(American Interest) Josef Joffe - Our good friend, the Shah, installed a small U.S.-supplied research reactor in 1967. Seven years later, he ordered four power reactors from Germany's Siemens/AEG. He then proceeded to put together a complete fuel cycle - in a country that was awash in oil. In 1974, he confided to Le Monde: "Sooner than is believed," Iran will have "a nuclear bomb." After the Shah fell and the Khomeinists took over, revolutionary fervor merely compounded the logic of Reza Pahlavi's realpolitik. Iraq attacked Iran in 1980 in a war that caused a million deaths by its end in 1988. Nukes were to deter Saddam Hussein once and for all. In the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the removal of Saddam, the Khomeinists found an even better reason to accelerate their nuclear arms program. Now the purpose was to deter the U.S. and intimidate Israel. As a geopolitical bonus, the nukes would also extend an umbrella over Iran's revolutionary expansionism. The point is that nuclear weapons are useful. What the Shah began, Allah's revolutionaries have been assiduously perfecting. So why ever give up such a valuable asset - one that provides both life insurance and an umbrella for domination? The writer, a fellow of Stanford's Hoover Institution, serves on the editorial council of the German weekly Die Zeit.
2019-07-31 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive