U.S. Instigated Iran's Nuclear Policy in the '70s

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The Sacramento Bee
February 17, 2006

U.S. instigated Iran's nuclear policy in the '70s

The Providence Journal

By William O. Beeman

The White House staff members who are trying to prevent
Iran from developing its own nuclear-energy capacity,
and who refuse to take military action against Iran
"off the table," have conveniently forgotten that the
United States was the midwife to the Iranian nuclear
program 30 years ago.

Every aspect of Iran's current nuclear development was
approved and encouraged by Washington in the 1970s.
President Gerald Ford offered Iran a full nuclear cycle
in 1976. Moreover, the only Iranian reactor currently
about to become operative - the reactor in Bushire
(also known as Bushehr) - was started before the
Iranian revolution with U.S. approval, and cannot
produce weapons-grade plutonium.

The Bushire reactor, a "light-water" reactor, produces
Pu240, Pu241, and Pu242.

Although these isotopes could theoretically be
weaponized, the process is extremely long and
complicated, and untried. To date, no nuclear weapon
has ever been produced with plutonium produced with the
kind of reactor at Bushire.

Moreover, the plant must be completely shut down in
order for the fuel rods to be extracted - making the
process immediately open to inspection and detection.

Other possible reactors in Iran are far in the future.

The American push for Iran's nuclear development was
carried out with great enthusiasm. Prof. Ahmad Sadri,
chairman of the Department of Sociology and
Anthropology at Lake Forest College in Illinois was a
young man in Iran when the United States was touting
nuclear-power facilities to the government of the Shah
in the 1970s. He remembers seeing the American display
at the Tehran International Exhibition, which was
"dedicated to the single theme of extolling the virtues
of atomic energy and the feasibility of its transfer to
Iran."

Sadri also remembers an encounter with Octave J. Du
Temple, executive director emeritus of the American
Nuclear Society, who fondly reminisced about half a
dozen trips to Tehran in the early '70s to participate
in meetings on "transfer of nuclear technology."

Donald Weadon, an international lawyer active in Iran
during that period, points out that after 1972 and the
oil crisis, the United States was rabidly pursuing
investment opportunities in Iran, including selling
nuclear-power plants. He writes that "the Iranians were
wooed hard with the prospect of nuclear power from
trusted U.S.-backed suppliers, with the prospect of the
reservation of significant revenues from oil exports
for foreign and domestic investment."

American dissimulation on this point reveals some
interesting motives on Washington's part. Iran under
the Shah was as much of a threat to its neighbors -
including Iraq - as it might be said to be today; its
nuclear ambitions then could have been inflated and
denigrated in exactly the same way that they are being
inflated and denigrated today. But the United States
was blissfully unconcerned. The big difference today is
that Iran is now perceived to be a threat to Israel,
and this fuels much of the threat of military action.

Even those who admit that the United States helped
start Iran's nuclear development can produce only two
factors that make a difference in how Iran should be
treated today, as opposed to the '70s. The most recent
factor is President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's widely
denounced remarks attacking Israel. The second, older
factor is Iran's alleged concealment of nuclear-energy
development in the past.

President Ahmadinejad's remarks have little or no
connection with any probable action on Iran's part
regarding Israel. His pronouncements were designed
primarily to shore up support from extremist elements
among his revolutionary supporters. Moreover, he has no
control over Iran's foreign policy or its nuclear-
energy program, and his views are not embraced by
Iran's clerical leaders.

However, the second accusation - that Iran has
"regularly hidden information about its nuclear
program" - is equally specious. When the reports of the
United Nations inspection team are examined, one
realizes that much of what the United States has called
"concealment" was never concealed at all.

Many of the charges about removing topsoil and
bulldozing material at some of the research sites
describe actions that never took place. Moreover, even
if one concedes that Iran did conceal some processes,
this activity started 18 to 20 years ago, when the
revolution was still young and Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini was still alive, under completely different
political actors from those in power today.

Indeed, whatever Iran did or didn't do in the past,
today it is in compliance with the Nuclear Non-
proliferation Treaty. There would in fact be no way to
accuse Iran of anything if it were not so compliant.

Furthermore, the treaty grants all signatories the
right to pursue nuclear research for peaceful purposes
of precisely the kind in which Iran is currently
engaged.

The mantra "Iran must not get nuclear weapons" has been
repeated so often now that most people have come to
believe that Iran has them, or is getting them.

This implication is completely unproven. The tragedy
would be that in the end the United States may goad
Iran into a real nuclear-weapons program. The Iranians
may reason that since they are being punished for the
crime, they may as well commit it.
___

William O. Beeman, a Brown University professor of
anthropology and Middle East Studies, is author of "The
'Great Satan' vs. the 'Mad Mullahs': How the United
States and Iran Demonize Each Other."

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