IAEA lacks tools to expose secret work: ElBaradei

By Mark Heinrich

VIENNA (Reuters) - The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said on Tuesday its failure to detect nuclear arms work in Saddam Hussein's Iraq in the 1980s showed his inspectors lacked authority to pre-empt proliferators.

His remark was telling because an investigation of Iran by the agency has stalled over Tehran's failure to explain allegations of secret nuclear arms research and its refusal to grant inspectors access to military-affiliated sites and officials they deem relevant.

Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said the crux of the problem was that some countries under investigation, the latest being Syria, had failed to ratify an agency protocol permitting short-notice IAEA visits to sites not declared to be nuclear to ensure no bomb-related work was going on at secret locations.

"Our legal authority is very limited. With Iraq, we have discovered that unless we have the Additional Protocol in place, we will not really be able to discover undeclared activities," he said on the sidelines of the agency's annual 145-nation General Conference in Vienna.

"Our experience is that any proliferator will not really go for declared diverted activities (that would quickly reveal them as violators of the Non-Proliferation Treaty), they will go for completely clandestine undeclared activities," he said.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Iraq under Saddam Hussein developed a nuclear weapons program hidden from the IAEA because of severe restrictions on access for inspectors. It came to light only after Iraq's defeat in the 1991 Gulf War and the IAEA spent the next seven years dismantling it.

DECLARATIONS NOT ENOUGH

Diplomats say the key to resolving current IAEA inquiries into Iran and Syria is extra access to sites not declared to be nuclear. Tehran and Damascus have both ruled this out, arguing that such sites involve their conventional military and so lie outside the IAEA's writ.

Iran and Syria deny having any covert weapons programs or illicitly hiding any nuclear activity from the IAEA. ElBaradei has called on Syria for greater transparency and access. Damascus has not ratified the Additional Protocol.

ElBaradei said the failure of about 100 countries, including the United States, to ratify the decade-old protocol handicapped the IAEA's verification mandate.

Since May, the IAEA has been investigating Syria, based on U.S. intelligence allegations that it had almost completed a secret nuclear reactor that might have made bomb-grade plutonium before the site was destroyed in an Israeli air strike.

The United States and Western allies have criticized Iran and Syria in the IAEA debate, accusing both of stonewalling U.N. investigators and demanding unfettered cooperation.

ElBaradei said his job was complicated by loopholes in the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which permits states to develop nuclear fuel enrichment technology even though this can yield material for civilian energy purposes as well as to make atom bombs, depending on how the process is configured.

He said the seven known nuclear weapons powers were setting a bad example to non-nuclear-armed states by clinging to doomsday arsenals as the pillar of their security instead of dismantling them according to NPT commitments.

"How can I go with a straight face to the non-nuclear weapons states and tell them these weapons are no good for you, when the nuclear weapons states continue to modernize and say we absolutely need nuclear weapons?" said ElBaradei.