Nuclear Iran: The Birth of an Atomic State

David Patrikarakos

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781838604233
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Arms Control
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Iranian nuclear crisis has dominated world politics since the beginning of the century, with the country now facing increasing diplomatic isolation, talk of military strikes against its nuclear facilities and a disastrous Middle East war. What is Iran's nuclear programme all about? What is its genesis? There is little real understanding of Iran's nuclear programme, in particular its history, which is now over fifty years old. This ground-breaking book is unprecedented in its scope. It argues that the history of Iran's nuclear programme and the modern history of the country itself are irretrievably linked, and only by understanding one can we understand the other. From the programme's beginnings under the Shah of Iran, the book details the central role of the US in the birth of nuclear Iran, and, through the relationship between the programme's founder and the Shah of Iran himself, the role that nuclear weapons have played in the programme since the beginning.
The author's unique access to 'the father' of Iran's nuclear programme, as well as to key scientific personnel under the early Islamic Republic and to senior Iranian and Western officials at the centre of today's negotiations, sheds new light on the uranium enrichment programme that lies at the heart of global concerns. What emerges is a programme that has, for a variety of reasons, a deep resonance to Iran. This is why it has persisted with it for over half a century in the face of such widespread opposition. Drawing on years of research across the world, David Patrikarakos has produced the most comprehensive examination of Iran's nuclear programme - in all its forms to date.

PART I

A SURGE INTO MODERNITY: THE NUCLEAR PROGRAMME 1957–2001

CHAPTER 1

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE ATOM BOMB: NUCLEAR POWER AND THE POST-WAR WORLD

In August 1945 the USA dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. ‘Fat Man’ (a 6.4 kg plutonium bomb) and ‘Little Boy’ (a 60 kg uranium bomb) obliterated almost 100,000 people in minutes and began the nuclear age. Japanese radio described the view hours after Nagasaki was hit: ‘Practically all living things, human and animal’, it reported, ‘were literally seared to death’.¹ Images of the ‘Great Mushroom Cloud’ beamed across the world were a perhaps inevitable end to the long funeral march of World War II, and united the victorious allies in agreement that the bloodshed of the previous six years must never be repeated – at least not among themselves. The world would need greater regulation and the UN was created to at least give form to this idea. The very first UN Resolution in 1946 highlighted the ‘problem’ of atomic energy and called for the ‘elimination’ of atomic weapons and all other major weapons of mass destruction.² Just over a year later, at the third session in 1948, the General Assembly again called for the atomic bomb to be outlawed.³ Nuclear power had arrived, and it had changed everything.

THE ATOMS FOR PEACE PROGRAMME

But the UN also faced nuclear power’s inherent paradox: a clean, renewable energy source that could destroy on an unprecedented scale but could also lift countries into modernity. It was simply unrealistic to try to deny this new energy to a clamouring world, particularly when its appeal was almost universal, stretching from South Asia to the Middle East to Northern Europe; it had to be harnessed, not simply abandoned.⁴ While the UN pronounced, a recalibrated world order looked to Washington for a more substantive reaction, which it supplied. At the eighth UN General Assembly in New York on 8 December 1953, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower stepped up to the podium and gave his ‘Atoms for Peace’ speech, which created the international nonproliferation regime that exists to this day. The speech outlined the extent of global anxiety over atomic energy, the response that sought to assuage it and the reasoning behind this.

Eisenhower grasped that nuclear power’s destructive potency had irretrievably changed the world, not least in its military and political spheres; and that it was an international problem. Critically, even then, he (or his advisors) understood the global threat of proliferation:⁵

…the dread secret and the fearful engines of atomic might are not ours alone …If at one time the United States possessed what might have been called a monopoly of atomic power, that monopoly ceased to exist several years ago …the knowledge now possessed by several nations will eventually be shared by others, possibly all others.

Behind the rhetoric was policy: a commitment to establish a supranational institution devoted solely to the regulation of nuclear power, realized four years later in 1957 with the establishment of the IAEA and with it the internationalization of nuclear governance:

The governments principally involved, to the extent permitted by elementary prudence, should begin now and continue to make joint contributions from their stockpiles of normal uranium and fissionable materials to an international atomic energy agency.

Each state that was able would donate nuclear materials and expertise to the Agency, which would in turn be distributed to those in need. Eisenhower had (with characteristic floridity) set out a simple bargain. The IAEA would provide assistance to any country that wanted a nuclear programme in exchange for a commitment that it would be for civil and not military use: ‘Atoms for Peace’. The speech garnered a standing ovation and almost universal acclaim. The European delegations considered it the most significant America had yet delivered at the UN,⁶ while Winston Churchill declared it ‘a great pronouncement’ that would ‘resound’ through ‘the anxious and bewildered world’.⁷ Reaction from across the Middle East was almost universally positive, too.⁸ But the Belgian delegation sounded a note of prescient disquiet, arguing the proposal was insufficient because it excluded any disarmament commitments and left the USA and the USSR with their nuclear stockpiles.⁹ As a critique of the nascent non-proliferation regime’s structural flaws it was astute; as a premonition of what would become the major grievance of the non-nuclear-weapon states – the nuclear states’ lack of disarmament – it was prophetic.

Washington’s determination to encourage peaceful atomic energy was as privately resolute as it was publicly robust. Its nuclear energy establishment was eager to show the world ‘the benign possibilities of the atom’ and proposals to help other nations set up their own isotope production and training centres, designed after the US nuclear centre at Oak Ridge, quickly occurred.¹⁰ The zeitgeist was peaceful nuclear power, and the language of international relations decried proliferation. If you wanted international acceptance, you didn’t want nuclear weapons – at least not publicly. And Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, wanted that acceptance more than anything else.

CHAPTER 2

TWO CENTURIES OF LOSS: IRAN AT THE ADVENT OF NUCLEAR POWER

At 4:30 in the afternoon on 17 September 1941, a day after his father, Reza Shah, had left Tehran in an unmarked car, a faltering Mohammad Reza Pahlavi took the imperial oath of office and became Shah of Iran. The Soviet and British legations were pointedly absent from the Parliamentary gallery set aside for the diplomatic corps, though their soldiers had been a presence in Iran for some weeks. ‘I swear to the sacred words of Allah’, said the young Shah with a strained forcefulness, ‘that I will focus all of my efforts towards safeguarding the borders of the nation, and the rights of the people’.¹ As night fell, British soldiers in the Tehran streets bellowed and squawked in triumph; some of the bolder (and drunker) ones donned Iranian army uniforms they had found in an abandoned barrack; others mimicked Reza Shah, painting his bushy moustache onto their faces with regulation army boot polish, and strutting up and down the road like peacocks.

Mohammad Reza Shah had taken ‘power’ at the height of World War II in circumstances that reflected the precariousness of both his position and Iran’s. And he nearly hadn’t taken power at all. Only 24 hours earlier, the impending Anglo-Soviet occupation of Tehran had finally convinced Reza Shah to abdicate and flee to South Africa, having persuaded his callow 21-year-old son (whom he never thought up to much anyway) to stay and take his place as they stood outside the palace gates. Meanwhile, Sir Reader Bullard, the British Ambassador to Iran, had already met with Iranian emissaries and described the Crown Prince as ‘obnoxious to His Majesty’s government’, as well as assuring them that the Soviets were also ‘unfavourably inclined’ towards him.² Efforts had been made to see if the Qajar dynasty, specifically Prince Hamid, son of the last Qajar Crown Prince, Mohammad Hassan Mirza, could be re-installed. Now a British citizen (an officer in the Royal Navy calling himself Lieutenant Drummond, no less) and completely unable to speak a word of Persian, he was considered too much of a stretch even for British Middle East policy. So Mohammad Reza Shah it was. Reluctantly.

War had come to Iran in June 1941 after Nazi Germany had launched Operation Barbarossa and invaded the USSR, breaking the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact between the two countries. Iran now became a vital strategic ‘corridor’ to supply the Soviets, who would have to engage German forces on what would become known as the War’s Eastern Front. Britain and the USSR had watched Iran and Germany become uncomfortably close since the late 1930s; they now mistrusted Reza Shah’s official position of neutrality and on 25 August 1941 launched Operation Countenance, invading Iran in order to secure the country’s oilfields and supply lines. The invasion was traumatic. The ultimate symbol of imperial machination for Iranians – the Union Jack – flew from Royal Navy ships that attacked from the Persian Gulf and from tanks rolling across the border from Iraq; simultaneously, Soviet forces descended from Transcaucasia to occupy Iran’s northern provinces.

The Allies eventually advanced on Tehran, shelling the city and causing mass terror (though few casualties). Even worse was the total implosion of the Iranian military – the pride of imperial Iran. The young Mohammad Reza Pahlavi watched soldiers desert in their hundreds, scuttling (sometimes barefoot) out of army bases, while officers made bonfires in their homes to burn their uniforms as the Allies approached; and those were the ones that didn’t flee the city disguised as women. Bombed out ruins and streets emptied by panic all left their mark on the young prince who vowed that Iran would never be so defenceless again. His army, should he ever have one, would be different.

More psychologically devastating was the knowledge that he owed his very position to the Great Powers: they had pressured his father into abdicating and then only begrudgingly ‘allowed’ him to claim the throne. The new Shah internalized two truths at his political birth: the need for his regime to be militarily strong and the ability of the Great Powers, particularly Britain and Russia, to manipulate his country at the highest levels; in fact, to do whatever they wanted in Iran. And just in case he had not, the British sent him a message (via the Egyptians) to ‘read, mark, learn and inwardly digest what had happened to his father’.³ He did.

Foreigners had decided Iran’s future – again. No country is more cursed by its own self than Iran. Its geostrategic location and natural wealth have made it a target for more powerful nations for over 200 years, and while the country never experienced direct colonialism like, say, India, it has repeatedly been subject to deleterious foreign meddling. As with many previously powerful Middle Eastern states, Iran enjoyed relative military and economic parity with its contemporaries until a sharp decline in the nineteenth century, which coincided with the rapid industrialization of the West and a new Great Power focus on the Middle East. With the advent of the British Empire, Persia (as it was then) became a gateway to London’s ‘jewel in the crown’, India, and so of vital importance to Britain, which began to compete with Russia for influence in the country and for supremacy in Central Asia as a whole – the so-called ‘Great Game’. Iran had become an arena for superpower battles, which only intensified with what came next.

In the late 1890s, reports began to circulate of great oil potential in Persia, leading a British industrialist, William Knox D’Arcy, to sign a concession with Iran’s Shah, Mozaffar al-Din, in 1901 for exclusive rights to prospect for oil in the country. Believing the concession would provide an advantage in the struggle against Moscow, British officials gave full political support to D’Arcy, while their Russian counterparts tried to block the deal and, indeed, succeeded in slowing negotiations until D’Arcy’s representative in Tehran offered the Shah an extra £5,000 to sign the agreement. The relatively paltry sum was enough. On 28 May 1901, Shah Mozzafar al-Din signed an 18-point concession granting D’Arcy exclusive rights to prospect, explore, exploit, transport and sell natural gas, petroleum, asphalt and mineral waxes over an area of 1,242,000 km² – three quarters of the country – for a 60-year period. In return, the Shah received £20,000 cash, another £20,000 worth of shares, and 16 per cent of annual net profits from the operating companies of the concession. D’Arcy subsequently ran into difficulties but eventually discovered large commercial quantities of oil in 1908 just in time for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (which later became British Petroleum) to take over the concession in 1909. Anglo-Persian became one of the most powerful oil companies in the world and an asset to British Imperial interests for the next 50 years. For Iranians, it was a shameful ‘capitulation’ to foreigners.

And it was merely the latest. In several key regards, Knox D’Arcy encapsulates the tragedy of modern Iran in the Iranian mind. Caught between the Great Powers of the day, which meddle in Iran for their own political or financial reasons, an Iranian leader is forced to sacrifice the country’s wealth and (perhaps more importantly) ‘integrity’ to the interests of foreigners through a disadvantageous deal that has the threat of the bayonet behind it: often unspoken, sometimes overt, but always there. Even before the oil concession, Iran had lost substantial territories to Russia following its defeat in the 1826–8 Russian–Persian war. Under the resulting 1828 Treaty of Turkmenchay, Iran was forced to cede most of present-day central Armenia and parts of Azerbaijan. This was in addition to all lands annexed by Russia (including modern day Daghestan and Eastern Georgia) in the Gulistan Treaty 15 years earlier. The Russians had promised Iran’s ruler, Fath Ali Shah, that if he did not sign the treaty, they would conquer Tehran in five days.

And all the while, Iran was trying to grope towards some form of political modernity. From 1905 to 1907 the Iranian people finally awoke into mass political consciousness with a ‘constitutional revolution’ that led to the establishment of Iran’s first parliament, just as the British and Russians were busy dividing the country into ‘spheres of influence’ between themselves. Almost 20 years later in 1925, Moscow and London ‘encouraged’ further political change in the country by helping end the Qajar dynasty that had ruled Iran for a century through tacit support of a military coup that replaced Ahmad Shah Qajar with a young Reza Khan (later Reza Shah), who of course fell victim to the same forces less than 20 years after that. The cycle may have seemed endless, but it always ended with Iran as the loser. Even without the trauma of a sustained occupation, this interference amounted to a colonization of Iranian politics that Mohammad Reza Shah experienced so viscerally in 1941 and that would find its inevitable apotheosis in the 1953 Anglo-American Coup that overthrew Mossadegh.

The internalization of these events (and of many others like them) would drive national policy for over 100 years. A perennial concern of successive Iranian governments has been, since the start of the nineteenth century, to achieve some form of ‘independence’ and to preserve Iran’s territory: to protect its shape on the map (‘a sitting cat’). Tehran’s diplomacy has veered from Prime Minister Mirza Taghi Khan Amir Kabir’s attempts in the mid-nineteenth century to try to balance stronger powers by offering concessions to all, to Mossadegh, who tried to deal with the superpowers by offering nothing to either, with predictable results. But the underlying narrative that fuels this spectrum of approaches has remained the same: that Iran is a weak country that must do what it can to protect itself against stronger and more aggressive ones to achieve some kind of ‘independence’ within a Western-dominated world that is historically hostile. Twinned with this is a second, attendant imperative: the need to restore the national ‘self-respect’ that has been taken away as a result of Iran’s encounter with the modern world.⁴

Iranian political rhetoric reflects both the ambivalence of Iran’s relationship with its own history and the importance of that history. It is the struggle between pride in a glorious past and shame at more recent subjugations (in which the latter predominates) that would lead Mohammad Reza Shah, in 1971, to spend millions on an extravaganza marking (with questionable historicity) 2,500 years of continuous Iranian monarchy, and almost 40 years later, Iran’s Ambassador to the IAEA to tell me, over tea, that Iran is a 5,000-year-old country, the West must not speak to it ‘in the language of animals’. Emotive it may be, but the influence of history is undeniable. And it explains much of the way both Pahlavi Iran and the Islamic Republic made and make decisions, especially nuclear ones.

So it was unsurprising that when Mohammad Reza Shah took power in 1941 after a century-long history of foreign meddling insecurity was his default emotion; and his early reign was conducted in the shadow of the occupying British and Soviets (a 1942 Life Magazine article described him as a king ‘on probation’).⁵ Perhaps paradoxically, it was also its most democratic era: a time of relative pluralism with no single figure in total control. While he did make efforts to consolidate himself, the Shah was something of a playboy; less concerned with the exercise of power than with playing tennis, going to parties and driving around Tehran very quickly. When he gradually began to engage in politics, he found himself involved in struggles against the Majlis (parliament), successive Prime Ministers (notably Ahmad Qavam) and the landed and religious classes.

The 1953 coup changed everything. Mohammad Mossadegh had been a problem for the Shah since he became Prime Minister on 28 April 1951. He had by then been a force in Iranian politics since the 1905–7 Constitutional Revolution when he had joined the Majlis aged 24. A nationalist, Mossadegh had taken a keen interest in the question of Iran’s oil from the beginning of his career and almost 40 years earlier had actually decamped to Switzerland for a year in protest at the 1919 Anglo-Persian Agreement that had guaranteed Britain access and drilling rights to Iran’s oilfields. The Shah was naturally desperate to keep the Western powers happy, which of course meant satisfying their oil thirst, and when Mossadegh became Prime Minister with a vocal agenda to nationalize Iran’s oil reserves – at this time largely controlled by the British – conflict was inevitable.

Mossadegh repeatedly offered large amounts of compensation in return for his proposed nationalization, but he would not compromise on the fundamental point of Iranian control of its own oil. While better for national sel...