By Farhang Jahanpour
OXFORD, Sep 9 2015 (IPS)

Iran has had a nuclear programme since 1959 when the United States gave a small reactor to Tehran University as part of the “Atoms for Peace” programme during Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi’s reign.  When the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was introduced in 1968 and entered into force in 1970, Iran was one of the first signatories of that Treaty.

Farhang Jahanpour

The Shah had made extensive plans for using nuclear energy in order to free Iran’s oil deposits for export and also in order for use in petrochemical industries to receive more revenue. The Shah had planned to build 22 nuclear reactors to generate 23 million megawatts of electric power.  By 1977, the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran (AEOI) had more than 1,500 highly paid employees, with a budget of 1.3 billion dollars, making it the second biggest public economic institution in the country.

In 1975, the Gerald Ford administration in the United States expressed support for the Shah’s plan to develop a full-fledged nuclear power programme, including the construction of 23 nuclear power reactors.

President Gerald Ford has been reported as having “signed a directive in 1976 offering Tehran the chance to buy and operate a U.S.-built reprocessing facility for extracting plutonium from nuclear reactor fuel. The deal was for a complete ‘nuclear fuel cycle’.”“Iran has had a nuclear programme since 1959 when the United States gave a small reactor to Tehran University as part of the “Atoms for Peace” programme during Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi’s reign”

The Shah donated 20 million dollars to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to train Iranian nuclear experts, many of whom are still working for Iran’s Nuclear Energy Organisation, including the current head of the organisation and one of the chief negotiators, Dr. Ali Akbar Salehi.  In 1975, Iran also paid 1.18 billion dollars to buy 10 percent of Eurodif, a French company that produces enriched uranium. In return, Iran was supposed to receive enriched uranium for its reactors, a pledge that the French government reneged on after the Iranian revolution.

In 1975, Germany’s Kraftwerk Union AG started the construction of two reactors in Bushehr at an estimated cost of 3-6 billion dollars. Kraftwerk Union stopped work on the Bushehr reactors after the start of the Iranian revolution, with one reactor 50 percent complete, and the other 85 percent complete. The United States also cut off the supply of highly enriched uranium (HEU) fuel for the Tehran nuclear reactor.

After the revolution, the Islamic Republic initially stopped all work on the nuclear programme. However, in 1981, Iranian officials concluded that after having spent billions of dollars on their programme it would be foolish to dismantle it. So, they turned to the companies that had
signed agreements with Iran to complete their work. Nevertheless, as the result of political pressure by the U.S. government, all of them declined. Iran also turned to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for help to no avail.

In the late 1980s, a consortium of companies from Argentina, Germany and Spain submitted a proposal to Iran to complete the Bushehr-1 reactor, but pressure by the United States stopped the deal. In 1990, U.S. pressure also stopped Spain’s National Institute of Industry and Nuclear Equipment from completing the Bushehr project.  Later on, Iran set up a bilateral cooperation on fuel cycle-related issues with China but, under pressure from the West, China also discontinued its assistance.

Therefore, it was no secret to the West that Iran was trying to revive its nuclear programme.

Having failed to achieve results through formal and open channels, Iranian officials turned to clandestine sources, and using their own domestic capabilities.  A major mistake was to receive assistance from A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme.  In 1992, Iran invited IAEA inspectors to visit all the sites and facilities they asked. Director General Hans Blix reported that all activities observed were consistent with the peaceful use of atomic energy.

On Feb. 9, 2003, Iran’s programme and efforts to build sophisticated facilities at Natanz were revealed allegedly by Iranian dissident group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the political wing of the Mojahedin-e Khalq Organisation (MKO), for years regarded as a terrorist organisation by the West. It has been strongly suggested that MKO had received its information from Israeli intelligence sources.

President Mohammad Khatami announced the existence of the Natanz (and other) facilities on Iranian television and invited the IAEA to visit them. Then, in late February 2003, Dr. Mohammad El-Baradei, the head of IAEA, accompanied by a team of inspectors, visited Iran.  In November 2003, the IAEA reported that Iran had systematically failed to meet its obligations under its NPT safeguards agreement to report its activities to the IAEA, although it also reported no evidence of links to a nuclear weapons programme.

It should be noted that at that time Iran was only bound by the provisions of the NPT, which required the country to inform the IAEA of its nuclear activities only 180 days before introducing any nuclear material into the facility.  So, according to Iranian officials, building the Natanz facility and not declaring it was not illegal, but the West regarded it as an act of concealment and violation of the NPT’s Additional Protocol, which Iran had not signed. In any event, the scale of Iran’s nuclear activities surprised the West, and it was taken for granted that Iran was developing nuclear weapons.

In May 2003, in a bold move, the Khatami government in Iran sent a proposal to the U.S. government through Swiss diplomatic channels for a “Grand Bargain”, offering full transparency, as well as withdrawal of support for Hamas and Hezbollah, and resumption of diplomatic relations, but the offer went unanswered.

In October 2003, the United Kingdom, France and Germany undertook a diplomatic initiative to resolve the problem. The foreign ministers of the three countries and Iran issued a statement known as the Tehran Declaration, according to which Iran agreed to cooperate with the IAEA and to implement the Additional Protocol as a voluntary confidence-building measure. Iran even suspended enrichment for two years during the course of the negotiations.  On Mar. 23, 2005, Iran submitted to the EU Troika” a plan of “objective guarantees” with the following elements:

(1) Spent reactor fuels would not be reprocessed by Iran.

(2) Iran would forego plutonium production through a heavy water reactor.

(3) Only low-enriched uranium would be produced.

(4) A limit would be imposed on the enrichment level.

(5) A limit would be imposed on the amount of enrichment, restricting it to what was needed for Iran’s reactors.

(6) All the low-enriched uranium would be converted immediately to fuel rods for use in reactors (fuel rods cannot be further enriched).

(7) The number of centrifuges in Natanz would be limited, at least at the beginning.

(8) The IAEA would have permanent on-site presence at all the facilities for uranium conversion and enrichment.

In early August 2005, the EU Troika” submitted the “Framework for a Long-Term Agreement” to Iran, recognising Iran’s right to develop infrastructure for peaceful use of nuclear energy, and promised collaboration with Iran. However, as the result of extreme U.S. pressure, the EU Troika was unable to respond to Iran’s call for nuclear collaboration, and subsequently Iran withdrew its offer and resumed enrichment.

The rebuff by the West to President Khatami’s outstretched hand resulted in the weakening of the Reformist Movement and the election of hardline candidate Mahmud Ahmadinezhad as the next president of Iran in June 2005. (END/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

Newly published recollections by the former French ambassador to Iran suggest that Iran was not running a covert nuclear weapons programme that it then decided to halt in late 2003, as concluded by U.S. intelligence in 2007.

Ambassador Francois Nicoullaud recounted conversations with high-ranking Iranian officials indicating that Tehran’s then nuclear policy chief – and now president-elect – Hassan Rouhani did not know what research projects relating to nuclear weapons had been carried out over the years.“I guess that most people, [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei included, were surprised by the extent of the activities." -- former French ambassador to Iran Francois Nicoullaud

The conversations described by Nicoullaud in a Jul. 26 New York Times op-ed also portray Rouhani as having difficulty getting individual researchers to comply with an order to halt all research related to nuclear weapons.

The picture of Iranian nuclear policy in 2003 drawn by Nicoullaud is different from the one in the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that Iran had halted “its nuclear weapons program”. That conclusion implied that Iranian government leadership had organised a programme of research and development aimed at producing a nuclear weapon.

Nicoullaud recalled that a high-ranking Iranian official confided to him in late October 2003 that Rouhani had just “issued a general circular asking all Iranian departments and agencies, civilian and military, to report in detail about their past and ongoing nuclear activities.”

The conversation came immediately after Rouhani had concluded an agreement with the foreign ministers of the UK, France and Germany on Oct. 21, 2003, Nicoullaud recalled.

The same official explained that “the main difficulty Rouhani and his team were encountering was learning exactly what was happening in a system as secretive as Iran’s,” wrote Nicoullaud.

A few weeks after, the French ambassador learned from a second official, whom he described as “a close friend of Rouhani”, that Rouhani’s nuclear policy team had issued instructions to halt projects relating to nuclear weapons.

The Iranian official said the team was “having a hard time”, because, “[p]eople resist their instructions,” according to Nicoullaud. The official remarked that it was difficult to “convince researchers to abruptly terminate projects they had been conducting for years”.

In an e-mail to IPS, Nicoullaud said he did not believe the Iranian government had ever approved a nuclear weapons programme. “The first challenge for Rouhani when he took hold of the nuclear,” said Nicoullaud, “must have been to get a clear picture of what was going on in Iran in the nuclear field.”

Rouhani had been the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) since 1989 and would not only have known about but would have been involved in any government decision to establish a nuclear weapons programme.

“I guess that most people, [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei included, were surprised by the extent of the activities,” Nicoullaud told IPS.

Nicoullaud’s recollections are consistent with published evidence that nuclear weapons-related research projects had begun without any government authorisation.

Despite an Iranian policy that ruled out nuclear weapons, many Iranian officials believed that a nuclear weapons “capability” would confer benefits on Iran without actually having nuclear weapons.

But the meaning of such a capability was the subject of ongoing debate. Nasser Hadian, a well-connected Tehran University political scientist, wrote in late 2003 about two schools of thought on the option of having a “nuclear weapons capability” but not the weapons themselves. One definition of that option was that Iran should have only the capability to produce fuel for nuclear reactors, Hadian explained, while the other called for Iran to have “all the necessary elements and capabilities for producing weapons”.

That debate had evidently not been officially resolved by a government decision before Rouhani’s appointment. And in the absence of a clear statement of policy, figures associated with research centres with military and defence ministry ties began in the latter of the 1990s to create their own nuclear weapons-related research projects without the knowledge of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC).

Such projects were apparently begun during a period when the Supreme National Security Council was not exercising tight control over the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran (AEOI), the Ministry of Defence or the military industrial complex controlled by Defence Industries Organisation related to nuclear weapons.

By the mid-1990s, AEOI was already taking advantage of the lax supervision of its operations to take actions that had significant policy implications without authorisation from the SNSC.

Seyed Hossein Mousavian, then the spokesman for Iran’s nuclear negotiating team, recalls in his memoirs that in January 2004, Rouhani revealed to him that AEOI had not informed the SNSC about a policy-relevant matter as important as the purchase of the P2 centrifuge designs from the A. Q. Khan network in 1995. AEOI officials had misled him, Rohani said, by claiming that “they had found some information about P2 centrifuges on the Internet and are studying it!”

When Rouhani was named to take over as nuclear policy coordinator in early October 2003, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was demanding a full accounting by Iran of all of its nuclear activities. Rouhani’s circular to all civilian and military offices about nuclear work came soon after he had promised the IAEA that Iran would change its policy to one of full cooperation with the IAEA.

At the same time, Rouhani moved to tighten up the policy loophole that had allowed various entities to start weapons-related nuclear research.

Rouhani anticipated resistance from the bureaucratic entities that had nuclear weapons-related research projects from the beginning. He recalled in a later interview that he had told President Mohammad Khatami that he expected that there would be problems in carrying out the new nuclear policy, including “sabotage”.

The sequence of events surrounding Rouhani’s new nuclear policy indicates that he used Khamenei’s public posture that nuclear weapons were forbidden according to Islamic law to ensure compliance with the ban on such research projects.

Around the same time that Rouhani ordered the bureaucracy to report on its nuclear-related activities and to stop any research on military applications of nuclear power in late October, Khamenei gave a speech in which he said, “In contrast to the propaganda of our enemies, fundamentally we are against any production of weapons of mass destruction in any form.”

Three days later, Rouhani told students at Shahrud Industrial University that Khamenei considered nuclear weapons as religiously illegal.

That same week, in an interview with San Francisco Chronicle correspondent Robert Collier, Hossein Shariatmadari, the editor of the conservative newspaper Kayhan and an adviser to Khamenei, alluded to tensions between the Rouhani team and those researchers who were not responding to or resisting the Rouhani circular.

Khamenei was forcing those working on such projects to “admit that it is forbidden under Islam”, Shariatmadari said. He also suggested that the researchers resisting the ban had been working “clandestinely”.

After the U.S. intelligence community concluded in November 2007 estimate that Iran had halted a “nuclear weapons program”, a U.S. intelligence official said key pieces of evidence were intercepted communications from at least one senior military officer and others expressing dismay in 2007 that nuclear weapons-related work had been shut down in 2003.

But U.S. intelligence officials said nothing about what kind of work was being shut down, and revealed no further evidence that it was a “nuclear weapons program” under the control of the government.

Nicoullaud’s recollections suggest that the 2007 estimate glossed over a crucial distinction between an Iranian “nuclear weapons program” and research projects that had not been authorised or coordinated by the Iranian regime.

Nicoullaud told IPS he believes the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which controls Iran’s ballistic missile programme, was also carrying out a clandestine nuclear weapons programme. The IRGC’s own ministry had been merged, however, with the old Ministry of Defence to form a new ministry in 1989, which implies that any such clandestine programme would have necessarily involved a wider military conspiracy.

*Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan.