Tehran from people whom I thought were moderate in
their views, there is no purpose in Tehran's developing a bomb
that will quickly be discovered, with counter-action that will
be too difficult to contemplate. Furthermore, those who take a
religious view of this matter assured us that the Koran would
almost certainly expressly forbid the development of weapons of
mass destruction.
If the Archbishop of Canterbury were speaking
for the British Government and he made a statement saying that
we would or would not do something, would it be believable in
a political context? If so—or if not—how should we
take the words of the clerics in Tehran, and Iran more widely,
to indicate that their intentions are also honourable?
Q204 Dr. Howells: That is a very
good question. I think, first, that it is necessary also to say
that another Islamic nation has a bomb—that is, Pakistan.
There are clear links between the Pakistan bomb and the plans
that A. Q. Khan stole from the research institute in Holland to
create the enrichment facility in Pakistan that enabled Pakistan
to develop a bomb. He either sold on or passed on some of those
engineering secrets to Iran.
I do not think that we can just depend on the
words of some clerics. There will be others inside Iran—whoever
they may be—some of whom are, I have no doubt, extremely
pious individuals who nevertheless believe that it is the destiny
of Iran to have a nuclear bomb. I take your point that Iran is
very different from many other countries; it is not North Korea.
It has a different attitude to the world and it has 5,000 years
of history, of which it is very much aware, as it is of its identity.
Iranians do not like to be called Arabs. They
see themselves differently from many of their neighbours and feel
that they are just beginning to punch their weight internationally,
in so many ways.
In a sense, my greatest fear is that the Iranians
believe that by developing a bomb they will add to their cachet
in international circles, in the same way that, at the end of
the second world war, many countries felt that if they had an
atomic bomb they would become a big power in the world.
Q205 Mr. Purchase: My question is,
are we employing double standards? I think you know what I am
saying.
Dr. Howells: No, I do not think
that we are, because it is not a better world if 10 nations have
bombs rather than five. I am very wary of that argument.
We have a good record in this country—better
than anyone in the world—for reducing our number of warheads
and the technologies that we employ for delivering them, and so
on. Iran signed up to that co-ordinated reduction, which we have
all aimed at and which the non-proliferation treaty is about.
We want the Iranians to abide by the rules that they signed up
to—nothing more, nothing less.
Q206 Ms Stuart: Dr. Howells, before
I move on to sanctions, may I press you a little more on nuclear
capacity? I fear that we may be in a situation like the one we
were in with the 45 minutes in Iraq, in which we were not entirely
sure what we could do within the 45 minutes. Have you made an
assessment and differentiated between the acquisition of nuclear
weapons and the ability to deploy them, and what would the time
scale on that be?
Dr. Howells: We do not believe
that the Iranians have a nuclear weapon. We think that they probably
have a rocket system that is capable of delivering powerful weapons
over quite long distances and we have some idea about how they
have acquired them. We know that they have the wherewithal, at
least in intent, and that it is part of their science and engineering
base to build a nuclear bomb, but that is a lot easier in theory
than in practice. I come back to the point that I made to the
Chairman, which is that you can have 3,000 centrifuges, you can
arrange them in cascades, you can get your pipework right and
you can do all kinds of things, but you have to make the thing
work properly.
Q207 Ms Stuart: So the UK Government
think that the Iranians have the delivery mechanism?
Dr. Howells: Yes, I think that
they probably have a rocket powerful enough to deliver a large
payload—certainly on to one or other of their neighbours,
probably as far as the Mediterranean.
Q208 Ms Stuart: The reason that I
am questioning that is that on one of our visits to Russia, not
long ago, a suggestion was made to us that a flaw in our reasoning
is that Iran, as a country, is not big enough to test any of those
delivery mechanisms and that the Iranians would require nuclear
navy carriers, which they were not developing. So, the Russians
were slightly relaxed in saying that, even if the Iranians had
delivery, they had no mechanism for testing it. Do we not agree
with that assessment?
Dr. Howells: No, I certainly would
not agree with it. Iran is a very big country—it is six
and a half times bigger than Britain—and some of it is extremely
remote. The same argument could be made for a similarly sized
country: Pakistan. However, the Pakistanis certainly tested their
bombs in the Chagai hills down on the Afghan border and managed
to disguise that pretty well from most countries. I am not sure
whether we were aware of what was going on. I think that there
is enough room there for the Iranians to conduct testing on rockets.
Many other countries have done it already. Germany did in the
second world war.
Q209 Ms Stuart: That is very helpful,
thank you.
May I take you on to economic sanctions, briefly?
One of the constant responses we received in Tehran was that the
Iranians thought that economic sanctions hit us much more in the
west. It would be helpful to get some idea of the extent to which
you think the population of Iran and those who ought to be hit
by our sanctions are actually being affected by them. From my
observation, I was quite struck by the fact that the petrol sanction
does not seem to have had much impact, certainly not on the traffic
in Tehran.
Mr. Hamilton: It is 5p a litre.
Ms Stuart: Yes, it is 5p a litre. They
were just not travelling long distances and were flying rather
than using the car. What is your assessment of the genuine effectiveness
of the sanctions structure that is in place?
Dr. Howells: I just asked Antony
if there is a petrol sanction. There is not a petrol sanction,
but there is petrol rationing. That has been caused by President
Ahmadinejad to try to limit the amount that is being sold because
the Iranians are desperately short of fuel, especially good quality
fuel such as petrol and diesel. That is because no one is investing
in the Iranian hydrocarbon industry. That is a big worry for them.
It looks as if this year they will produce less gas and oil than
last year, despite the fact that the price of oil is up to near
$100 a barrel.
I think that the Iranians are quite desperate
to get substantial investment—not just little dribs and
drabs—to replenish their hydrocarbons industry and to bring
it up to modern standards. I think that the population are very
aware that they could be making a lot of money out of that. After
all, President Ahmadinejad came to power on the promise that he
was going to address and alleviate the great poverty that exists
among so many people in Iran. He has not done that and I notice
that the Iranian Government are becoming very repressive in terms
of clamping down on internal critics of his economic record. He
calls them traitors. Radio stations get interfered with or closed
down. All sorts of things are happening.
I do not know what that tells us about the effect
of the sanctions, but they have been very precisely targeted to
hit not the great mass of people living in Iran, but particular
individuals and the nuclear and missile programmes.
Q210 Ms Stuart: We saw the scrambling
of television stations such as CNN and BBC News 24. Whenever they
got interesting, they got scrambled. If we pursue the sanctions
at the UN, what about the Gulf states? Is the co-operation of
the Gulf states sufficiently tight that this does not allow Iran
an opening for sanctions busting?
Dr. Howells: This is a question
that you probably have better answers to than I do, Mr. Chairman.
There is a population of somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000
Iranians in Dubai alone. Admiring their entrepreneurial qualities,
I will say that this is an area that has a long tradition of sanctions
busting. They know how to break sanctions, believe me. Curiously,
there is almost a contradiction between what a lot of Iran's neighbours
will tell you in private and what they will utter in public.
It is, however, very interesting that at the
Istanbul Iraq neighbours conference a couple of weeks ago, Prince
Saud, the Saudi Foreign Minister, spoke very directly against
Iran's expansionist policies in Iraq and elsewhere. That was the
most forthright critique that I have heard. It is a tough neighbourhood,
and one where the general ethos is to try to get on with each
other. They know just how incendiary the whole situation is and
are very aware of the key strategic position of the Persian Gulf
and the Straits of Hormuz in terms of the world's energy. Like
it or not, it is the most strategic seaway there is.
Q211 Chairman: On the question of
sanctions, leaving aside the economic impact or the ability of
people to avoid them and get around them, is not there a danger
that they are actually used by a regime to solidify domestic support
and make it more likely that the hardliners retain power because
the internal problems can be blamed on the foreigner?
Dr. Howells: Yes, there is always
a fine judgment, as sanctions can generate a kind of siege mentality,
as you implied. President Ahmadinejad has been very clever at
using external international pressure against his policy on nuclear
questions. He has used that to fly the Iranian flag and stir up
nationalist feelings within Iran. However, that is a balance that
the international community has to judge exactly. The UN Security
Council has been pretty solid on that. Remember, there was only
one vote against the initial decision for sanctions, from Qatar.
That had nothing to do with Iran because the vote took place in
the middle of the war between Israel and Lebanon and Qatar felt
that Lebanon should have been the subject of discussion at that
UN Security Council session.
Q212 Chairman: But the existing UN
sanctions are quite limited. Security Council resolutions 1737
and 1747 do not really get to the heart of the issue, which is
Iran's gas and oil exports. Is there any prospect that there will
be tightened UN sanctions with Russia and China going along with
it?
Dr. Howells: I will ask Antony
to speak about that, as he will be involved in those discussions
directly.
Antony Phillipson: The sanctions
were limited, and deliberately so. As the Minister has said, they
were targeted on the nuclear and missile programme because that
was the issue that the UN Security Council was addressing. With
regard to their effectiveness, they have had some economic effect.
It has not been great or dramatic because they were not very harsh,
partly so as not to allow the regime to say that we were hitting
the Iranian people.
However, they had a political effect. The Iranians
were surprised to have two 15-0 votes in December 2006 and March
2007, and we all want to work hard to protect that unity with
the E3+3 this weekend and within the broader UN Security Council
when we get there. The honest answer to your question is that
there is no prospect of the next UN resolution hitting investment
in the oil and gas sector, but there will be an escalation of
the sanctions and a tightening of the screw.
Q213 Chairman: That leaves the European
Union acting on its own, even if there is not another UN Security
Council resolution. I have picked up that there are also differences
within the EU on those issues. Is there any immediate prospect
of an agreed EU strengthening of sanctions? Are countries that
have bigger business interests in Iran than we do, principally
the Germans, content to go down the same route?
Dr. Howells: I will ask Antony
to come back to that in a moment. There are obvious differences
within Europe; there is no question about that. The E3+3 has not
been a vehicle that has been universally admired within Europe.
However, despite the doubts of some significant countries, there
has been a remarkable degree of solidarity in supporting the general
direction that E3+3 negotiations have taken. I am not as pessimistic
about that as I am about most things. However, it is a problem,
and we have to make those arguments. As you have said, Mr. Gapes,
the EU measures are already tougher than the UN measures, but
that does not say a hell of a lot because the UN measures were
not that tough. Paul knows about the effect of the key measures,
which were designed to limit the ability of the Iranians to push
forward with a nuclear bomb programme.
Paul Arkwright: Regarding the
effect of the sanctions on the proliferation-sensitive technologies
in both the nuclear and missile-related areas, clearly the intention
was to target specific types of goods and technologies which would
be of particular utility to the programme. The sanctions have
had two effects. First, there is some evidence that we have been
able to slow down the programme. Some said that they would have
expected Iran to have built and be operating a 3,000-machine centrifuge
facility before now, and one could ascribe some of that delay
to the sanctions, which is a fair point. The other point is about
raising international consciousness about the Iranian programme,
and about the types of goods—in particular dual-use goods,
which are obviously difficult to identify at times—and the
value of those goods to the Iranian programme, which is a very
important aspect of sanctions. We have managed to raise the level
of knowledge on that around the world, in particular in countries
which could be either supplying those goods or acting as a trans-shipment
route for those goods. We have been making it clear that under
the UN Security Council resolutions it would be illegal to transfer
those goods to Iran, so the sanctions have had an impact on the
programme in that sense.
Antony Phillipson: On the record
of the EU to date and what might happen next, as the Minister
said, we pushed very hard for the EU to complement and, indeed,
go further than the UN after the last two resolutions, and we
achieved that through common positions in February and then April
this year. We did that in order to have the EU do its bit and
also because what the Iranians try to do when they look at the
international community taking action against them is to look
for comfort and for people who have not taken action. The EU,
acting on the back of the UN, reinforced the political message
of the UN sanctions regime. That is what we are pushing for again
now with partners within the EU. There is no doubt that there
is still a preference within the EU—and, indeed, it is our
preference—for the UN to be the principal vehicle because
it applies the broadest possible waterfront of sanctions. We will
be pushing very hard for the EU to be in a position to reinforce
anything that the UN does, or if the UN track fails, for the EU
to be in a position to try to fill the gap, because otherwise
the result will be no pressure at all on Tehran.
To make a point about the effectiveness of the
sanctions on Tehran, one thing that is interesting about Iran
is that although it is by our standards repressive, in terms of
social and political freedoms, as I think you probably found during
your visit, it is actually also reasonably open; people will meet
you and talk to you. I was struck from talking to our colleagues
in the embassy that you went from a meeting with the secretary
of the Supreme National Security Council to a meeting with a Nobel
peace prize winner—it is that kind of society.
There is a debate under way, which is quite
an open debate. Anyone else who receives BBC monitoring will see
that there are people criticising the record of the regime and
the President himself on economic matters. They do it in coded
language because deliberately standing up and criticising him
is not very constructive, but whether it is 57 economists writing
a letter saying that his handling of the economy is appalling,
or a former nuclear negotiator saying that the way that foreign
policy decisions are being handled is damaging to the country,
a debate is under way and the UN and EU sanctions regimes play
into that.
Q214 Andrew Mackinlay: On the suggestion,
which has now been actively canvassed and which I support, that
a third country should carry out the enrichment—ie Russia—I
recall that about a year ago people, even in evidence to the Committee,
pooh-poohed that idea, although I do not think that it was you,
Minister.
Dr. Howells: By the Iranians?
Q215 Andrew Mackinlay: No, by the
United Kingdom Government. It is slightly irritating, because
the suggestion that the original architects of this were the Russian
Federation was pooh-poohed by a UK Foreign Office spokesperson.
Why did he pooh-pooh it and what has changed?
Dr. Howells: I cannot remember
pooh-poohing anything about a year ago, but it is a fair question.
I shall ask Paul, if I can, whether he knows anything about that.
Q216 Andrew Mackinlay: Am I right
or am I wrong?
Paul Arkwright: If you are talking
about Russia providing fuel for the Bushehr plant, that has never
been something that we have had any objection to. We would have
no problem with Russia supplying nuclear fuel to Bushehr, provided
that adequate safeguards are in place under the IAEA. That brings
us to a separate point about the ability of the agency to discover
what is really going on in Iran. If you are talking about the
recent Saudi proposal that Prince Saud raised in a number of newspaper
interviews, then it is an idea worth exploring. We would come
back to the UN Security Council resolution obligations and to
the requirement for Iran to suspend its enrichment activities
as a starting point.
Q217 Andrew Mackinlay: Yes, but with
respect to my question, am I right or am I wrong that the United
Kingdom dismissed the proposal of the Russian Federation which
we have now endorsed? That is that we would guarantee a civil
nuclear programme with enrichment carried out in a third country,
likely Russia—
Dr. Howells: As Antony says, he
thinks that he knows the answer.
Q218 Andrew Mackinlay: So I did not
dream it.
Antony Phillipson: No. This is
one of those issues that surfaces in the ongoing debate between
Iran and the international community—that after the event
is held to be a lot more significant than it was at the time.
The episode that you are referring to is when a proposal surfaced
that Iran might give up its right to enrich on Iranian soil, in
return for a guarantee of supply of fuel from some form of international
consortium. At the time it was held to be a Russian proposal.
I was not involved in the dossier at the time, but I think those
who were would say that when the Russians were asked about it,
they said that it was not their idea, and when the Iranians were
asked, they also claimed that it was not their idea. The Iranians
then slipped back into defending their rights to enrich on their
own soil and the thing slipped away. It has now come back on the
agenda because of the comments made by Prince Saud during his
recent visit, and an article in the Middle East Digest.
The other comment that I want to make is about
the nuclear co-operation on offer as part of the E3+3 offer mentioned
by the Minister a few minutes ago. It is possible to have a discussion
about that type of facility in the context of an overall negotiation.
However, before we can have that discussion we need to get into
the negotiation, and Iran needs to suspend its enrichment programme—
Q219 Andrew Mackinlay: It was purely
the narrow point that the idea of Russia had been rubbished when
in fact it was a sensible idea. It was rubbished because it was
Russia's idea.
Dr. Howells: No, I do not think
that that is true.
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