Washington Post op-ed: Energy secretary Ernest Moniz champions Iran nuclear deal
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8111
On 2 April, the Washington Post reported , along with many others, that Iran had “agreed in principle to accept significant restrictions on its nuclear facilities for at least a decade and submit to international inspections under a framework deal” that is not final but that “creates parameters” for further negotiations. On the evening of 12 April, the Post published online US energy secretary Ernest Moniz ‘s op-ed promoting the prospective agreement.
The piece links to a State Department press release outlining the parameters. Because DOE experts were closely involved, Moniz argues, “the key parameters ... provide a technically sound path for certifying Iran’s nuclear program as peaceful, quickly determining if it is not and providing the breathing room needed to respond appropriately.” The parameters “would block Iran’s four pathways to a nuclear weapon,” writes Moniz, who uses that word path and its variant pathway repeatedly, calling to mind what the op-ed contradicts: the often-repeated claim by Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the deal does “not block Iran’s path to the bomb, it would pave it.”
Moniz engages each of the four pathways: “the path through plutonium production at the Arak reactor, two paths to a uranium weapon through the Natanz and Fordow enrichment facilities, and the path of covert activity.” He emphasizes that “breakout time"—how long “it would take Iran to produce the nuclear material needed for a weapon"—will shift from two to three months to at least a year.
The “understanding is not built on trust,” Moniz declares. “It is built on hard-nosed requirements that would limit Iran’s activities and ensure vital access and transparency.”
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.