It built its weapons by diverting material from civilian nuclear plants -- just what the United States says Iran is doing.
Still, diplomats expect sharp debate over the American list of goods that Washington wants to monitor so that Iraq cannot reconstruct weapons by diverting material or equipment that also has civilian uses.
Efforts to ban or restrict creative, imaginative and diverting material — from novels and film to comic books, popular music and video games — have always relied on oversimplified claims that they "caused" problems ranging from juvenile delinquency to sexual promiscuity.
Still, her life-story brims with plenty of diverting material: a spell working for the organisation commanded by Beatles manager Brian Epstein; recollections of hanging out with Paul McCartney; depression; single parenthood; bulimia; valium; and lots of political activism (her political hero, she claims, is Labour bigmouth and quaint throwback Dennis Skinner).
The polyester material is made from post-consumer waste, meaning it is truly diverting material from landfills.
The Clarke system has the ability to sort at super-human speeds, diverting material for re-processing that might otherwise end up in landfill.
What if, instead of simply diverting materials from landfills, they could recover a harmful waste material before it is even released?
Disaffected individuals in Pakistan (which, remember, was intimate with the Taliban) would have no trouble finding the illicit channels or the rationalization for diverting materials, expertise -- even, conceivably, a warhead.
At the time, the United States and its allies feared that North Korea was diverting materials from the reactor to a weapons program, and they threatened to impose economic sanctions -- and considered military action -- to force Pyongyang to readmit the monitors.
In practice, these limitations and the verification associated with them make it highly unlikely that the Iranians could divert materials for a covert program or would be in a position to break out to weapons-grade material in less than a year for the eight and a half to 10 years that the restrictions on the number and types of centrifuges apply.
