Wolf D. Fuhrig

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The Case Against Iran

“If they (Iran) have the nuclear material and they have a parallel weaponization program along the way, they really are not very far--a few months--from a weapon.” That alarming statement came from Mohmmad El Baradei, the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in a recent Newsweek interview. Yet, neither he nor anybody else has come up with hard evidence that the Iranian government is indeed producing a nuclear weapon. Practically all of the evidence cited against Iran is circumstantial.

Since 1968, all but four of the member states of the United Nations, including Iran, have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that entitles only the U.S., Russia, China, Britain, and France to produce and own nuclear arms. The four holdouts are Cuba, India, Israel, and Pakistan. Cuba is known not to produce nuclear weapons while India and Pakistan have acknowledged that they possess them. Israel is known to have some 100 nuclear weapons but refuses to acknowledge them or to allow any kind of inspection by the IAEA.

Two of the signer states, North Korea and Iran, have been suspected for some time of trying to produce nuclear arms. The suspicion against Iran was reinforced in 2002 by a group of dissidents. Although Russia has been building a nuclear power plant for Iran at Bushehr on the Persian Gulf, nobody claims to know for a fact if and when Iran may be capable of producing a nuclear bomb. Nevertheless, the IAEA, the U.S., Britain, France, and Germany have been increasingly pressuring Iran to forego nuclear production for both military and civilian use.

The IAEA insists that the Iranian authorities did not give its inspectors access to all of their military sites. The CIA deduced from computer files that Iranian scientists may be designing a nuclear warhead for a missile with a 1,200 km range. The Economist alleges that Iranians may have obtained nuclear production equipment from a black market network run by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the founder of Pakistan’s nuclear industry.

Pressured by the European negotiators, Iran in November 2003 agreed to stop all uranium enrichment but refused to end nuclear production permanently. The Iranian government repeatedly insisted that the NPT allowed all signers to enrich nuclear fuel on their own if they allowed the IAEA to supervise their production facilities. They also protested that Israel was allowed to threaten Iran and the whole Middle East with its nuclear arsenal of some 100 weapons and to deny the IAEA access to any of its nuclear plants.

When neither the Europeans nor the IAEA permitted Iran to continue nuclear enrichment for non-military purposes, the newly elected, outspokenly anti-Israeli president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad decided to have the inspectors’ seals at the uranium-enrichment plant in Natanz removed. That brought the long-smoldering crisis to a boil.
The 35-member board of the IAEA will meet in Vienna, while the U.S. secretary of state and the foreign ministers of China, Russia, Britain, France, and Germany plan to confer in London to find a common response to Iran’s refusal to scrap its nuclear industry. Russia and China have so far not agreed to the demand to bring a complaint against Iran before the U.N. Security Council.

As a compromise, Russia has offered Iran a ten-year supply of fuel for the reactor at Bushehr. Even if they accept such a deal, the Iranians insist that they should have the same right as all other NPT signers to pursue their own nuclear research and their own production of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.

If the Bush administration were willing to end the temptation of nuclear armaments for countries such as Israel, Iran, and Iraq, it should at long last take the initiative and propose the only way out: a treaty committing all countries of the Middle East to free the region of all nuclear production for military use.