Page 3 of
3 Debunking Iran's nuclear myth
makers By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
intelligence, John Negroponte, last
February that Iran had not "produced or acquired
the necessary fissile material for nuclear
weapons", focusing instead on Negroponte's other
statement that Iran would be capable of producing
nuclear weapons within a decade.
But, of
course, any country with mastery of the
nuclear-fuel cycle has such a capability, as
Japan's leaders have recently boasted publicly.
The question is, has Iran put forth sufficient
objective
guarantees to ensure the low
ceilings on uranium enrichment, and the answer is
a definite yes. Iran has put forth a litany of
initiatives with respect to robust IAEA monitoring
of the enrichment cycle and immediate conversion
of enriched uranium to fuel rods, which needs
serious scrutiny by the international community.
Another question: Has Iran
provided sufficient clarifications regarding its
peaceful nuclear intentions? Again the answer, in
lieu of a decree, or fatwa ,
by Iran's Supreme Leader, attached to Iran's response
to the international incentive package,
is affirmative. In a recent article in the Los
Angeles Times, Iran's representative to the UN labored both
points, reaffirming that Iran has no
nuclear-weapons intentions.
Insight from
the field of international relations is called for
here. Robert Jervis has noted what happens when
policymakers assimilate "incoming information to
their existing beliefs ... People see evidence as
less ambiguous than it is, think that their views
are steadily being confirmed, and so feel
justified in holding to them firmly." [2]
Interestingly, US government
officials have supported the IAEA's finding on the
foreign source of Iranian equipment that contained traces of highly
enriched uranium, and some of them have told Arms
Control Today that "the isotopic composition of
the recently discovered particles appears similar
to other particles that agency inspectors
previously found at other sites in Iran. Those
particles originated from imported
enrichment-related equipment." [3]
Unfortunately, the malady of self-serving
hypotheses is not exclusive to the Americans and
has infected the Europeans as well. Case in point:
a German author favoring sanctions bases his
argument on Iran's "as-yet-undiscovered secret
nuclear-weapon program". [4] But can we really
exclude the possibility that there is no such
program in existence, seeing how the virtually
identical certainty about Iraq's intentions caused
one of the worst Western policy blunders in the
modern era? In hindsight, shouldn't Western
experts and officials start paying some attention
to Iran's non-proliferation declarations, instead
of dismissing them as a ruse, as Allison has done
in his book on nuclear terrorism?
This
author in his several years of interaction with
Iranian policymakers and foreign-policy experts
has never once detected any evidence that would
corroborate the Western pundits' claim that Iran
is seeking a nuclear deterrent capability and, in
fact, can recount several intimate conversations
when important officials involved with
national-security issues emphasized the "spiraling
effect" of an Iranian nuclearization in the
Persian Gulf region that would tax the Iranian
economy and harm the country's long-term
national-security calculus.
But, alas, the
Western nuclear myth makers are too busy protecting
their vested institutional interests by
recycling their flimsy truth paradigm on Iran to
bother themselves with such minor details.
Notes 1. "In large
measure, Iran's leaders seek nuclear weapons to
deter a US attack." Quoted from Michael McFaul,
Abbas Milani and Larry Diamond, "A win-win US
strategy for dealing with Iran", Washington
Quarterly, Vol 30, No 1 (Winter 2006-07). The
authors dispense with any empirical proof for
their allegation that Iran is pursuing a
nuclear-weapon program and, what is more,
contradict themselves when calling for "a
verifiable and indefinite suspension of all
enrichment activities" and, simultaneously, for a
"limited and temporary suspension". Worse, their
justification of serious sanctions on Iran in the
absence of Iran's compliance with suspension
demands makes their pretensions of objectivity
ring hollow. 2. Robert Jervis, "Deterrence and
perception", International Security, Vol 7, No 3
(Winter 1982-83), p 21. 3. Arms Control Today,
July/August 2006, p 31. 4. Peter Rudolph,
"Sanctions against Iran: Options, problems,
perspectives", Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik
Comments 37, German Institute for International
and Security Affairs, September 2005, p 3.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the
author of After Khomeini: New Directions in
Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and
co-author of "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear
Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume
XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu.
He also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear potential
latent", Harvard International Review, and is
author of Iran's Nuclear
Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
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