Leaders in neighboring states are anxious about the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran
because they remain suspicious of its theocratic leaders, whom they view as extreme
and unpredictable. Israeli leaders consider an Iran with nuclear weapons a threat to
their country’s existence and have openly discussed possible military action to thwart
any Iranian nuclear weapons program, thus validating from Iran’s perspective its own
interest in having such weapons in the first place.
Iran had begun building a civilian nuclear energy program in the mid-1970s, but
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his fellow clerics halted it after coming to power
in the 1978–1979 revolution. Concerns that Iran had secretly built facilities intended
to produce nuclear weapons arose in late 2002, just as the United States accused Iraq—
Iran’s long-time enemy—of doing the same. President George W. Bush justified his
decision to launch an invasion of Iraq in March 2003 largely on intelligence claiming
that Iraq had built up massive arsenals of biological and chemical weapons and was
moving rapidly toward a nuclear weapons capability. After the invasion, a thorough
search of Iraq by U.S. intelligence agencies proved this assumption to be wrong (The
Missing WMD, p. 516).
The controversy over Iran’s weapons program flowed from claims by a banned left-
ist opposition group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, that the Tehran gov-
ernment had built secret facilities to enrich uranium, used as a fuel for nuclear weapons,
and to produce heavy water, a necessary element in producing plutonium, another fuel
for weapons. Iranian president Mohammad Khatami acknowledged that Iran had built
nuclear facilities but insisted that they were part of a program to produce electrical
power, not weapons. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN body
that monitors nuclear programs, conducted inspections of Iranian facilities in 2003 that
raised questions about the truthfulness of Khatami’s contention that Iran had no inten-
tion of building nuclear weapons. As a signatory of the Nuclear Nonproliferation
Treaty (NPT), Iran was required to report its nuclear activities to the IAEA.
After numerous negotiations between Iranian officials and European diplomats,
who had taken the lead on the issue, the IAEA’s Board of Governors on November 26,
2003, announced that it “strongly deplores Iran’s past failures” to disclose all its nuclear
activities and warned that “any further serious Iranian failures” would lead the IAEA
to consider “all options at its disposal.” This latter statement hinted at the prospect of
sending the matter to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions against Iran.
Under European pressure, Iran agreed in late 2003 to suspend some of its nuclear
activities. During the subsequent three years, Iran’s refusal to uphold that suspension
became the central focus of international negotiations that pitted Iran against a good-
cop, bad-cop team of European negotiators trying to use friendly persuasion in direct
negotiations and the United States threatening international sanctions in the background.
Iran resumed its uranium enrichment efforts in stages between late 2005 and early
- This raised the diplomatic stakes because it appeared to confirm the Bush
administration’s assertions of Iran’s determination to proceed with a weapons program
and a policy of playing for time by engaging in seemingly endless rounds of negotia-
tions with the Europeans. The issue finally reached the UN Security Council in late
March 2006. The council issued a statement pressing Iran to stop its weapons work
within thirty days, but Tehran missed that deadline and two others later in the year.
By the end of 2006, the international community’s patience with Iran was close to
running out. On December 23, the Security Council adopted Resolution 1737, which
IRAN 405