Why Iran Didn’t Cross the Nuclear Weapon Road

LONDON: Contrary to the claim by Washington’s latest National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran, accepted by President George Bush, that Tehran’s decision to end its military-weapons program resulted primarily due to “international scrutiny and pressure,” the predominant factor was the pressure from its rival, Iraq. The chronology of events and the predilections of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, suggest that initiating and halting of Iran’s atomic-bomb project was related to Saddam Hussein's nuclear plans.

It all started with Saddam’s invasion of Iran in September 1980, which resulted in an eight-year war. The events in that conflict determined Tehran’s defense policy, decided in doctrinal terms by Khomeini, the arbiter of final authority, from 1979 until his death 10 years later.

Khomeini gave paramount importance to the preservation of the Islamic Republic, treating all else, including some basic tenets of Islam, as subsidiary.

When faced with the prospect of Iran’s military disintegrating in the face of a series of Iraqi offensives, using chemical weapons on a massive scale, Khomeini reversed his position in the spring of 1988 and accepted the year-old UN Security Council’s ceasefire resolution. He described his decision as tantamount to drinking hemlock.

On the nuclear issue, Khomeini took a stand early on. He stopped the building of a civilian nuclear power plant near Bushehr, started by Siemens of West Germany in 1974 – because he viewed it as a project inspired by US President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who had persuaded the Shah to build up to 22 nuclear-power plants.

It was Saddam’s deployment of non-conventional weapons – also called weapons of mass destruction, or WMD – during the Iran-Iraq War that compelled Khomeini to rethink his stance on the nuclear option as part of a defense strategy.

From October 1983 onward, Saddam resorted to deploying chemical weapons, banned by the Geneva Convention of 1925, on the battlefields. Once his engineers had extended the range of the Soviet-supplied surface-to-surface Scud missiles, he mounted the “War of Cities,” targeting heavily populated areas in March 1985. This phase lasted about a month.

The episode left a deep mark on Iran’s leaders. They feared that Saddam’s next step would be to deploy poison-gas bombs as payloads for his extended Scud missiles.

Since it is comparatively easy to convert pesticide factories to produce poison gases like Sarin and nerve agents, Iran had the option of retaliating in kind. But Khomeini excluded it. That would have meant Iran losing the moral high ground it had secured as a victim of poison-gas attacks.

Still there were two other WMDs: biological agents and nuclear arms. Though Saddam was believed to have a biological-weapons program, he had not deployed them.

That reduced Khomeini’s option to nuclear arms. Committed to preserving the Islamic Republic in the future, he seems to have given a go-ahead to his government to explore the nuclear option to safeguard the republic. Such weighty decisions in Iran were and still are taken in strictest secrecy. Khomeini knew well that this was to be a complicated, expensive process, stretching over many years.

Iranian officials secretly contacted Pakistan’s leading nuclear scientist-engineer, Abdul Qadeer Khan, in May 1987. He sold them the design for centrifuges to enrich uranium. He also “voluntarily” gave them the technology of how to mold highly enriched uranium into two hemispheres as a preamble to assembling an atom bomb, so the Iranians now claim.

Iran’s move had not come a day too soon. In February 1988, Iraq attacked Tehran and other cities with its boosted Scud missiles, called Al Hussein, with a range of 370 miles. Its poison-gas attack on its own Kurdish citizens of Halabja in March alarmed Tehran’s residents. They feared a similar fate. A third of the capital’s population fled to the countryside.

This seems to have given impetus to Iran’s leaders to pursue its atom-bomb project with added vigor and urgency.

What appears to have given further impetus to the Iranian enterprise was the discovery by International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors, made in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War between Iraq and the US-led coalition, that Iraq had a fairly advanced, clandestine nuclear-arms program.

When the IAEA and other international inspectors noticed discrepancy between what WMD materials they found and destroyed, and what the official documents showed to be in Iraq’s inventories at the start, Saddam claimed that he had ordered the destruction of some WMD materials himself. The documentation got lost in the mayhem, caused by the uprisings in Iraq in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, he explained.

The purpose of Saddam’s cat-and-mouse game with international inspectors was to make the leaders of the neighboring states feel that he possessed WMDs or could produce them at short notice, and thus gain their respect out of fear. Indeed, he said as much in his interviews with the US intelligence agents during his three-year incarceration. Saddam was particularly keen to foster such an assessment among the ruling mullahs of Iran, whom he detested for being ethnic Persian and Shiite.

The mystique of Saddam having a clandestine WMD was so strong that even his generals believed it. On the eve of the Anglo-American invasion in March 2003, however, he admitted to them that he had nothing of the sort. So, many of his generals failed to turn up for their jobs once the invasion got going. They knew that without chemical weapons and without air cover, they had no chance of resisting the invading forces.

Saddam’s overthrow in April was not enough to reassure Iran’s leaders to abandon their nuclear-arms option. What made the critical difference was the statement by David Kay, leader of the US-led Iraq Survey Group. At the end of an investigation costing $300 million, he said on October 2, 2003, "We have not yet found stocks of [non-conventional] weapons." Earlier, the Pentagon's 75th Exploitation Force too had discovered nothing.

This reassured Iran’s leaders, including Hassan Rouhani, its chief nuclear negotiator with foreign governments and international agencies.

On October 21, 2003, Rouhani held several hours of talks with the visiting foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany. At the end, Iran agreed, “Voluntarily to suspend all uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities as defined by the International Atomic Energy Agency” and to resolve satisfactorily all the IAEA’s remaining questions.

In return, the foreign ministers promised in writing that the EU would go along with whatever the IAEA decided, that Tehran could expect easier access to modern technologies and supplies in a range of areas from the EU, and that the EU and Iran would work for regional security and by implication examine Israel’s nuclear program.

This seems to have led the authors of the latest NIE to conclude that Iran’s leaders stopped the atomic bomb project in “the fall of 2003,” and that the primary reason was international pressure. No, the primary reason was the overthrow of Saddam and the absence of any WMD projects in Iraq; all else was secondary.