Dr. John Ghazvinian
Executive Director, Middle East Center, University of Pennsylvania
I will be speaking as a historian. I think that history is relevant. I am going to run through what I think are the most significant historical guideposts along the way that got us to this point. I think that when one looks at the history, one cannot help but feeling that this entire nuclear issue, this sort of crisis that has sucked up so much energy in the conversation around US-Iran relations over the last 20 years, is actually rather avoidable and unnecessary. It’s my opinion that this is an issue that could be imminently resolved relatively easily in a positive and constructive atmosphere between the two countries, and it is an issue that is almost impossible to resolve in a hostile, insincere and antagonistic atmosphere between the two countries. That is just logic: when you are full of enmity with someone, trying to resolve an enormously technical, complicated issue like a nuclear program is going to be rife with challenges and issues. Conversely, when we look at this historically, we realize that Iran’s actual nuclear file is not that serious. There are many other countries that have similar question marks over their IAEA inspection records where we don’t have the same level of drama that we have around Iran and the nuclear issue.
I’m going to have a quick look at this historically, I beg your forgiveness for having to go back so far. I have just finished a book that covers almost 300 years of US-Iran history. I’m not going to go back that far.
It is important to remember that Iran’s nuclear program dates back to the 1950s, to 1958, as an outgrowth of a very close cooperation with the United States. Initially the president Eisenhower’s had “Atoms for Peace” program that wanted to ensure that nuclear technology was used for peaceful rather than destructive purposes. This gave rise to the NPT, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the basic concept of “Atoms for Peace”. It is important to remember that it was the United States that sold Iran its first nuclear technology including helping to build the Tehran Research Reactor in the 1950s and 60s, or at least providing some of the fuel for it.
By the 1970s the United States is cooperating much more closely with Iran on developing its nuclear industry. And the question that is being asked today was simply not asked or asked very quietly in 1970s by both Nixon, Ford and even Carter administrations. There was a real amount of unanimity among the American scientific community, energy community and policy-making community in Washington: a nuclear program would be a desirable thing for Iran as a developing country with a large amount of petroleum at its disposal. This is still true, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to build very expensive, complicated refineries for what is always going to be a very limited amount of domestic demand for refine gasoline. It has always made more sense for a country like Iran to sell its oil on the international market and use those funds to develop a genuinely sustainable energy industry. Nuclear is not the only way to do that, but it is one very significant way to do that. An option the Shah of Iran was exploring, and it was one that the United States tended to strongly support as a logical approach for meeting Iran’s energy need.
Another relevant thing when we talk about history is Iran’s entry into the NPT in the first place. The NPT has three basic principles: disarmament, non-proliferation and cooperation. I agree with Lord Hanney, the NPT remains to this day a really in some ways inspiring international attempt to reduce the threat of nuclear annihilation. But it is important occasionally to revisit its basic principles and remember that when we had five nuclear arms states – Soviet Union, United States, China, Great Britain and France – the desire was not to add additional nuclear arms states, so non-proliferation is a critical part of the NPT. But out of that bargain it is important to remember that a whole bunch of countries had to agree not to develop nuclear weapons. The key is that for the countries in a developing world this was a challenging and not very appealing prospect. The NPT has a non-proliferation aspect and the disarmament aspect which has never really fully happened. The US and the Soviet Union made some progress towards disarmament, but they still have 6,000 nuclear weapons each, more than enough to destroy the world many times. In the cooperation part of it which has almost become a mockery, the idea is that if you ask other countries not to develop nuclear weapons, you will have to help them with peaceful nuclear technology, which was the original point of “Atoms for Peace”.
The key to remember is that for the five nuclear arms states you can see the appeal of the NPT, because it retains their preeminent powers as nuclear weapons states. For countries like Fiji, Nicaragua and the Seychelles we can also see the appeal of the NPT, because these countries are never going to develop a nuclear weapons program. They have no purpose or interest in one. What the NPT does is wonderful, because it helps to guarantee their safety and security, because it means we are not living in a nuclear arms race and one of their more belligerent neighbors will not get nuclear weapons. If you are a Caribbean nation, you don’t want Mexico to possess nuclear weapons. You can see the appeal. But it was all the mid-range countries that always had an issue with this. They complained about it vigorously in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. Countries like India, Yugoslavia, Argentina said that this was the nuclear apartheid, that was the Indian claim on this. “We are up and coming powerful countries, what is in this for us? Are you telling us to hang back and not to become nuclear weapons states? But we are significant countries”. Iran was in that league in 1970s. Yet it signed the NPT in 1968. It was one of the original signatories of the NPT the day it opened for signatures in 1968 and immediately ratified it by 1970.
The head of Iran’s nuclear program at that time, Akbar Etemad, who is in his 90s now, has given some fascinating interviews in recent years which said: “We should never have signed, all these mid-range countries didn’t sign and instead they went to the threshold, developed the technology and then joined”. As you know, it took decades to get all the countries to join. I think only 40 countries joined in 1968, and it was only about 20 years ago that all countries finally joined. In the case of a couple of countries, they simply never joined, I’m thinking about India and Pakistan who said: “No, we are actually going to build nuclear weapons”, and not anyone could do much to stop them. North Korea pulled out, deciding the NPT was not working, and actually built the bomb. And of course, Israel has never joined and built at least 200 nuclear weapons.
A particularly relevant thing is that like a lot of other countries, Iran basically shot itself in a foot in a sense. The Shah made a calculation that with close US alliance he could benefit... There are two ways one could get nuclear cooperation in the 1970s for a country like Iran – either join the NPT and do it through a mechanism created and led by the US, if you had close alliances with a powerful nuclear weapon country, or one can decide to go one’s own way, go to the threshold and then join the NPT. Iran did it the legalistic way which made sense at the time. But no one saw the Revolution coming. As soon as the Revolution took place, understandably, for some very good reasons a lot of the powerful states said: “No, we are not going to cooperate with Iran anymore. We don’t care if you are in the NPT. We will not help you develop peaceful nuclear technology, because we don’t trust you”. What is relevant about that is that ironically, just as Iran was no longer able to benefit from this cooperation, Iran made its own decision that it didn’t want to pursue any kind of nuclear program. Ayatollah Khomeini famously dismantled the entire program. It was sinful against Islam, one of those shiny western objects that the Shah had been blindly fascinated by, Iran didn’t want to pursue this. Fine, but Iran still had a need for some peaceful nuclear technology, and it found itself cut off at every point along the way. When in the 1980s, for example, the US pressured on China, Argentina to stop selling Iran the fuel that it needed. It happened again in the 1990s. Iran found itself in a difficult position, because it genuinely needed the energy, radioisotopes for medical treatment and all these kinds of things. And it was a member of the NPT. But every time it tried to develop these things according to the mechanisms of the NPT, it found that one of the most powerful countries in the world pressured other allies not to cooperate in actual violation of the NPT principles.
I want to emphasize that this is not in any way special love for the Islamic Republic of Iran. There are many things they do wrong, that are open to condemnation and should be condemned. But on the whole, when you look at the history of the nuclear program, I don’t think that Iran has been the obstacle. Beginning in the early 1990s Iran made the strategic choice that it was not able to get above board cooperation through the NPT on its nuclear program, it was going to have secret ways to develop what is was doing. That began to create this self-fulfilling cycle where naturally Israel, the US or other countries that didn’t trust Iran were suddenly saying: “Wait a minute! What are they doing? What are they doing in secret?” The more it happened, the more it had to be secret. So, it took something that was legitimate, legal under the NPT and gave this air of secrecy to this. That’s where we see the beginning of the crisis.
I would have love to run through some of later history as well, because I think this is equally relevant. Briefly, Iran in the early 2000s when this nuclear crisis began, had only around 163 centrifuges, first generation old stuff. Now it has thousands of second generation centrifuges. I think this has become a very self-fulfilling crisis. It could have been resolved very easily in the first Bush administration when it first came up, but unfortunately the United States took a very hardline approach, zero enrichment attitude. It is important to remember that in 2003 Iran actually suspended its nuclear program completely, 16 US intelligence agencies verified that it happened and it only restarted in 2005, since the E3 process wasn’t going to lead anywhere. This hardline approach made Iran feel backed into a corner.
This is a very complicated issue. Looking at history is an important starting point. I think it is too easy to leave some of these issues out.
