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For nearly three decades we have been hearing or reading dire predictions by the officials of the United States, Israel, and their allies that Iran is on the verge of developing nuclear weapons. Such “warnings” have been common, but none has come true. Now that the talk of imposing “crippling sanctions” on or even attacking Iran is heating up again, it is instructive to take a look at the history of such false prophecies.

The most astonishing aspect of the predictions about Iran’s “imminent” nuclear bomb is that, when Iran actually declared in the 1970s that it was indeed pursuing nuclear weapons, the West and Israel were absolutely silent, but Iran’s declarations since the mid-1980s that it is not seeking nuclear weapons have been greeted with disbelief and mockery.

On June 25, 1974, the Christian Science Monitor published “More Fingers on Nuclear Trigger?” The piece quoted Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as saying that Iran would have nuclear weapons “without a doubt and sooner than one would think.” In an article in the 1987 book A European Non-Proliferation Policy: Prospects and Problems, Dr. Akbar Etemad, who was the Head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran under the shah, wrote that scientists at Tehran Nuclear Research Center (TNRC) had ... >>>