Nuclear inspectors are to travel to Libya, perhaps as early as the weekend, to begin dismantling Colonel Muammar Gadaffi’s covert nuclear bomb project.
After Libya’s promise last week to renounce weapons of mass destruction, Mohammed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said yesterday that he would leave for Libya within days, escorted by inspectors, to start a long-term regime of verifying the African country’s nuclear programmes.
”Libya has asked the IAEA to ensure through verification its decision to eliminate any nuclear-weapon related activities,” the Vienna-based UN nuclear watchdog said.
In a breakthrough meeting in Vienna at the weekend after the Anglo-US announcement of a deal with Colonel Gadaffi, a senior Libyan official, Matooq Mohammed Matooq, admitted that Tripoli had been engaged in a clandestine nuclear bomb project for more than a decade
Libya has now agreed to let UN nuclear experts conduct snap inspections of its sites.
The unusual step of disclosing a secret bomb programme, publicly renouncing it, and inviting international experts to monitor and verify its dismantling has few precedents. In 1989 the apartheid regime in South Africa decided to scrap its nuclear arms programme and the IAEA oversaw the final elimination of Pretoria’s nuclear weapons facilities in 1993.
After months of crisis and a game of cat-and-mouse, Iran last week also signed up for snap inspections of its contentious nuclear programme. Tehran’s 18-year project for uranium enrichment is much more advanced than Libya’s, but while Tripoli has admitted that its efforts were aimed at building a nuclear bomb, Iran insists its nuclear programme is exclusively peaceful.
Dr El Baradei is also likely to use the Libya breakthrough to step up a campaign aimed at Israel, calling for a nuclear-free Middle East.
”I see a lot of frustration in the Middle East due to Israel’s sitting on nuclear weapons or nuclear weapons capability, while others in the Middle East are committed to the NPT [nuclear non-proliferation treaty],” he told an Israeli newspaper last week.
The Libyans have admitted to the IAEA that they have been secretly importing raw uranium, sophisticated equipment for converting it into the gas required to spin through centrifuges to enrich the uranium to weapons-grade material, and cascades that form part of the centrifuge facility.
”A considerable amount of importing went on,” said Mark Gvozdecky, the IAEA spokesperson. ”Many things should have been declared. We don’t know where it all came from.”
The Libyans told the IAEA that the uranium enrichment plant had already been dismantled, and that at no stage in the past decade was enriched uranium produced.
Libya was unusually honest and straightforward when challenged about weapons of mass destruction, a senior British official involved in the talks, which began in March this year, told the Guardian. The candour from the Gadaffi regime convinced the UK that the problem could be solved by backroom diplomacy, rather than through the high-profile pressure applied on Iran.
Britain raised the issue of WMD in August 2002, when the then foreign office minister Mike O’Brien met Colonel Gadaffi in Sirte, Libya, the first ministerial contact for 20 years. According to a senior official with close knowledge of the discussions, the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, had wanted his team to report back on whether Colonel Gadaffi was prepared to change. The British officials decided that he was.
At the meeting the Libyan leader was challenged about WMD. The source said that he did not deny possessing them. He replied that his country was in a dangerous part of the world and had to protect itself.
The British source said the Libyans proved ”much more cooperative” than expected. ”Throughout the process they did not mislead us. When they had difficulties, they said when they had them and what they were. We formed a view we could deal with them, we could do business with them.”
Pakistan has questioned the founder of its nuclear programme, Abdul Qadeer Khan, as part of its investigations into whether any of its scientists have proliferated sensitive technology, the foreign ministry said yesterday.
Pakistan’s government has strongly denied that it spread nuclear technology to countries such as Libya, Iran and North Korea, but yesterday acknowledged that scientists may have acted on their own. – Guardian Unlimited Â