![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
Abstract
Tipped off by Iran's efforts to acquire uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing technology, despite the economic illogic, the United States and its allies identified Tehran's nuclear weapons intentions early on and took effective action to stop several countries from inadvertently assisting that program. This postponed the worst-case scenario of when Iran might have the bomb, which for 15 years has been estimated at being five to ten years away. The intelligence success gave insufficient attention, however, to Iran's procurement efforts through non-state actors on the black market. Intelligence on Iran's motivations also will be important to devising effective policies. Those motivations include a need to achieve prestige, assert national pride, and secure dominance in the Gulf region. Iran's clerical leaders also see a nuclear capability as the best way to ensure their survival despite outside threats and internal opposition. At least 10 indicators of military involvement in the program have become known, reinforcing the judgment that Tehran is still intent on developing a latent nuclear weapons capability. Despite the confirmed evidence, the international community has not been able to change Iran's strategic calculations. The intelligence indicators will need to be corroborated if the world is to summon the will to put firm pressure on Iran to stop its nuclear pursuits.
Notes
1. This section is drawn from the author's article, “Assessing Iran's Nuclear Programme,” Survival 48 (Autumn 2006), pp. 5–26.
2. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), “Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” GOV/2005/67, Sept. 2, 2005, p. 7. Gchine is on the Straits of Hormuz.
3. IAEA, “Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” GOV/2004/11, Feb. 24, 2004, p. 5.
4. IAEA, “Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” GOV/2004/34, June 1, 2004, p. 5.
5. IAEA, “Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” GOV/2006/38, June 8, 2006, p. 3.
6. IAEA, “Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” GOV/2006/15, Feb. 27, 2006, p. 5.
7. Carla Anne Robbins, “As Evidence Grows of Iran's Program, U.S. Hits Quandary,” Wall Street Journal, March 18, 2005, p. A1; Michael Adler, “U.S. Briefs on Alleged Iranian Nuclear Warhead Work: Diplomats,” Agence France-Presse, Oct. 9, 2005; William J. Broad and David E. Sanger, “Relying on Computer, U.S. Seeks To Prove Iran's Nuclear Aims,” New York Times, Nov. 13, 2005, p. 1; and Dafna Linzer, “Strong Leads and Dead Ends in Nuclear Case against Iran,” Washington Post, Feb. 8, 2006, p. A1.
8. IAEA, GOV/2005/67, p. 10.
9. Paul Kerr, “Questions Surround Iran's Nuclear Program,” Arms Control Today 36 (March 2006), <www.armscontrol.org/act/2006_03/MARCH-iranquestions.asp>.
10. Linzer, “Strong Leads and Dead Ends in Nuclear Case against Iran.”
11. Linzer, “Strong Leads and Dead Ends in Nuclear Case against Iran.”
12. IAEA, GOV/2006/15, p. 8.
13. Underscoring the prominence of the pride factor, a foreign diplomat in Tehran related to the author that a house servant had asked for a wage increase on the (erroneous) grounds that Iran is now a nuclear power. Foreign diplomat, name withheld by request, communication with author, Tehran, April 2006.
14. For background, see Gregory F. Giles, “The Islamic Republic of Iran and Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Weapons,” in Peter R. Lavoy, Scott D. Sagan, and James J. Wirtz, eds., Planning the Unthinkable: How New Powers Will Use Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Weapons (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), pp. 79–103.
15. Thomas W. Wood, Matthew D. Milazzo, and Barbara A. Reichmuth, and Jeff Bedell, “The Economics of Energy Independence for Iran,” forthcoming in The Nonproliferation Review. The authors conclude that Iran's nuclear program, as currently structured, will not achieve energy independence and that investments in enrichment and other front-end fuel cycle facilities may delay energy independence by diverting capital and other resources from projects that would address pressing energy sector problems.
16. David Albright, Frans Berkhout, and William Walker, Plutonium and Highly Enriched Uranium 1996: World Inventories, Capabilities, and Policies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 359.
17. “Hashemi-Rafsanjani Speaks on the Future of the IRGC Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps,” Tehran Domestic Service, 0935 GMT, Oct. 6, 1988, translated in FBIS-NES, Oct. 7, 1988, p. 52.
18. Even authors who should know better fall into this trap. Al J. Venter, in the first page of his 2005 book on the Iranian nuclear weapons program, writes that until the NCRI “tipped off the West about Iran's activities at Natanz and Arak, “neither Washington nor London had any idea of what was going on.” Al J. Venter, Iran's Nuclear Option: Tehran's Quest for the Atom Bomb (Drexel Hill, PA: Casemate, 2005).
19. Albright et al., Plutonium and Highly Enriched Uranium 1996, p. 362.
20. Gordon Corera, Shopping for Bombs: Nuclear Proliferation, Global Insecurity, and the Rise and Fall of the A.Q. Khan Network (London: C. Hurst, 2006).
21. Gordon Corera, Shopping for Bombs: Nuclear Proliferation, Global Insecurity, and the Rise and Fall of the A.Q. Khan Network (London: C. Hurst, 2006)., p. 79.