PRAGUE, Czech Republic—Underlying tensions in the blossoming U.S.-Russia relationship surfaced last week, when U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said on 1 August in Moscow that Washington views Moscow's recently upgraded nuclear cooperation with Iran with the "utmost concern" and was voicing its anxiety "at the highest level." U.S. President George Bush in January named Iran as a member of the "axis of evil," comprising countries that Washington believes sponsors international terrorism.

Abraham's statement came a week after Russia announced that it would help Iran to build five new nuclear reactors. It is already working on the construction of Iran's first reactor, in Bushehr, under the terms of an $800 million deal signed in 1995. The plant is expected to be completed by 2005. Russia is not the only former Soviet bloc country to have been involved in the project. In 1999, then-Czech Prime Minister Milos Zeman justified his country's reluctance to stop the sale of components for the projects on the grounds that "Iran is not Iraq."

Washington has for many years expressed its concern that the Iranians are using civilian projects as a means of circumventing international trade restrictions and obtaining dual-purpose technology to develop its military capabilities. The United States and other Western states imposed an embargo on sales of military hardware to Iran 20 years ago.

Abraham argued on Thursday that "Iran's only interest in nuclear civil power, given its vast domestic energy resources, is to support its nuclear weapons program." On the same day, Washington's ambassador to Moscow, Alexander Vershbow, added that the Bush administration also has "concerns about the potential assistance Iran is gaining from contacts with Russia with respect to chemical and biological weapons."

A Kremlin spokesman responded by saying that Iran's nuclear program "has nothing to do with proliferation," and that Russia was keeping to all its international obligations on the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons.

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Abraham's forthright statements that "no one should be under any impression that we treat this as anything except of the utmost concern and those concerns have been frankly directed during our meetings here" suggest that the Bush and Putin administrations are now embroiled in one of their most serious rows since the Sept. 11 attacks. Over the past 11 months, the White House and the Kremlin have forged a new relationship that has seen major shifts in attitudes toward—among other issues—nuclear weapons, military and intelligence cooperation, NATO, the deployment of U.S. troops in former Soviet republics, oil, Russia's inclusion in the G7 (now G8) organization of leading economic powers, and Russia's status as a "market economy" (a precursor to membership in the World Trade Organization).

However, Russia has consistently maintained a separate line regarding its cooperation in the Bushehr project and also about broader relations with both Iran and Iraq. The question of nuclear cooperation was prominent in the run-up to the St. Petersburg summit between Bush and Putin in May, and during the summit itself.

During his visit to Russia, Bush warned Putin that "if you arm Iran, you're liable to have the weapons pointed at you," and a member of his entourage described the Bushehr plant as "the single most important proliferation threat there is." For his part, Putin denied the U.S. charges that providing nuclear technology to Iran would help it obtain weapons of mass destruction. Prior to the summit, Nikolai Shumkov, an official at the Russian Space Agency, was quoted by the Wall Street Journal as saying that "we have adopted comprehensive measures to exclude the merest possibility of missile-technology transfers," and said that the Americans had failed to provide evidence of illegal nuclear exports.

On 24 May, just days after the summit, Russia's deputy chief of staff, General Yuri Baluyevsky, raised the possibility that Iran already has nuclear weapons. "Iran does have nuclear weapons," Baluyevsky said. "Of course, these are nonstrategic nuclear weapons" and had not been supplied by Russia, he said. Iran denied the claim, and also asserts that it is not trying to develop nuclear weapons. It has, though, said that it is developing conventional arms for deterrence and, in late May, after successfully testing a medium-range ballistic missile capable of striking Israel, Iranian Defense Minister Ali Shamkani said that "Iran can produce any conventional arms the authorities want, as we are self-sufficient in the technology."

*This article was edited and adapted from Transitions Online. A longer version is available at: www.tol.cz

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