Barbara Slavin
Director, Future of Iran Initiative, The Atlantic Council
I always say that Iran is the slowest moving proliferator in the history of nuclear weapons, and I think there are interesting reasons for that. If we look at the last sixty years since Iran began working on nuclear field, we’ve had Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea all developing nuclear weapons, while Iran has not. I agree with John that the reason is that Iran seeks the capacity, but not the bombs themselves. If we look back at the program, there is a significant amount of inertia involved, because, as John pointed out, the United States basically gave Iran the beginning of its program with “Atoms for Peace” in the late 1950s, and then, a decade later, the Tehran Research Reactor, under the Johnson administration, which unbelievably is still operating now despite Iran’s difficulties in getting fuel for it over the years.
The Shah had an excellent relationship particularly with the Nixon administration and Ford administration, and he had plans for something like 28 nuclear power plants. The Germans actually began building the Bushehr reactor in the mid-1970s. This was also when France sold Iran a 10% stake in the consortium Eurodif which was supposed to provide fuel for Bushehr. The Shah also doubled in nuclear weapons research as well. He was not shy about even then beginning to develop the hedging capacity, just because he had a sense of himself as the hegemon, as the policeman of the United States and the Persian Gulf. This cooperation with the West obviously ended with 1979 Islamic Revolution. The western countries all cancelled their contracts with Iran. I am not sure that Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the Revolution, was thinking so much about religion, or maybe just trying to make a virtue of the fact that the Westerners had cancelled their contracts by declaring that nuclear weapons were against Islam. It was in 1983-1984 that Khomeini gave the green light for Iran to resume nuclear work because of the Iran-Iraq war and the fact that at that time Iraq was already using chemical weapons against Iranian troops, and there was a real fear in Iran that Saddam Hussein would develop nuclear weapons and use those against Iranian cities.
The program resumed, but even then it moved very slowly. The Iranians got some help from Pakistan, from A.Q. Khan, infamous Pakistani proliferator, he gave Iran a few rudimentary centrifuges and also some bomb plans. Iran worked on it, but it had other major priorities after the end of the Iran-Iraq war in terms of just basic reconstruction of an absolutely devastated economy. During the 90s, as John pointed out, Iran did also approach China and Russia for assistance. They provided some technical assistance and some materials. But the Clinton administration lobbied very strongly against it and both Russia and China gave some but not too much. Russia did eventually agree to complete the Bushehr plant, but it wasn’t until 2011, 35 years after the construction of this facility began that it was actually attached to the Iranian grid.
One pattern we have seen repeatedly with Iran is that when it is denied technology by the West, when it is confronted for its nuclear advances, it shows that it can make progress on its own, and there was a clear military dimension to the program, but that essentially did end in 2003 after it was revealed. The CIA and the Israeli Mossad fed the information to the Iranian dissident group, the MEK, which revealed the existence of the Natanz centrifuge facility and a few other facilities back in 2000. It was revealed, at the same time, as John pointed out, Iran lost the main motivation for weapons program with the fall of Saddam Hussein after the US invasion. Iran used the program as a bargaining chip with European powers initially and later with the United States and other countries. The desire to show that Iran could do this on its own is always very strong, and we saw it under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who identified himself with the nuclear program. It was in 2006, about 6 months after Ahmadinejad took office that Iran finally managed to produce some enriched uranium, a small amount. And it continued to make advances despite the imposition of UN sanctions, European sanctions, US sanctions against the program all the way through the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
But Iran doesn’t have a bomb. I think this is for two reasons: one, as John has discussed, it wants the capability, but not the bomb itself, and I think frankly it has already achieved this goal. Iran has built a national defense strategy that depends on creating and supporting Shiite militias in surrounding countries and on deploying increasingly accurate conventional missiles and drones. This is what it has, and if it had actually to go all the way to build a bomb, as has been pointed out, this could lead to war, an Israeli attack and it would also incentify its Arab adversaries like Saudi Arabia to obtain nuclear weapons as well. Nuclear weapons really don’t fit Iran’s national security strategy as well as the other means that Iran has developed. We only need to look at the rise of groups such as Hezbollah, the Shiite militias in Iran and Syria as well as the Iranian alliance with Houthis to see that this strategy has actually projected Iran’s influence much more successfully than possessing nuclear weapons would. And in terms of missile prowess, we saw what Iran did to the Saudi oil facilities at Abqaiq in 2019, we saw the strikes on US forces in Iraq after the US killed Qasem Soleimani in 2020 and the rockets that are being deployed by Hamas as we speak, which Iran helped provide.
The other reason I think why Iran will not develop nuclear weapons is a product of Iran’s failures, particularly the failure of its intelligence services to hide and protect the program and the scientists involved. As I mentioned, the US and Israeli intelligence discovered Natanz in the early 2000s, later on they discovered the underground plant at Fordow and revealed that to the world in 2009. The US and Israel developed the Stuxnet cyber worm which was inserted into computers controlling the centrifuges at Natanz, and it caused the machines to speed up and slow down erratically destroying about a thousand of them. Mossad also quite famously assassinated at least a half dozen Iranian nuclear scientists in the mid-to-late 2000s and more recently Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the father of the Iranian bomb program late last year. I think that Iranians have realized that even if they kick out the IAEA, frankly, I think that the national means of particularly the Israelis, but also the United States and the penetration of the Iranian nuclear program means that they would not be able to build the bomb and hide that progress.
In terms of where we are now, I am optimistic that we can get back to the JCPOA, less optimistic about whether we can build on it, and a lot of it is going to depend on internal politics in Iran. As has been pointed out, Iran is having presidential elections, and there is likely to be a consolidation of power by the so-called hardliners, conservatives. The real question is whether or not this group will see the need for a change in the 40 years of hostility between Iran and the United States. Will they be content to rely on China-Russia neighbors, the Look East policy, or will they think that there really is an opportunity to change the fundamental nature of the relationship with the United States. There are a lot of variables here. Certainly Israel and its attitude is going to be very important. The fact is that despite the distrust of the United States, particularly the disappointing experience with Trump, the majority of Iranian people would still prefer to have a better relationship with Europe and the United States, this is after all where the Iranian diaspora has traditionally congregated – you don’t see an Iranian diaspora in Russia or China as far as I know, at least not a very big one. So, if there is a consolidation of power by the so-called hardliners, how will they use that consolidation? Will they try to improve their popularity by making some gestures that are truly popular with the Iranian people or will they simply continue down the autocratic repressive route and decide that it’s easier to have relations only with countries that are not going to criticize their domestic human rights policies. This is a big unknown, and something, I think, we are really going to have to watch.
