After Tuesday’s historic agreement between Iran and the “P5+1” group of countries, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency will have access to all of the Mideast power’s nuclear facilities. Once they’re in, what specific equipment will they use to detect any hijinks?
IAEA declined to comment directly, as did both Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. That’s perhaps not surprising; while nuclear inspections are fairly routine—IAEA has safeguard agreements with 180 countries, and conducts around 20,000 inspections each year—few will be as politically fraught as what’s to come in Iran.
Even the terms of the inspections are woven with delicate thread. Inspectors will continuously monitor known enrichment facilities, but access to areas with suspected nuclear activity will be more difficult to come by. Inspectors must request access, along with their reasons for concern, in response to which Iran can essentially stall for up to 24 days before inspectors are allowed in, if at all.
“This is not a process which has 100 percent transparency,” explains Anthony Cordesman, defense expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “There are very good reasons why the IAEA doesn’t go out and tell you everything they’re doing.” Or there's really one great reason: The less information Iran has about the inspections, the less equipped it will be to undermine them.
That’s quite a bit more intrigue than you would find in, say, the Czech Republic, where the inspection process is so routinized that IAEA even made a video to document how it works.
Still, even though the specifics of the Iranian investigations are being closely kept, we can have a pretty good idea of what tools they’ll be using on the ground. There are, after all, only so many ways to sniff out nuclear malfeasance.
Just to be clear, this won’t be the first time IAEA inspectors have poked around Iran’s facilities; they first visited for a fact-finding mission in October 2003, and agreed to the implementation of safeguards in November of that same year. The history since has been rocky; Iran blocked inspections multiple times since, clashes that in part necessitated this new accord.
One important byproduct of the regular stalemates with Iran? The IAEA equipment that was in place was woefully outdated, and potentially ineffective, especially in light of infrequent inspections. That changes with this deal.
“[The IAEA] will be allowed to have a better set of surveillance systems that provide much more detail on a real-time and continuing basis,” says Cordesman. “What they’ve agreed to is not only far better access but the use of much more advanced inspection technologies.”
Again, it’s unknown what the precise arsenal will entail. But here are some safe assumptions, based on the IAEA’s current toolkit.
An uncomplicated name for an uncomplicated item; a seal is simply a small bit of hardware attached to a wire loop, put in place around nuclear equipment to monitor its use. Previously, you’d have to remove the seal from the site and inspect it back in a lab, a difficult trick when you’re being denied access to the site in question. Besides which, the process could take days or weeks.
“The seal technology basically was just a seal, it didn’t have an electronic component or something that provided a lot of detection,” explains Cordesman. Assuming this new deal allows for the latest technology, though, “you would be able to have much better seals, which would make it harder to not only violate the seal but provide potentially real-time indication of tampering.” In other words, the latest seal technology will remotely transmit information back to the IAEA regularly, so inspectors don't have to rely on in-person observation.
The other on-site component for constant monitoring? Good old-fashioned security cameras, which in Iran are also long overdue for an upgrade. Older cameras stored collected data on flash memory cards, again necessitating the physical presence of inspectors to take them off-site for analysis.
“The cameras, these sort of detection devices were relatively crude. The time-lapses were extensive. The potential for moving or evading was there to a degree. And you had to go in and recover the material,” Cordesman recalls. “They’re talking about much better real-time coverage” with updated equipment.
The Next Generation Surveillance System (NGSS), as what will be rolled out if and when the deal goes into effect is known, is a combination of seals, cameras, and other monitoring equipment working in conjunction, capable of transmitting authenticated data to a remotely located computer. It can also integrate the data from various sources before the analysis begins, saving valuable time.
MGBS; SRBS; VIFM; SEGM. These are just some of the acronyms (there are plenty more) that describe the types of more advanced safeguard instruments that are installed in facilities alongside cameras and seals. While they serve a wide range of inscrutable scientific purposes, they’re all in place to take measurements during the nuclear cycle. They can determine not only how much fuel moves through a facility, but vitals on any sensitive-material-bearing vessels associated with the process.
As for the instruments that inspectors carry with them into the field, there are almost too many tools to count, each used for a highly specific purpose.
“Everything depends on the facility,” says Cordesman. The IAEA does break down the various types of equipment it uses, though, with some (but not total, for the reasons mentioned above) specificity.
The IAEA claims (PDF) to use more than 100 distinct NDA systems, most of which are deployed to detect the gamma rays or neutrons that are tell-tale signs of nuclear radiation. Basic measurements also come into play; keeping track of the temperature, weight, volume, and similar statistics around nuclear materials helps determine if they’re being used in an appropriate manner.
The IAEA also engages in “destructive analysis,” in which samples of nuclear material (uranium and plutonium, primarily) are taken from a site back to labs for analysis. That, combined with screening of samples taken in the field, contributes critical intel, but doesn’t amount to much more than polyethylene or glass sample bottles and a cotton swipe kit in the field.
That’s the top-level view of the equipment—there are over 140 individual items approved for inspection, which range from multichannel analyzers to field spectrometers to cascade header enrichment monitors—available to IAEA. But it’s also, according to Cordesman, just one part of a much larger story. All that equipment doesn’t do much for you if you don’t know where to send it.
“The IAEA is not an intelligence agency,” Cordesman reminds us. “It doesn’t seek out new facilities; somebody has to tell them.” That somebody will end up being the IAEA’s partner countries, who will do their best to determine what sort of nuclear development is taking place not just in previously established labs, but military annexes and other secretive settings.
“One of the most critical aspects of this entire structure is essentially how good will the intelligence of the participating countries be. That will be as critical as any of the technology improvements on the part of any of the IAEA inspectors.”
All of which comes down to old fashioned spy games. The good news, at least, is that if and when the intelligence community identifies a potential unknown facility, the equipment IAEA has at its disposal will be able to sniff it out, even with that 24-day grace period.
“The problem is that if you tool up and then have to tear it down, that’s a pretty expensive game, as well as a very high-risk one, when it comes down to the stuff that’s going to be detectable,” explains Cordesman. “While 24 days sounds like a lot of time, if it involves any radioactive material, it is damn hard to get rid of.”
