Iran has pursued its nuclear project with a strategy inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s story The Purloined Letter. In that short story, the police fail to find a stolen letter because they think it must be elaborately hidden. Instead, the thief outwits them by placing it right under their noses.
To those who have followed the evolution of Iran’s military doctrine since the 1980s, the leak to The Times of confidential intelligence documents indicating that Iran is working on a key final component of a nuclear bomb comes as no surprise. The regime in Tehran has not hidden its nuclear ambitions.
The Ayatollah Khomeini in 1988 ordered a resumption of Iran’s “frozen” nuclear project. The Islamic Republic, then at war with Iraq, believed that Saddam Hussein was on a fast track to build the bomb. Although the war ended in 1988, the nuclear project continued at increasing pace. In 1992, acquisition of a nuclear arsenal became one of the three pillars of Iran’s “defence doctrine”, alongside the creation of a mass infantry, the so-called 20-million-man army and the largest missiles stockpile in the Middle East.
Iran began by saying that it is building a nuclear plant to produce electricity, a project that it started in 1973, and may never complete. Then it set up a plant to enrich uranium, ostensibly for use as fuel in its non-existent plant. Last month, it announced plans to build ten more uranium-enrichment facilities. The uranium thus enriched is stockpiled until the day the Khomeinist leadership decides to enrich it further for use in nuclear warheads.
Until now, most experts assumed that Iran’s aim was to arrive at the so-called threshold point: the penultimate stage of building a bomb. If the leaked documents are authenticated, we must assume that the Islamic Republic has reached the “threshold” and is beginning to cross it, albeit gingerly. As long as Iran was suspected of merely moving towards full nuclear status, the problem the international community faced was one of prevention. If Iran has crossed the threshold, the problem becomes one of nuclear disarmament. The latest revelations could have three immediate consequences.
First, Iran’s bomb will destabilise the region. It may speed up a nascent nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Since the dispute over Iran’s nuclear ambitions became public in the 1990s, twenty-two countries, eight of them in the Middle East, have started or revived nuclear programmes. The region, already in turmoil with three wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen, is hardly in need of another destabilising factor.
With most regimes in the region, including the Iranian one itself, facing internal revolts, the risk of nuclear material falling into terrorist hands is a concern. And there is an additional risk of an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear targets, something that could trigger a bigger conflict.
Next, the revelations could spell the death of the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty, of which Iran was one of the first signatories in 1968. Despite attempts to amend and strengthen it with “additional protocols”, the NPT is a blunt instrument for preventing rogue states from building the bomb. Although the International Atomic Energy Agency and its outgoing director, Mohamed ElBaradei, who downplayed the Iranian project, share the blame for what is happening, there is no doubt that the NPT is full of holes.
Finally, the major powers must decide what to do about the five resolutions that the UN Security Council has passed in the hope of persuading Tehran to comply with the NPT. Three of those resolutions open the way for military action.
The new US Administration has tried to bypass the UN resolutions in the hope of cajoling Mahmoud Ahmadinejad into a temporary freeze of the enrichment programme. Such a move would give President Obama something to show for his “open hand” and “unconditional talks” strategy without ending the Islamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions.
Some of Ahmadinejad’s advisers urge him to provide Obama with a “fig leaf” to silence his domestic critics in the US. They argue that the Islamic Republic made a mistake by wrecking Jimmy Carter’s presidency in 1979 when “students” raided the US Embassy in Tehran and made hostages of its diplomats. By sinking President Carter, who had been sympathetic to the revolution, the mullahs ended up with a hostile Ronald Reagan, who became the first, and so far only, US president to take military action against Iran, in 1988. Iran should not repeat that mistake by “Carterising Obama”, some Ahmadinejad advisers insist.
Unwilling to contemplate pre-emptive war, some may believe the only alternative is pre-emptive surrender. It is not. It is still possible to raise the cost of Iran’s nuclear ambitions by fully applying the sanctions already approved, but not implemented by the UN resolution and envisaged by the IAEA’s own rules. These include tight control of exports of all dual-use material and equipment to Iran, the inspection and impounding of suspect cargos on board ships and aircraft, and the termination of Iranian access to credit facilities and banking services used for its illicit nuclear project.
The full implementation of existing resolutions would send a signal to Tehran that its “cheat-and-retreat” strategy is not cost-free.
Obama had hoped to kick this can down the road with a mixture of negotiations and symbolic gestures. The latest revelations may make it difficult to continue that tactic. What he faces is a choice between accepting Iran as a nuclear power and taking action to stop it from crossing the threshold.
Amir Taheri, the author of The Persian Night: Iran Under the Khomeinist Revolution.