Why the nuclear program is an identity issue for Iran

In October 1978, two leaders of the Iranian opposition to the British-backed Shah of Iran met in the Paris suburb of Neufchâteau to plan the final phase of the revolution - a revolution that now, after 46 turbulent and often brutal years, may be coming to an end.

The two men were united only by their nationality, age, and determination to overthrow the Shah. Karim Sanjabi, leader of the secular liberal National Front, was a former Sorbonne-educated law professor. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had been the leading Shiite opponent of the Iranian monarchy since the 1960s. Both were then in their seventies.

Sanjabi arrived in Paris with a draft declaration of the goals of the upcoming revolution that the two of them were to lead. The document stated that the revolution would be based on two principles: that it be democratic and Islamic. However, Sanjabi later told historians that during the Paris meeting, Khomeini added a third principle to the declaration with his own hand - independence.

This third principle, the primacy of independence, derived from Iran’s history of exploitation by colonial powers, helps explain what can seem incomprehensible in the Iran-US conflict: Iran’s dogmatic insistence on its right to enrich uranium. It is an issue that has plagued negotiations between Iran and the West over Tehran’s nuclear program since the turn of the century, and was a major sticking point during the two-year talks that ultimately ended in Iran’s favor with the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) reached under the Obama administration. It is also why Iran bombed Israel and, last weekend, the United States.

However, for many in the US, this Iranian obsession with enriching uranium within its own borders, rather than, say, importing it from Russia, can only be explained by accepting that Iran secretly wants to build a nuclear bomb. The fatwa against “un-Islamic” weapons of mass destruction, which the Supreme Leader has issued twice, can be nothing more than a smokescreen from the American perspective.

On social media last week, US Vice President J.D. Vance largely espoused that view. He wrote: “It’s one thing to want civilian nuclear power. It’s another to demand sophisticated enrichment capacity. And yet another to insist on enrichment while simultaneously violating basic nonproliferation obligations and enriching to near-military-grade uranium. I have yet to see a good argument why Iran needed to enrich uranium well above the civilian threshold. I have yet to see a good argument that Iran was justified in violating its obligations under the nonproliferation treaty.”

The process of enriching uranium for civilian nuclear power and for making a nuclear bomb is essentially the same. It is generally accepted that uranium enriched to 3,67 percent is sufficient for civilian nuclear reactors, while weapons require a purity of 90 percent. Once 60 percent purity is reached, as is the case with Iran, it does not take much to reach 90 percent.

Iran, of course, claims that there is nothing mysterious about enriching uranium to such a high level of purity. This, they say, was part of a clearly announced gradual escalation in response to Donald Trump's unilateral decision to withdraw the US from the JCPOA in 2018 - a move that stripped Iran of the sanctions relief it had negotiated. Moreover, Trump has made it impossible for Europe to trade with Iran by imposing secondary sanctions, nullifying another key benefit of the deal.

Iranian policy over the past decade has been shaped precisely by the belief that Tehran was a betrayed partner and that the US was inherently unreliable.

Centrist figures like former President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif have invested enormous political capital within the country to sign an agreement with the West only for the West to promptly break it. Meanwhile, Israel, a country that, unlike Iran, is not a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and possesses a completely unverified and undeclared nuclear arsenal, enjoys generous support and protection from the West.

Yet Vance may have a point. As a pretext for action, the right to enrich uranium to 3,67 percent purity—the level permitted by the JCPOA—seems at first glance to be an unlikely reason for current Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to risk martyrdom.

Iranian policy over the past decade has been shaped by the belief that Tehran was a betrayed partner and that the United States was inherently unreliable.

Why was a country with large oil reserves so keen to have its own civilian nuclear power?

The compelling new interpretation offered by Vali Nasr in his book “Iran’s Grand Strategy” helps answer that question by placing it in the context of Iran’s colonial exploitation and its quest for independence.

He writes: “Before the revolution itself, before the hostage crisis or American sanctions, before the Iran-Iraq war or attempts to export the revolution, and before the sordid legacy of Iran’s conflicts with the West, the future supreme religious leader of Iran considered independence from foreign influence as important as establishing Islamic principles in the state.”

Khamenei was indeed once asked the question: what is the use of revolution? He replied: “Now all decisions are made in Tehran.”

Nasr argues that many of the lofty ideals of the revolution, such as democracy and Islam, have been eroded or distorted over time, but that the principle of Iranian independence has survived.

The quest for sovereignty, Nasr argues, stems from Iran’s dark history. In the 19th century, Iran found itself squeezed between British and Russian imperial power. In the 20th century, its oil resources were exploited by British oil companies. Twice, its leaders, in 1941 and 1953, were removed from power with the help of the British and Americans. The popular Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh was overthrown in a CIA-organized coup in 1953, over his demand that Iran take control of its own oil resources. No event in modern Iranian history has left a deeper wound than Mossadegh’s overthrow. For Khomeini, it was proof that Iran was still not in control of its own destiny, or its own energy resources.

Although civilian nuclear energy and the right to enrichment became symbols of independence and sovereignty after the revolution, Eli Geranmayeh of the European Council on Foreign Relations points out that it was the British and Americans who first introduced nuclear energy to Iran under a program called "atoms for peace."

The Shah of Iran, with US approval, began a plan to build 23 civilian nuclear power plants, which would enable Iran to export electricity to its neighbors and bring it to the status of a modern state. Michael Axworthy, a leading British historian of modern Iran, said: “Such a use of oil revenues seemed at the time a sensible way to invest a finite resource in the creation of an infinite one.”

Before the revolution itself, before the hostage crisis or American sanctions, before the Iran-Iraq war or attempts to export the revolution, as well as before the dirty legacy of Iran's conflicts with the West, the future supreme religious leader of Iran considered independence from foreign influence as important as the establishment of Islamic principles in the state.

In an interview with the Washington Post, Henry Kissinger later admitted that as US Secretary of State he had no objections to the construction of these power plants. “I don’t think the question of nuclear proliferation was even raised at that time,” he said. Work began on two nuclear reactors, including one in the port city of Bushehr, with the help of the German company Kraftwerk Union, a subsidiary of Siemens and AEG.

The Shah was aware of the dual purpose of nuclear energy, and in June 1974 he even told an American journalist that “Iran will undoubtedly have nuclear weapons before you think.” He later retracted this statement. Gradually, the United States became increasingly concerned that the Shah’s obsession with weapons could mean that the civilian nuclear program would become military.

After the Iranian Revolution of 1979, work on two nearly completed power plants was halted. Khomeini viewed nuclear energy as a symbol of Western decadence, arguing that massive infrastructure projects would make Iran more dependent on Western imperialist technology. He said he did not want "Western toxicity" - gharbzadegi in Farsi. The program has largely been shut down, to the disappointment of some Iranian nuclear scientists.

However, within a year or two, electricity shortages and a demographic boom created pressure on the political elite in Tehran to quietly reconsider the decision to terminate the program. Iraq's use of chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq War, Tehran's sense of diplomatic isolation in its attempts to gain international condemnation for continued Iraqi attacks on the unfinished Bushehr nuclear power plant, and multimillion-dollar legal disputes with European firms over the Shah's unfinished nuclear program all combined to fuel the emergence of "nuclear nationalism."

By 1990, the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran announced that by 2005 as much as 20 percent of the country's electricity could come from nuclear sources and that 10 nuclear plants would be built in the next decade.

Hashemi Rafsanjani, speaker of parliament during the 1980-1988 war and then president of Iran from 1989 to 1997, made repeated appeals to Iranian nuclear scientists to return home and revive the program. He declared in 1988: “If you will not serve Iran, then who will you serve?” Suddenly, Iran’s nuclear program went from a symbol of Western modernism to a source of patriotic pride.

At the turn of the 20th century, the Iranian nuclear program was mistakenly thought to consist mainly of several small research reactors and a light-water nuclear reactor jointly built by Iran and, later, Russia at Bushehr.

Rafsanjani later admitted that Iran first considered deterrence capabilities during the Iran-Iraq War, when the nuclear program was restarted. He said: “When we started, we were at war and we wanted to have that capability for the day when the enemy might use nuclear weapons. That was the thinking. But it never became a reality.”

Rafsanjani traveled to Pakistan to try to meet with Abdul Qadir Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear program that later helped North Korea develop an atomic bomb.

In mid-2002, a leak by a dissident group, possibly via the Mossad, revealed that Iran had two secret nuclear sites for uranium enrichment: one in Natanz, near Isfahan, and the other in Kashan, in central Iran. Iran claimed that it was not required to notify the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of the existence of these facilities because they were not yet operational. Iran added that the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) recognized the “inalienable right” of all states to develop nuclear programs for peaceful purposes, under IAEA supervision.

In itself, uranium enrichment is not evidence of an intention to build nuclear weapons, but critics have pointed out that it is difficult to explain why Iran would be producing nuclear fuel at that stage, when it did not have a single functioning nuclear reactor.

From then on, diplomatic trickery began, which has continued in varying intensities to this day.

In October 2003, through the Tehran Declaration, Iran, under enormous international pressure due to the information revealed, agreed to sign an additional protocol allowing the IAEA to carry out unannounced inspections. In November 2004, under the so-called Paris Agreement, Iran agreed to temporarily suspend uranium enrichment, pending proposals from the so-called E3 group (France, Germany and the United Kingdom) on a long-term solution to the issue. However, out of respect for Iranian sovereignty, the E3 acknowledged that this suspension was a voluntary confidence-building measure, not a legal obligation.

But Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's populist president elected in June 2005, has taken a more assertive stance, insisting that Iran's technology is the peaceful result of the scientific achievements of the country's youth. "We need peaceful nuclear technology for energy, medicine, agriculture and our scientific progress," he said.

Pressure to start negotiations gradually increased. The US demanded a complete halt to enrichment, while Iran insisted on its legal right to continue. The E3 thus found itself caught between two opposing positions. Various compromises were offered, including those proposed by Brazil and India.

However, Western public opinion was largely shaped by the opinion of then-director of the UN Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, who said: “In my view, the Iranian nuclear program is a means to an end: Iran wants to be recognized as a regional power, they believe that nuclear knowledge brings prestige, it brings power, and they want to see the United States recognize and respect them.”

Rouhani made a similar point in an article for The Washington Post. He wrote: “For us, mastering the atomic fuel cycle and producing nuclear energy is as much a matter of diversifying energy resources as it is an expression of who we Iranians are as a nation—our claim to dignity and respect, and our rightful place in the world. Without understanding the role of identity, many of the issues we all face will remain unresolved.”

Yet, if the goal of Iran's nuclear program was truly security and independence, and not something more sinister, then the Iranian leadership has paid a huge, and probably disastrous, price.

Translation: NB