THE FEAR OF THE ISLAMIC BOMB

Teheran Psycho: The origins of the Islamic Nuclear Program go back to the Shah Rezah Pahlavi and Henry Kissinger

By Torsten Wohlert

[This article published in: Freitag 09, 3/3/2006 is translated abridged from the German on the World Wide Web, www.freitag.de/2006/09/06090701.php.]

Iran’s elected president's verbal abuse that Israel should disappear from the map sounded very absurd…

With the help of the US, Iran’s ambitious nuclear program began almost 50 years ago. Washington delivered the first research reactor in 1959. The next one was supplied eight years later. In 1975 Secretary of State Kissinger signed National Security Decision memorandum 292 that raised US-Iran nuclear cooperation to a new level. This memorandum earmarked the construction of two-dozen nuclear power plants and the possibility of establishing a complete nuclear cycle. It was an invitation to Teheran to join the club of nuclear weapon states and thus a blatant offense against the Nuclear Test ban treaty resolved in 1968 and ratified by the US in 1970. The Nuclear test ban treaty should have prevented this.

At that time Washington had no inhibitions about nuclear arms for Iran. There were no other potent buyers of American military technology in the region at that time… In 1979 the nuclear program of the overthrown Shah was put on ice as “infernal stuff’ by the Islamic revolutionaries. This happened on one hand for ideological reasons, primarily the resulting dependence on technological imports and had nothing to do with nuclear technology in itself. As a practical reason, both reactors (85 and 50 percent completed) found no customers in Iran’s economy weakened by the revolution…

POURING OIL INTO THE FIRE

From an energy policy and technological standpoint, the once plausible insights of the overthrown Shah are long antiquated. Even as an oil- and gas-exporter, Iran had other alternatives in the medium- and long-term for securing its precarious supply situation. Studies show that a conversion to regenerative energies could have been tackled in an economically sensible way. The technological progress from which threshold countries like Iran could expect an economic push had long developed away from the atom to solar technology appropriate to this region. If Teheran gave little attention to the analyses promoted by the Wuppertal Institute, this was due to controversial positions on democracy and human rights and to the fact that solar prophets are hardly appreciated in Iran.

One only needs to put oneself in the situation of the Ahmadinedschad government for a moment to understand why a desperate leadership leaps on the nuclear train. A rich country is confronted with social problems that can hardly be solved. The verbal readiness to disarm is Teheran’s imaginary pledge. The staged national pride is a propagandistic exaggeration and demands a levelheaded reaction.

Iran’s president provokes in order to divert. The message seems directed outward and yet primarily has a domestic political nature. Ahmadinedschad’s rhetoric has little to do with the ambivalent status of the Iranian atomic program. His program is unacceptable but not grounds for warmongering. Statements like those of US Senator McCain: “Only one thing is worse than a military action and that is a nuclear armed Iran” serve as verbal rearmament and prepare the ground for the next war or for “limited targeted” military strikes against Iran that could potentially trigger an extensive fire. Therefore one thing is necessary above all: European crisis diplomacy between Teheran, Washington and Jerusalem.

Mistrust toward Teheran’s peaceful intentions arises toward the negotiated Moscow offer to provide a kind of uranium enrichment to Iran on Russian territory. This mistrust is entirely justified given numerous inconsistencies uncovered by the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Authority) in many inspections in the past months and years.

As a signatory of the Nuclear Test Ban treaty, Iran has the explicit right to develop its own civil nuclear cycle but must submit to inspections. The IAEA suspected military misuse in the past. The decision to refer the case to the UN Security Council gives several options. The Security Council can regard the suspicion as serious and resolve appropriate measures like sanctions. The case could be forwarded to the IAEA again and examined with an expanded mandate.

This procedure is like a cat-and-mouse game with suspicions that can be easily politically staged and instrumentalized. This game is marked by an ambivalence arising from the nuclear technology itself that cannot be dissolved in security policy by an institution like the IAEA. Therefore the Moscow proposal seems to be a suitable attempt to cut this Gordian knot at least for the moment. The proposal requires abandoning sovereignty and upsets Mahmoud Ahmadinedschad’s domestic politics and verbal abuse. Ultimative, publically orchestrated pressure on the Iranian government reduces the chance for a face-saving solution. Whoever now pours oil on this fire does not want a hard negotiating partner. He wants an enemy – with all the fatal consequences.