 Now, before somebody like the U.S. President makes a pronouncement, there will be an interagency process of weeks or months where every single word is carefully judged, deliberated and negotiated. And was it on Monday that U.S. President Obama announced that the peaceful options on Iran are running out? Now, whether or not that is actually the case, well, who better to ask than the words leading authority on nuclear non-proliferation regimes than Joiner? He is someone who has studied this area over at least a decade, if not more. He is the author of two major books on the NPT and its implementation. They were published by OUP, but in order not to jeopardize our sandwiches to generous responses by Finola and by COP, as you see, he has immediately turned to ourselves and added an edited volume on non-proliferation law as a special regime published by COP, which will come out shortly. Dan is teaching in the University of Alabama School of Law and has a very active practice in Washington advising on nuclear non-proliferation and on investments and other issues connected with the transfer of nuclear technology. As I mentioned, two books in the area of the NPT, 2009, 2011, he is one of those who, in a way, anticipated that from his interest on nuclear non-proliferation that has grown over the past few years. He holds a JD from Duke University Law School, it is a sign of my increasing age that when he said, oh, I was taught by somebody from Cambridge who I remember as a young person sitting in the kitchen here having coffee with us that I was very surprised to see a senior person like you having been taught by him, Michael Byers, at Duke University. So you must have been one of the very first generation of students he had over there. He obtained an MA from the University of Georgia and then went to the University of Warwick where he taught and obtained his PhD. So Dan, for you the questions, are the peaceful options running out? What are the kind of ways to engage in the issue of this kind and what will happen over the next year in relation to Iran? What are your confident and absolutely true expectations and predictions? Thank you. Well, thank you for that very kind introduction and thank you to the Latterpac Center for having me today and to all of you for coming. It's a great privilege for me to be here. Yes, today I would like to talk about Iran's nuclear program and international law. Before I begin, one does have to realize, of course, that international legal issues are not the only issues involved in the Iranian nuclear crisis. Lots of politics and ideology and ego to boot are involved. But my starting point is that notwithstanding there are so many other issues involved, both sides of the issue, I'll come back to that in a moment, both sides of the issue use international law, international legal argumentation to justify their policies and diplomatic actions. And so what I would like to do is review the international legal arguments which form the justifications for the actions of both sides on this issue in order to understand them because I think in the media particularly there has been a lot of confusion about exactly what rules of international law are involved, what are the legal arguments on both sides, and this again goes to the question of the legitimacy of both sides' arguments, positions, and efforts. I keep saying both sides. Who are we talking about? Of course Iran on the one side, whose nuclear energy program has been criticized as being both imprudent and a threat on the one hand, but also illegal, and that again is where I'd like to give my comments. On the other side I will refer to western governments as a shorthand. What I mean specifically is the United States, Britain, France, Germany. I leave out Russia and China largely in my sighting to western governments and their arguments, legal arguments, because Russia and China have largely stayed to the sidelines. They've gone along with a number of UN Security Council resolutions, but usually reluctantly and usually limiting those resolutions and the very recent sanctions that have been applied on Iran have been applied unilaterally by the United States and the EU. So I think that it's my impression that the leaders of the legal challenges against Iran are the four governments, the United States, Britain, France, and Germany. So moving on then. What I'd like to do today is go over the legal arguments made by both sides on the one hand western governments against Iran, and on the other side Iran's legal arguments in response. And then I would like to give my legal assessment and then move on to talking about options going forward. So first, two western arguments, western legal arguments on Iran's nuclear program. The Iranian nuclear crisis began in 2002 when Iranian dissident groups revealed the existence of two facilities, nuclear facilities in Iran at Natanz, a large uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, and another facility at Arak that had not been declared by Iran to the IAEA, but that had been in existence for at least a decade. And once this was revealed to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the IAEA decided that the non-disclosure of these two facilities was in non-compliance with Iran's safeguards agreement with the IAEA. And that then began the legal process which eventually moved on to the Security Council of the United Nations. Let me talk then about IAEA safeguards agreements because really the core of western legal arguments against Iran is to do with safeguards agreements and not with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty itself, although we'll talk about that more in a minute. And I hope you all, I think you all got this. I had printed off for your benefit the principal provisions of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In Article III, paragraph 4, all non-nuclear weapon states are obligated to conclude with the International Atomic Energy Agency a safeguards agreement covering their nuclear facilities. A few important points. The International Atomic Energy Agency actually predates the NPT by about 10 years. It had been in existence since the late 1950s and had been created as a result of US President Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace program which was purposed in facilitating the spread of peaceful nuclear energy technologies and materials. So in the NPT, the IAEA was referenced but not certainly created. The IAEA predated the NPT as I've said. What Article III requires is that all non-nuclear weapon states to the NPT conclude a safeguards agreement with the NPT. This is a separate treaty, a separate treaty entirely, a bilateral treaty between the non-nuclear weapons state in question and the International Atomic Energy Agency. And those safeguards agreements stipulate the mandate of the International Atomic Energy Agency very clearly which is to account for all fissile materials and facilities that work with fissile materials in the safeguarded state. They do this through processes like cameras, seals, inspections. They have a comprehensive safeguards regime. This all depends, of course, on the non-nuclear weapons state party disclosing the existence of facilities because the IAEA has no, neither mandate nor resources to be an investigative body. It can only deal with the facilities and materials that are disclosed to it. So this is what the IAEA safeguards agreement does. It establishes a safeguards regime where the non-nuclear weapons state must disclose all of its fissile materials and nuclear facilities. And the IAEA then safeguards these facilities. The point being to make sure that all fissile materials involved in peaceful uses are not diverted to non-peaceful uses to the creation of nuclear weapons. So an IAEA safeguards agreement is a separate treaty, the conclusion of which is required by the NPT. IAEA safeguards agreements, I should say, the International Atomic Energy is the Board of Governors is tasked under the IAEA statute to determine whether or not member states are in compliance with their safeguards agreements. And I use that word advisedly, compliance. And the Board of Governors is given a mandate to determine that a safeguarded state has been in non-compliance with its safeguards agreement. However, we should note that in the IAEA statute, in IAEA safeguards agreements, the concept of non-compliance is not analogous to the concept of treaty breach. Because non-compliance with an IAEA safeguards agreement can occur by virtue of relatively minor technical omissions, accounting omissions, for example, if a state fails to... Well, if the numbers don't match up, for example, the number of the amount of physical materials that is declared doesn't quite match up to what the IAEA inspectors find, that omission can be non-compliance with a safeguards agreement. So very technical omissions can result in a finding of non-compliance, whereas that sort of finding... And that standard, rather, of non-compliance doesn't map on at all to the material breach standard in Article 60 of the VN Conventional Law of Treaty. So the point I'm making is that non-compliance with a IAEA safeguards agreement is not necessarily the same thing as breach of the treaty, the IAEA safeguards agreement. In fact, the IAEA is not given any adjudicatory role in determining breach that's nowhere in the statute. So I give all that background so that we can understand what the arguments are. These are separate agreements. There is a standard of non-compliance in the IAEA statute, which the IAEA is authorized to determine. But that is not the same as treaty breach. The IAEA does not have an adjudicative role. There is no adjudicative function. Now going back to the timeline, in 2002 the discovery of these facilities did lead to a determination by the IAEA Board of Governors that Iran was in non-compliance with its safeguards agreement, and it undoubtedly was. That was correct. The Board of Governors then in a series of resolutions determined that Iran was therefore to be placed under a special positive obligation to clear up suspicions or, you know, lacks of knowledge, lacking of knowledge by the Board of Governors as to the scope and contours of its nuclear program. A positive obligation of cooperation to, again, the best word is to cooperate with IAEA inspectors in resolving all concerns that the IAEA Board of Governors had about Iran's nuclear program. You could call this an obligation to prove the negative because essentially what the Board of Governors requires Iran to do in these resolutions is to prove through a high level of cooperation that there are no undeclared physical materials, there are no undeclared nuclear facilities, and if the most recent IAEA report is to be a guide, to prove that there are no related nuclear technological activities, research and development going on inside Iran. So to prove quite a large bit of negative is what the IAEA has put Iran in a process of having to do. Iran's failure to reach that level of cooperation in the eyes of the Board of Governors has led to the Board of Governors sending Iran's file to the UN Security Council, and in 2006 the UN Security Council determined that there was a threat to international peace and security under Article 39 and passed Resolution 1696, in which the UN Security Council acting under Chapter 7 commanded Iran to cease all uranium enrichment going on inside Iran. Iran has refused to do that, to comply with the decision has led to four rounds of UN Security Council sanctions, economic sanctions prohibiting international trade with individuals, companies, actors in Iran's nuclear development program. The most recent sanctions, as I noted, some of which are yet to actually come into place, have been taken unilaterally by the United States and by the EU. These are sanctions on Iran's central bank and will almost certainly make it very difficult for Iran to trade in oil, at least in the West. I'll mention one more data point under the general category of western legal arguments critical of Iran. This is in November of 2011, the production by the Director General of the IAEA, Yukia Amano, and submission to the IAEA Board of Governors of a report that received a lot of media attention. You may have almost certainly were aware of this report. This report was singular. What it did was to lay out the IAEA's current understanding of what it termed possible military dimensions of Iran's nuclear program. The information in the report came almost exclusively from national intelligence agencies and was given to the IAEA. Again, the IAEA does not have an intelligence arm. It doesn't have either the mandate or the resources to conduct its own intelligence operations. So this was all information that had been submitted to the IAEA by national intelligence agencies. It is important to understand what this report said. In the media it was, as it always is, portrayed in a light most likely to sell newspapers. And so it was quite sensationally reported to the point where in some media outlets this report was described as showing that Iran indeed did have a nuclear weapons program, a nuclear warhead development program. This is not correct, however. All of the report does, if you actually read the report, it details a number of scientific, industrial research programs and applications that Iran has allegedly been engaged in that produce capabilities that could be used to build a nuclear weapon if Iran ever chose to do so. But the report did not, nor have any national intelligence reports that have been disclosed at least, including the United States NIE. No report, either by the IAEA or national intelligence agencies, has determined that Iran has made a decision to build a nuclear weapon. That's an important distinction. What the IAEA report said is that there are capabilities that Iran has acquired through specific research programs, specific and industrial, that could be used in the development of nuclear warhead if Iran chose to do so. Now that doesn't mean that that's not a significant development. You could say it's a very significant development because it adds to Iran's capability to build a nuclear weapon should it decide to do so. But it must be understood for what it is. Legally, the publication of this report, now remember that so far in Western arguments I have been mostly talking about safeguards agreements because that is really the core legal argument of the West that Iran is in breach of its safeguards agreements. The IAEA report in November did raise the specter of the possibility of an Article 2 violation of the NPT in some arguments. If you look in Article 2 it says paraphrasing nuclear weapon states not to acquire, not to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons on nuclear explosive devices. There is an interesting legal debate about the scope and contours of the term manufacture in this context. What does it mean to manufacture a nuclear weapon? And here if you're specifically talking about a nuclear warhead, is it only manufacturing when you turn the final screws into the warhead or is it manufacturing much further down the ex-anti research and development process? So there's interesting legal arguments about whether, for example, the sorts of activities that this report alleges Iran is engaged in, whether those activities are encapsulated within the concept of manufacture. Let me then add to what I've given as the Western arguments with what are implicit NPT arguments by the West dealing with Article 4. Article 4 of the NPT, as you'll see, has two paragraphs. The first paragraph recognizes as it terms it an inalienable right of all parties to the treaty to, I'm paraphrasing, engage in peaceful applications of nuclear energy with this final clause in conformity with Articles 1 and 2 of this treaty. There have been arguments made by Western officials that Iran's safeguards agreement non-compliance constitutes a violation of Article 3 of the NPT. If you recall, I said that in Article 3-4 and Article 3-1, each non-negotiable state is obligated to have a safeguards agreement with the IAEA. Depending on how you read those provisions, an argument can be made and has been made by Western officials that Iran's non-compliance with its IAEA safeguards agreements constitutes a violation of Article 3. If you then follow the logic, if there's been a violation of Article 3, if you look to Article 4-1, which says that the peaceful right must be exercised in conformity with Articles 1 and 2, and here I must add a footnote because in one of the NPT review conferences, the final document referred to Articles 1, 2, and 3 here. There's an argument that this ought to actually read in practice Articles 1, 2, and 3. So if you're... I know this is hard to follow this logic. It took me a while to figure it out too. You can read my book if you want to. Better explain. But the argument is, in a nutshell, that Iran is in non-compliance with the safeguards agreement. This constitutes a violation, a breach of Article 3 of the NPT because Iran has violated Article 3 of the NPT, therefore it has foregone its right to peaceful uses of nuclear energy. That is the argument by Western officials. That, therefore, legitimizes UN Security Council sanctions and unilateral sanctions trying to pressure Iran into ceasing its uranium enrichment program. This, then, is the legal argumentative framework of Western governments against Iran, primarily based on violations of safeguards agreements, but also entailing and, at times, underpinned by arguments that Iran has, in fact, breached the NPT. Let's move now, then, to the counterarguments, Iran's arguments. With regard to safeguards agreements with the IAEA, Iran has a safeguards agreement with the IAEA. It even signed the additional protocol, which is voluntarily entered into a sort of supplement to a safeguards agreement. Iran's argument has been that since 2002, since the disclosure of the two clandestine facilities in Atanzan, Iran, that it has been in full compliance with its safeguards agreements. That is Iran's argument. Iran argues that it has done everything that all other non-nuclear weapon states have done. It has cooperated with the inspectors. There are cameras. There are seals on all declared nuclear facilities. All of Iran's declared fissile materials are accounted for. The IAEA inspectors visit regularly. Iran argues that it has done everything that other non-nuclear weapon states have done. At the core of this argument is Iran's disputation of the IAEA's mandate. Iran disputes the fact that, well, I should put it this way. Iran claims that the IAEA overstepped its bounds in imposing the special positive obligation to prove the negative that I described earlier. It argues that this is beyond the mandate of the IAEA and not reflected in any IAEA practice. It argues that there has been no other state that has ever been subjected to such a positive obligation to prove the negative. It offers examples like South Korea. No, I didn't say North Korea. I said South Korea, which around the same time, 2002, it was discovered that it was reported and later confirmed that South Korea had, for at least a decade, been experimenting with uranium enrichment in undeclared facilities. It is likely, however, that you never heard of that, and this is Iran's point, that when other states have committed non-compliances, remember that term, not breach, non-compliance with IAEA safeguards agreements, the matter has been dealt with at the IAEA, slap on the wrist, don't do that anymore, and it hasn't been, there has not been the institutional escalation as there has been with Iran and there was certainly no positive obligation, similar positive obligation placed on South Korea to open up all of its facilities in the way that Iran has been expected to. One particularly striking example of this to illustrate the level of cooperation that the IAEA seems to expect of Iran is the most recent, and by that I mean just a few weeks ago, visit by IAEA inspectors to Iran when the inspectors, according to Iran, this had not been brought up before the visit, but once they got to Iran, the inspectors asked to visit the Parchin Military Installation. This installation is the missile research center of Iran's military, and there are no physical materials there, no one ever thought there were physical materials there. It's a military research and development facility. In the November report of the IAEA, it was alleged that it was at this facility that some of the scientific experiments, the hemispherical explosion experiments had been taking place, and so the IAEA inspectors requested to go to the Parchin Military Installation. Iran sort of incredulously argues that no state on Earth would allow the IAEA to, on a couple of weeks' notice, go into one of its military facilities and start poking around. Again, there are no physical materials at Parchin, no one thinks that there are. This was the IAEA seeking to, again, investigate the possible military dimensions of Iran's nuclear program. To this, Iran argues that if you look at Iran's safeguards agreement with the IAEA, this is completely beyond the mandate of the IAEA. Again, the IAEA's role is to be the bean counter of physical materials. Where are the physical materials? We get to put safeguards on your nuclear facilities to make sure they're not diverted from peaceful purposes. The idea that the IAEA should instead become the receiver of intelligence from national intelligence agencies and then go around inspecting military facilities in a non-nuclear weapons state seems, to Iran at least, quite beyond any reasonable understanding of the IAEA's mandate. So, this level of cooperation that the IAEA has imposed on Iran, in Iran's view is completely unprecedented. It is subjective. There's no standard for what level of cooperation is required in the IAEA statute or in relevant practice, because, again, it's never been done before. These arguments underpin Iran's claim under a reasonable legal interpretation of their safeguards obligations as contained in their safeguards agreement, they are in full compliance. Let's move on to NPT arguments. I noted that there are western legal arguments surrounding Article IV. And this was this sort of complex, logical game of the relationship between IAEA safeguards agreements and the NPT. Iran's argument is that in Article III-IV, non-nuclear weapons states are obligated, as it says, to conclude agreements with the International Atomic Energy Agency, and they are to be of a description laid out in Article III-I and III. In Iran's view, then, this is a separate legal instrument, meaning the IAEA safeguards agreement. And according to its reading of the IAEA statute, the IAEA has the authority to determine non-compliance, but it certainly doesn't have the authority to determine breach of the treaty. Remember, this is a bilateral treaty between the IAEA and the non-nuclear weapons state. In what other bilateral treaty context is one party allowed to determine whether there's breach? Iran's argument is that this is a bilateral treaty between Iran and the IAEA. The IAEA statute gives the Board of Governors the authority to determine non-compliance, but not breach. And so that's point A. But even if the Board of Governors could determine breach, Iran's argument is that, again, the NPT is a wholly separate legal regime and there's nothing in either the safeguards agreements or the NPT that would support the idea that even a breach of a safeguards agreement constitutes a breach of Article III. It's simply not there. There are two separate treaties. And all that Article III-IV says is that states' parties shall conclude such agreements. So that's the second point, that even if there is a breach of a safeguards agreement that does not amount to a breach of Article III. But again, even if there were to be a breach of Article III, Iran's argument is that Article IV, which recognizes the inalienable right to peaceful uses, is not a conditional right, because this is essentially what the western legal argument entails. The idea that the right to peaceful uses of nuclear energy is a right conditioned on full and demonstrated compliance with Articles I, II, and III of the treaty. So that, so the western argument goes, if you are not in compliance with Article III, you forego your inalienable right. Iran's argument, on the contrary, is that Article IV-I recognizes an inalienable right and subjects that inalienable right to a conventional limitation, which is contained in the last clause, which reads, in conforming to Articles I and II of this treaty. That may sound like just a semantic difference, but actually quite important. The western view again is that if you don't comply with the last clause entirely, you therefore forego the right recognized. Whereas Iran's argument is that Article IV-I recognizes a right of states, but it doesn't create that right. It simply recognizes it. And that this right, this actually gets into some really interesting international legal theory that, in my view, hasn't been fleshed out very well, the question of what is the character, what is the scope of the rights of states? You don't actually see that very much in treaties, in customary international law. Sometimes you see it in the context of sovereign rights over natural resources, that sort of thing, but there is no comprehensive list of the rights of states. And so we don't know exactly what the character of these rights are. Are they simply, are they customary rights, or are they, in a more naturalistic sense, rights that are newer to a state by virtue of its sovereignty? But in any event, Iran's argument is that this inalienable right is not created by the treaty. It's simply recognized. And that the conventional limitation cannot serve to extinguish it. As an analogy, you might consider one of the other, one of the few other places in treaty law where such a right of states is recognized, and this is of course Article 51 of the UN Charter, which recognizes the inherent right to self-defense if an armed attack occurs. It goes on, I'm paraphrasing, to say that the exercise of this unilateral right of self-defense is to continue until the Security Council, I ought to have memorized this, until the Security Council takes, it's become seized of the matter, and the state exercising the unilateral right of self-defense must declare in form the Security Council of its exercise. I think I've got that about right. Analogously, if you were to reply the western legal understanding of the relationship between the right and the conventional agreement, wouldn't this read as follows? States have the unilateral right of self-defense unless they forget to tell the UN Security Council that they're doing it. And if they breach this conventional condition, the right of self-defense is extinguished. Now, can you imagine that reading of Article 51 being accepted? Certainly not. So, again, this is just to show that in a clause like this where a right is recognized subject to conventional limitations, the dynamic is not the extinguishment of the right if the conventional limitations are violated. Rather, the right endures, but if there is, in fact, a violation of the conventional limitations, that's all that it is. I hope that's clear. But the point in the end is that Iran's argument is that the right to peaceful use, Iran's right to peaceful use has not been extinguished by any of the safeguards, non-compliances, NPT violations that have been alleged by the West. Let me move on to the new IAEA report. Again, Iran's argument with regard to this IAEA report is similar to its argument with regard to other IAEA safeguards issues, which is that this is the IAEA acting well outside of its mandate. And I've already described why it thinks that is the case. It offers examples such as Japan and Germany. And it argues that all of the scientific research development, industrial development capacities that are described in the 2011 IAEA report as being held by Iran, that all of these capabilities are and have been acquired by all highly industrialized non-nuclear weapon states. Japan, Germany, South Africa, Brazil, all of these countries, non-nuclear weapon states, have all of the capacities alleged to be possessed by Iran in the November 2011 report. The point here is, the point that Iran would make is that the capacity to build a nuclear weapon is not itself unlawful. Nowhere in the NPT is there a prohibition on acquiring scientific industrial capabilities that could be used to develop a nuclear weapon. And that if that were true, rather if the counterfactual were correct, if that were a violation of the NPT, Japan would be in violation, Germany would be in violation, South Africa, Brazil, etc. So again, Iran's argument is that the IAEA is stepped well out of its bounds and that the IAEA is really not making a cognizable legal argument here. Because there's really, even if all of these things are true, there has been no prima facie violation. Last point on Iran's argument is with regard to UN Security Council resolutions. Iran argues that the Security Council's resolutions, 1696 and the following sanctions resolutions are illegal. It argues this on the basis of the inalienable right in Article 4. I'm going to keep my comments on this short because I can't even make this argument with a straight face that the UN Security Council resolutions are somehow unlawful. Now, I have argued that before with, in the context of other Security Council resolutions, specifically Resolution 1540 in 2004, I wrote a piece arguing that that was an act ultra-virus the Security Council. So this is someone who even accepts that that's possible, that there are acts ultra-virus the Security Council. But I do not see that here and I'm not even going to make that argument. Okay, so now I have concluded a review of Western legal arguments against Iran and Iran's legal arguments in response. One of the great frustrations of the practice of public international law that most of you probably have already realized is that the great, that many, I say this because Professor Crawford and others are sitting here who have actually litigated very interesting questions of international law, but many very interesting questions of international law would never be the subject of adjudication in an international tribunal. And I dare say this is one of them, that we will never have an ICJ case regarding Iran's violations of IAEA safeguards for the NPT strictly on jurisdictional grounds. However, for what it's worth, or I should say therefore for what it's worth, I would like to give my own legal assessment of the merits of these arguments. In my view, on matters of IAEA safeguards agreements and on issues concerning the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, Iran's arguments are largely correct and that they have the better view of what the law actually says. However, at least prima facia, the UN Security Council resolution 1696 and its following sanctions resolutions do trump disharmonious rights and obligations under international law, according to Articles 25 and 103 of the Charter. So that's the legal situation, in my view, in which we find ourselves, meaning that on the underlying substance, the IAEA safeguards, the NPT issues, Iran is largely right in what the law says. However, the Security Council acting under a totally different standard, the Article 39 standard, has determined a threat to international peace and security, has said that Iran must cease its uranium enrichment and that that is valid law. So that's the sort of odd circumstance in which we find ourselves that on the underlying legal issues, I think that the Western governments who make up the permanent members of the Security Council are not correct. However, invoking the UN Security Council's Chapter 7 authority, we have passed valid legally binding command to cease uranium enrichment. So that's sort of the difficult legal position which we find ourselves. So now what? I really don't have time because I want to go on to questions and I'd be happy to pursue any of these in question time. I don't really have time to go through the various options for resolving the situation, including targeted killings, sanctions, airstrikes, blocking the Straits of Hormuz, counter measures, et cetera. Because what I really want to say is that all of these are terrible ideas and the only good idea, and now I am switching, I am putting on my policy hat, political science hat, and leaving the law professor hat behind just for a moment, because I think that there is a very obvious negotiated resolution to this crisis. It's one of these very well-kept secrets, badly kept secrets, kind of like the Middle East crisis between Israel and Palestinians. We all kind of know what the end result has to be. It's just a matter of political will getting there. In the Iranian case, it's just the same. Those in the nonproliferation community know pretty well what the resolution has to be. It would be a resolution mostly technical that would allow all sides to save face and would at least bring the tension level down so that cooler heads could talk about sort of final resolution. I will describe for you that technical solution even though it's unclear whether there's political will to enact it. The technical solution is this. The most controversial part of Iran's nuclear program is its enrichment program. It has two main enrichment facilities, one at Natanz and they're about to begin another one at the Fordow facility. Enrichment of uranium is the most difficult, technically the most difficult part of the fuel cycle if you leave out reprocessing on the back end. But at the front end, enrichment is the most difficult part. The Iranians, if not having mastered it, at least got capability to enrich uranium. This is a source of great national pride. It's something that appears to be very closely associated with national identity. And yet this is what the Security Council has chosen as its issue to fight about. A much better solution would be the following. If Iran were allowed to keep its uranium enrichment facilities operational, and yet, if it agreed to, once having enriched the uranium, LEU, to send it out of the country, almost certainly to Russia, for fuel fabrication, send it back to Iran for use in its reactors at Bushehr and in Tehran and wherever else they make a reactor, and then send it back to Russia for ultimate either reprocessing or the disposal, this would do a number of things. Before I even go into that, don't think that this is just Dan Joyner's idea. The essential elements of this plan were proposed by Turkey two or three years ago. So this is not just a professor's plan. This was a real plan submitted by Turkey, agreed to by Russia. It was all in place. It could have gone forward, but it didn't. So with that said, what would this accomplish? It would allow Iran to keep its enrichment program, which is its real sort of red line. It cannot, it's not going to give up its enrichment program. There's just no way. But it would also be a victory for the West in requiring Iran to subject itself to this special process of transshipment. What would that transshipment actually accomplish? Accountability and transparency. What it would mean is that all the low and rich uranium that's going to be used in the power and other reactors would be fabricated for fuel in Russia. So there you have accountability. We know exactly how much of it has come out. We know exactly how much of it has come back in. And on the back end, we know exactly how much of it has come back. So that would be the ultimate transparency and accountability that it would have for the declared fizzle materials in Iran. This would be a victory for the West to achieve this greater level of transparency. So again, both sides would get something that would allow them to save face. It would allow us to sort of pull back from the brink. Some obvious questions. What would it do about non-declared fizzle materials? It would not resolve that problem. That's true. It would not resolve the problem of undeclared fizzle materials. There's no way to resolve that. As I've just described, both Western governments in Iran would win a bit and lose a bit. Those are the characteristics of a good negotiated resolution. The state that is likely to be least pleased with this is Israel. And Israel, in many ways, is driving the entire crisis, in my view. Israel would not be satisfied with this resolution. But the problem is, there is no resolution that Israel would be satisfied with. Short of Iran entirely giving up its whole nuclear fuel cycle. And that, I'm afraid to say, is entirely unrealistic. The proposal that I have described, the technical proposal, is in my view the most practical, realistic way forward. Israel would have to come to terms with the fact that Iran will undoubtedly achieve nuclear weapons capacity. There's no way to stop it. Short of a 2003-style Iraq invasion regime, this is not going to happen. Israel will have to come to terms with the fact of a nuclear capable Iran. But the resolution that I've described would keep their nuclear fuel cycle as transparent and accountable as possible, and would be a resolution that would allow the parties, the West and Iran, to at least move forward to continue diplomatic exchange and I think would bring us back from the brink of war. Let me go ahead and end my comments there and open up the floor for questions. Thank you very much.