Consider yourself warned – “[I]n the next few years Iran will be in position to detonate a nuclear device,” so writes Ray Takeyh, confidently, in a recent Washington Post OpEd [1]. Why? Because the Iranian government willingly informed the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that it would begin installing additional centrifuges with higher capacity to enrich uranium. [2]
Just like fertilizer can be used to increase crop yields – or make bombs – uranium is a dual use material.
Uranium enrichment has been conflated with nuclear weaponization so often that it has morphed into a virtual bogeyman bomb itself – an absolutely impermissible activity for the likes of Iran to pursue. This was not always the case. In irony
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that only history can muster, Iran’s nuclear program was kicked off in the 1950s with the full encouragement and support of the United States, under the auspices of president Dwight D Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program. [3]
In 1970, the US proposed installing 23 nuclear power plants in Iran by the year 2000. A 1976 directive by then-president Gerald Ford offered Iran a US-built reprocessing facility for extracting plutonium from nuclear reactor fuel, another key ingredient for making nuclear bombs. [4] This “nuclear fuel-cycle” infrastructure is precisely the type of technology the US is now keen to keep out of Iran.
While it would be nice if …
