The Right to Enrich?

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Henry Sokolsky argues that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty does not give Iran an inalienable right to enrich uranium and that the U. S. can rally the world against Iran by arguing that it does not. Much as I might wish he were right, I do not believe he is. Here’s Article IV of the NPT:

**Article IV**

1. Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination and in conformity with Articles I and II of this Treaty.

2. All the Parties to the Treaty undertake to facilitate, and have the right to participate in, the fullest possible exchange of equipment, materials and scientific and technological information for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. Parties to the Treaty in a position to do so shall also cooperate in contributing alone or together with other States or international organizations to the further development of the applications of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, especially in the territories of non-nuclear-weapon States Party to the Treaty, with due consideration for the needs of the developing areas of the world.

Here is the kernel of his argument:

But there’s another reason to push back on the “right” to enrich: There is no such right. The NPT makes no reference to uranium enrichment or plutonium recycling. These nuclear activities and the weapons materials they could produce can bring nations to the brink of building bombs.

Nuclear fuel-making entails processing liquids, gases and powders, molecules of weapons-usable uranium and plutonium that are nearly impossible to track. As for reliable, timely detection of military diversions, forget it. By the time inspectors might spot missing materials, a bomb might have already been built.

The NPT’s negotiators understood this. When Mexican delegates proposed an amendment to guarantee access to the “entire fuel cycle,” the convention rejected it. The British, Swedish and Burmese delegates explained why: Nuclear fuel-making was too close to bomb-making ever to be “peaceful.” They had a point. That’s why Mr. Trump is right to demand that Iran surrender all its enriched uranium and decommission its nuclear fuel-making plants.

The problem is the negotiating history cannot override the treaty’s text. At most, it can clarify ambiguity. Here, the text grants a broad right to peaceful nuclear activity without excluding enrichment. To read an exclusion into the treaty based on rejected proposals is to add a limitation the parties chose not to include.

As signatories the NPT gives them the right to pursue nuclear energy “for peaceful purposes”. Although the IAEA is skeptical of the Iranian regime’s motives it has not found evidence of an active nuclear weapons program in Iran and said it cannot fully verify the program’s peaceful nature. That leaves us with a treaty that grants a right conditioned on peaceful use, but no decisive mechanism for determining when that condition has been violated.

Where does the discussion go from there? If the United States wishes to rally international support, it must do so on the basis of clear evidence of non-compliance, not by reading prohibitions into the treaty that are not there. Absent that, the argument is unlikely to persuade those not already inclined to agree.