Views on the nuclear program of Iran vary greatly, as the nuclear program of Iran is a very contentious geopolitical issue. Uriel Abulof identifies five possible rationales behind Iran's nuclear policy: (i) Economy, mainly energy needs; (ii) Identity politics, pride and prestige; (iii) Deterrence of foreign intervention; (iv) Compellence to boost regional influence; and (v) Domestic politics, mitigating, through 'nuclear diversion' the regime's domestic crisis of legitimacy.Abulof, Uriel. 2014. "Revisiting Iran's Nuclear Rationales." International Politics 51 (3):404–415. Below are considerations of the Iranian nuclear program from various perspectives.
Iran In taking a stance that the Shah of Iran expressed decades ago in 1968, Iranians feel the country's valuable petroleum should be used for high-value products, not simple electricity generation. "Petroleum is a noble material, much too valuable to burn.... We envision producing, as soon as possible, 23,000 megawatts of electricity using nuclear plants," the Shah had previously said. Assuming pumping rates remain steady, it was estimated in 2008 that Iran had only enough oil to last "another 75 years or so". Iran also faces financial constraints, and claims that developing the excess capacity in its oil industry would cost it , excluding the cost of building the power plants.Iran and Nuclear Energy Iran Virtual Library Roger Stern from Johns Hopkins University partially concurred with this view, projecting in 2006 that due to "energy subsidies, hostility to foreign investment and inefficiencies of its [Iranian] state-planned economy", Iranian oil exports would vanish by 2014–2015, although he notes that this outcome has "no relation to 'peak oil.'" Earlier, the Gerald Ford Administration had arrived at a similar assessment, and independent studies conducted by the Foreign Affairs Select Committee of the British Parliament and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences previously confirmed that Iran has a valid economic basis for its nuclear energy program.
The Iranians believe that concerns about nuclear weapons proliferation are pretextual, and any suspension of enrichment is simply intended to ultimately deprive Iran of the right to have an independent nuclear technology:
[W]e had a suspension for two years and on and off negotiations for three ... Accusing Iran of having "the intention" of acquiring nuclear weapons has, since the early 1980s, been a tool used to deprive Iran of any nuclear technology, even a light water reactor or fuel for the American-built research reactor ... the United States and EU3 never even took the trouble of studying various Iranian proposals: they were – from the very beginning – bent on abusing this Council and the threat of referral and sanctions as an instrument of pressure to compel Iran to abandon the exercise of its NPT guaranteed right to peaceful nuclear technology....Statement by H.E. Dr. M. Javad Zarif Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran before the Security Council , 23 December 2006.
Iran says that its inalienable right to peaceful nuclear technology has been the subject of "the most extensive and intensive campaign of denial, obstruction, intervention and misinformation" and that the international community has been subject to "bias, politicized and exaggerated information" on the Iranian nuclear program and activities.
After the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Iran informed the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of its plans to restart its nuclear program using indigenously made nuclear fuel, and in 1983 the IAEA planned to provide assistance in uranium conversion (not enrichment) to Iran under its Technical Assistance Program, until the program was terminated under U.S. pressure."U.S. in 1983 stopped IAEA from helping Iran make UF6" by Mark Hibbs, Nuclear Fuel, 4 August 2003, Vol. 28, No. 16; p. 12 An IAEA report at the time stated clearly that its aim was to "contribute to the formation of local expertise and manpower needed to sustain an ambitious program in the field of nuclear power reactor technology and fuel cycle technology". Iran's enrichment program was openly discussed on national radio in the early 1980s, IranAffairs.com, 13 December 2007. and IAEA inspectors were even invited to visit Iran's uranium mines in 1992.Government Mines Uranium For What It Calls Peaceful Nuclear Use, Monday, 10 February 2003
Iran announced plans in 1995 to build a uranium hexafluoride (UF6) conversion plant at the Nuclear Technical Centre in Esfahan, with Chinese assistance. During a November 1996 IAEA visit to Isfahan, Iran informed the IAEA Department of Safeguards that it planned to build a uranium hexafluoride (UF6) conversion plant at the Nuclear Technology Center. The UF6 plant was scheduled to open after 2000, but the project was abandoned by China under pressure from the United States in October 1997.MERIA: Chinese Arms Exports to Iran, Volume 2, No. 2 – May 1998 The Iranians informed the IAEA that they would complete the project nonetheless. In 2000, the Iranians completed the uranium conversion project, using the blueprints provided to them by China, and declared the facility to the IAEA. The facility was planned with the intention of supplying uranium dioxide () as fuel to IR-40, the 40 MW heavy water reactor under construction at Arak and to meet the needs of uranium hexafluoride () for the Natanz enrichment facility.NTI Iran Profile, Nuclear Facilities.
Iran argues that it disclosed information about its programs in which "in nearly all cases, it was not any way obliged to disclose in accordance with its obligations under its safeguards agreement with the IAEA." Iran says its voluntary confidence building measures were only "reciprocated by broken promises and expanded requests" and that the EU3 "simply wanted prolonged and fruitless negotiations" to inhibit Iran from exercising its inalienable right to peaceful nuclear technology.
Iran says it has suggested to the EU3 to ask the IAEA to develop monitoring modalities for Iran's enrichment program as objective guarantees to ensure that Iran's nuclear program will remain exclusively for peaceful purposes and has also provided its own set of Western suggested modalities to the Agency.
However, Iran says it will not suspend its enrichment because "it would further be deprived from its inalienable right to work on nuclear fuel cycle, with the aim of producing required fuels for its research reactors and nuclear power plants."
Dr. William O. Beeman, Brown University's Middle East Studies program professor, who spent years in Iran, says that the Iranian nuclear issue is a unified point of their political discussion:
The Iranian side of the discourse is that they want to be known and seen as a modern, developing state with a modern, developing industrial base. The history of relations between Iran and the West for the last hundred years has included Iran's developing various kinds of industrial and technological advances to prove to themselves—and to attempt to prove to the world—that they are, in fact, that kind of country.
Stephen McGlinchey agrees, noting that the Islamic Republic of Iran "owes its existence to its identity as a reaction to the Western way of life and of doing business. To come to a conciliation with the international community, spearheaded by the American insistence that Iran must not ever have full mastery of the nuclear cycle is in essence dismantling the foundations and the pride of the Regime."
Iran also believes it has a legal right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), a right which in 2005 the U.S. and the EU-3 began to assert had been forfeited by a clandestine nuclear program that came to light in 2002.
Iranian politicians compare its treatment as a signatory to the NPT with three nuclear-armed nations that have not signed the NPT: Israel, India, and Pakistan. India and Pakistan developed an indigenous nuclear weapons capability, and it is widely suspected that Israel has as well: Israel by 1966, India by 1974, and Pakistan by 1990.
The Iranian authorities assert that they cannot simply trust the United States or Europe to provide Iran with nuclear energy fuel, and point to a long series of agreements, contracts and treaty obligations which were not fulfilled. Developing nations say they do not want to give up their rights to uranium enrichment and do not trust the United States or other nuclear countries to be consistent suppliers of the nuclear material they would need to run their power plants.
Some have argued that there is a double standard between the treatment of Iran, which was reported to the Security Council for undeclared enrichment and reprocessing activities, and South Korea, which had failed to report enrichment and reprocessing experiments but was not found in non-compliance. In South Korea's case, issues were reported by the IAEA Secretariat but the IAEA Board of Governors did not make a formal finding of non-compliance. In making its decision, the Board said "there is no indication that the undeclared experiments have continued" and observed that the "Republic of Korea has an Additional Protocol in force and that developments in the Republic of Korea demonstrate the utility of the Additional Protocol." Pierre Goldschmidt, former head of the department of safeguards at the IAEA, has called on the Board of Governors to adopt generic resolutions which would apply to all states in such circumstances and has argued "political considerations played a dominant role in the board's decision" to not make a formal finding of non-compliance.Concrete Steps to Improve the Nonproliferation Regime. Pierre Goldschmidt. Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 51, no. 1, February–March 2009, pp. 143–164
Despite its history with the West, Iran has said it would like to see a warming in relations. Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the chairman of the Expediency Council and the Assembly of Experts, has said that Iran is not seeking enmity with the U.S. and that Iran would respond to any "formal" message which contained "change in practice". Seyed Mohammad Marandi, a professor at Tehran University, has suggested that if the United States is serious about negotiating with Iran in the future then "that the United States must take concrete steps toward decreasing tension with Iran" such as reassessing Iranian sanctions, reassessing Iranian assets frozen in the United States since the Iranian revolution, and reassessing Washington's backing of Israel. Professor Hamidreza Jalaiepour, a political sociology teacher in Tehran, said if the U.S. examined these options, Iran would be likely to immediately respond in a variety of ways, including helping stabilize Afghanistan, for example.