The Gathering Middle Eastern Storm: Iran’s Nuclear Program — Part Three – The American

Editor’s note: This is the third of a four-part series on Israel, Iran’s nuclear program, and the U.S. Parts One and Two examined six use-of-force crises where Israel and the U.S. were at odds. In all but one case, things ended pretty well despite divergent views. The exception was Suez, a catastrophe that determined the course of U.S. policy for six decades. Part Three turns to Iran’s original civilian nuclear program and then to the Islamic Republic’s sprint for a bomb, set against historical examples.

Iran’s Nuclear Quest

Iran’s quest to join the nuclear club can be divided into three phases: (1) its civilian nuclear program (1968–1988); (2) its military nuclear program (1988–2014); and (3) the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA (2015–2023).

On July 1, 1968, the text of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) was put out for signature. First-day signatories included the U.S. and Iran, the latter then under the rule of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. The NPT formally went into effect on March 5, 1970. There are 191 states that are party to the NPT, with five states — U.S., Russia, U.K., France, and China — labeled “nuclear weapon” due to their having manufactured and exploded a nuclear weapon or device prior to Jan. 1, 1967. The NPT incorporated, in broad brushstrokes, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s idealistic “Atoms for Peace” proposal, presented to the United Nations General Assembly on Dec. 8, 1953.

Mohammed Reza commenced a civilian nuclear program in 1975, planning to only go military if rival nations did so; in 1975, he told the New York Times: 

I am not really thinking of nuclear arms, [b]ut if 20 or 30 ridiculous little countries are going to develop nuclear weapons, then I may have to revise my policies. Even Libya is talking about trying to manufacture atomic weapons.

So long as the shah remained in power, America faced no nuclear risk. However, American policymakers abandoned the shah in 1978 as the Islamic Revolution picked up steam. Carter administration policymakers were unwilling to prop up a leader whom they believed had been installed by a CIA-backed coup in 1953. As Iran scholar Ray Takeyh, in a just-published op-ed, explains, the CIA’s role was marginal at best. In 1951, Mohammed Mossadegh, who had been appointed prime minister by the shah, wanted to nationalize British Petroleum’s extensive petroleum assets without offering compensation. Mossadegh asked President Harry Truman to broker a compromise; serial efforts by Truman and Eisenhower seeking some compensation for BP were adamantly rejected by Mossadegh. The Brits imposed an oil embargo, economically ruinous for an Iran heavily dependent on oil revenues. Mossadegh soon faced opposition across a broad spectrum of society — the military, students, merchants, and, significantly, the clergy. Eisenhower sent CIA officer Kermit Roosevelt to organize a coup, but, in fact, the military had already done the heavy lifting.

Mossadegh sought to exercise total power as if he, and not Mohammed Reza, were the supreme ruler. A vacillating shah, who had been driven into exile, was brought back and his spine stiffened by the military — not the CIA. The shah exercised his constitutional power to fire Mossadegh. These decisive actions caught the CIA flatfooted.

Upon the shah’s overthrow in February 1979, the nuclear program was suspended. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was preoccupied with seizing total power, which entailed first replacing the provisional government, a task begun in earnest on Nov. 4, 1979, by taking American diplomats hostage. The seizure rallied Iranian students to support the creation of an Islamic regime. Formally named the Islamic Republic of Iran, it was, in fact, a totalitarian clerical fascist regime. Its position was further solidified by America’s April 1980 abysmal failed hostage rescue attempt.

On Sept. 22, 1980, Iraq invaded Iran. In 1985, Saddam Hussein began firing at Iran ballistic missiles armed with chemical warheads. In Revolution & Aftermath: Forging a New Strategy toward Iran, co-authors Eric Edelman and Ray Takeyh note that upon the Aug. 20, 1988, negotiated end to the war, Khomeini decided to resurrect the shah’s nuclear program, this time with nuclear weapons in mind. The regime’s military nuclear program survived Khomeini’s 1989 passing. In 1992, Israel’s then–prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, became the first Israeli leader to publicly describe Iran’s nuclear program — then known to be a civilian program — as an “existential” threat. The Clinton administration refused to call a civilian nuclear program a threat; in this, it followed prior U.S. administrations. Israel, needless to say, stood its ground.

Per Edelman and Takeyh, throughout the 1990s, Iran simultaneously pursued domestic reform (economic reform, anti-corruption efforts — the latter exempting regime power players from investigation). Left unchallenged were Iran’s clandestine pursuit of nuclear military capability, its use of transnational terror against regime opponents, and its worldwide promotion of revolutionary Islamist ideology. In August 2002, the National Council of Resistance on Iran, the political wing of the alleged terrorist group Mujahideen e-Khalq (MeK), publicly outed Iran’s nuclear quest.

The U.S., preoccupied with the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, did nothing. In 2006, the CIA detected the construction of new underground nuclear facilities, yet, in 2007, it issued a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) asserting that Iran stopped its nuclear program in 2003. The Bush administration again did nothing. The finding by the CIA was risible: Israel had taken out clandestine nuclear reactors shielded from inspection. But a true civilian program can be verified by regular monitoring operations of the reactor; Israel could be assured that a strike was not necessary unless a sudden transition brought another Saddam or Assad to power. For such an event, Israel could rely on contingency plans. For a civilian program, Iran would have no need to bury the facility underground — and deny access to it.

A golden opportunity for the U.S. and its Western allies came in early 2009, when a manifestly rigged “election” — restricted to candidates approved by the regime — reelected Mahmoud Ahmadinejad president. Protesters took to the streets in huge numbers. American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael Rubin notes that the regime’s “elections” have always been fraudulent, as the regime “eliminate[s] more than 90 percent of the candidates.”

The Green Movement caught the regime off guard. Edelman and Takeyh show just how far off-guard it was by quoting a 2013 statement by Ali Khamenei, successor as Supreme Guide to Khomeini, admitting that the regime had been “on the edge of a cliff.” Gen. Muhammad Ali Jafari, who commanded Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps from 2007 to 2013, said that the 2009 election that spawned the Green Movement ushered in “greater danger” for the Islamic Republic than that during the Iraq–Iran War: “We went to the brink of overthrow in this sedition.”

But Khomeini had a friend in Washington, D.C., the recently sworn-in president, Barack Hussein Obama. Obama sided with the regime and deflated the 2009 protest movement. Edelman and Takeyh point out that protests resurfaced in 2018 across a broader spectrum than did the 2009 protests.

In September 2022, a renewed mass protest movement began over the regime forcing women to wear Islamic dress; it spread nationwide but currently appears in remission. This time, unlike earlier, the students, fed up with life under clerical fascism, joined the protests. Many mosques were empty as worshippers joined the street uprising. For the first time, all elements of Iranian society opposed the regime.

Failed Efforts to Stop Iran

Every American administration sought to identify genuine moderates but only succeeded in finding the pseudo-variety. The apogee of such efforts, prior to the ascension of Obama, had come during President Ronald Reagan’s second term. The 1986–87 Iran hostage negotiations ended — Reagan’s contrary intentions notwithstanding — as an arms-for-hostages swap. The upshot was that America delivered Hawk surface-to-air missiles, which Iran used against Iraq; Iran showed its gratitude by taking more Americans hostage. As was memorably put by several Washington wits, “A moderate Iranian is one who has run out of ammunition.”

A final effort came from Israel when, serially in 2010, 2011, and 2012, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to persuade his cabinet to authorize an airstrike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. But only former Prime Minister Ehud Barak — who had defeated Bibi in the 1999 election — would go along.

Life Under the JCPOA: From the…