t r u t h o u t | 02.13 / Ray McGovern
Who Will Blow the Whistle Before We Attack Iran?
Mon Feb 13, 2006 18:20
t r u t h o u t | 02.13
Ray McGovern | Who Will Blow the Whistle Before We Attack Iran?
With no perceptible demurral from inside the government, George W. Bush launched a war of aggression, defined by the Nuremberg Tribunal as "the supreme international crime." If this doesn’t qualify for whistle blowing, what does? Let us hope that administration officials, or analysts — or both — will find the courage to speak out loudly, and early enough to prevent the "disconnected-from-reality" cabal in the Bush administration from getting us into an unnecessary war with Iran, writes Ray McGovern.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/021306A.shtml
=================================================
August 31, 1993 in Information, Analysis and News : Security of Israel : Security of Israel-- General Printer friendly version E-Mail this article Subscribe to the Article Digest
Iran: Ever More Threatening
Kenneth R. Timmerman
As Iran struggles to recover from its devastating eight-year war with Iraq, it will pose an ever-growing threat to the security interests of the United States and its allies. The military threat is posed by terrorism, a long-range conventional strike capability, and the development of weapons of mass destruction. The economic threat is posed by attempts to manipulate the price of oil. The political threat is posed by Iran’s subversion of regimes and governments friendly to the United States.
This essay will concentrate on two aspects of the military threat Iran has already begun to pose to the West, Israel, and the moderate Arab regimes of the Middle East: Iran’s conventional military buildup and its development of weapons of mass destruction, especially nuclear weapons.
There are underlying factors that will move Iran increasingly toward confrontation with the U.S. Iran is the only nation in the Middle East that has made it a point to state its hostility to the recent declaration of principles between Israel and the PLO. Iran’s leaders have announced that they will do their best to subvert the agreement and have openly called on their proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Sudan, and elsewhere to violently oppose the implementation of the agreement and to assassinate those in favor of peace. The recipe for an increase in Iranian-sponsored terrorism is clearly there. I think the prospect of accommodation between the Arabs and Israel is one of the factors that will contribute to Iran’s hostility to the United States and to Israel in the future.
However, Iran is not only opposed to Israel’s existence as a viable nation in the Middle East. It is also opposed to a U.S. presence in the region, whether that presence is military, economic or even political. On July 14 of this year, Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Khameini, once again excited crowds of Iranian youths with the cry of “Death to America.” Iran would “defeat the United States in any standoff,” he said, “and would not stray from its Islamic revolutionary path. Today the slogan ‘Death to America’ belongs to each and every Iranian.”
After 14 years of such calls for bloodshed, one might assume that Iran’s revolutionaries would have tired of such worn-out slogans. In fact, they have not. Fomenting hatred for perceived enemies of the revolution is one of the hallmarks of this regime. It is reminiscent of the scare tactics used by other dictatorships, past and present, to stir up hatred of a scapegoat for all the woes of the people.
Economic Downturn
Iran’s hostility toward Israel and toward the United States is likely to grow as Iran’s economic situation continues to deteriorate. Today, the unemployment level is more than 40 percent. The official inflation rate is at an annual 25 percent, and that is a very low estimate. Although the Rafsanjani government is desperately tinkering with the economy in an attempt to win support from the bazaaris, the merchant class, the pauperization of the Iranian middle class and the rural population has become widespread and perhaps irreversible.
Over the past four years, Iran has borrowed close to $30 billion on foreign financial markets, ostensibly to pay for reconstruction and development projects. The money has come from France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Japan, and the World Bank. While some of this money has gone into infrastructure and heavy manufacturing, at least $10 billion, or $2.5 billion per year, has been spent to purchase new military hardware and to build weapons plants, according to public statements by Ali Akbar Torkan, who, until recently, served as Iran’s defense minister.
Iran can ill afford this military effort. Last year, Iran announced that it could no longer meet repayments on its short and mid-term foreign debt. Iran turned to the World Bank for relief. Its loan requests were vigorously and openly opposed by U.S. Secretary of State Christopher, who labeled Iran an international outlaw at a congressional hearing. This led both France and Germany to temporarily suspend government export credits for Iran. Unfortunately, these two governments have since withdrawn from this position.
Western Europe continues to lend Iran money because, contrary to popular belief, Iran is not bankrupt. The French government counsels businesses at export promotion seminars to avoid long-term contracts with Iran because of the high risk of non-payment. However, the French government continues to endorse two-year and three-year contracts with Iran as long as they are pegged to oil or similar tangible goods. To further sweeten the pot, several European governments provide export guarantees for short-term business deals with states such as Iran. Two such programs are the French COFACE guarantees and the German HERMES guarantees.
Despite this, the administration failed to win support from our allies, and in March, the World Bank approved three loans to Iran worth a total of $458 million. The message was clear: Western greed was once again getting the better of strategic good sense. We saw the same thing happen in Iraq.
Conventional Buildup
The huge arsenal of modern jet fighters, main battle tanks, and self-propelled artillery that Iran purchased from the West in the 1970s was virtually wiped out during its eight-year war with Iraq. From 600 combat aircraft before the war, Iran ended up with only a few dozen. A force of 3,400 tanks was reduced to a mere 700. Scarce resources forced Iran’s leaders to focus their procurement efforts after the war, from 1988 to the present, on a few key areas. Iran has abandoned, for the near term at least, any hope of rebuilding the arsenal that had existed before the revolution.
Particular emphasis has been given to standoff weapons, long-range strike aircraft and ballistic missiles, and to anti-shipping weapons. Iran has purchased fast-attack boats and hundreds of Silkworm anti-ship missiles from China and is rumored to have received Sunburst cruise missiles from the Ukraine. A program to build a military reconnaissance drone is now underway in cooperation with a German company. I have seen plans of this particular drone. It is as sophisticated and has a much longer range than the Pioneer drone used in Israel. Su-24 Fencer and Su-22N Backfire bombers, long-range bombers that used to be in the Soviet air forces, have also been delivered to Iran by the Russian federation.
Russia has delivered in recent months two Kilo-class submarines with a third on order and an option on a fourth. These ultra-quiet diesel-powered submarines are based just outside the Straits of Hormuz, in the port of Jasq, and would be the perfect weapon if Iran ever chose to close the straits to international shipping. They could also be used in conjunction with the Iranian navy’s Cosmos minisubs, purchased from a private Italian shipyard, to infiltrate Spetsnaz-type sabotage units into Saudi Arabia, crippling oil installations, power plants and desalinization plants. The shift from U.S.-standard to Soviet-standard weapon systems has been accompanied by a shift in responsibility from the regular armed forces, which were mostly U.S.-trained, to the more ideological revolutionary guards, whose specialists have been trained in North Korea, Cuba, China, and the former Soviet Union.
To summarize: Iran is acquiring a select arsenal of modern weaponry particularly suited to attacking naval forces in the Gulf or long-range targets such as Israel. And, the Iranian armed forces are being led by an increasingly politicized radical Islamic structure. I believe this adds up to a recipe for disaster.
The Nuclear Buildup
If a radical Iran armed with Backfire bombers and ballistic missiles presents a challenge, an Iran capable of packing nuclear warheads onto these delivery systems is a potential nightmare. For instance, the Washington Post noted in late September that in the draft presidential decision directive on nonproliferation now under discussion by the Clinton Administration, only Iran was singled out because of its WMD (weapons of mass destruction)programs. Yet it has taken time for even the nonproliferation establishment to wake up to Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, for its part, still does not recognize the threat.
Ten nuclear facilities in Iran were described in some detail in a study released last year by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. Only six of the facilities have been visited – not inspected – by the IAEA. The Vienna-based nuclear watchdog organization continues to provide technical assistance and financial aid to so-called peaceful nuclear research in Iran, just as it did in Iraq. One detail, which I recently discovered, that is indicative of what goes on at the IAEA is a $500,000 grant the agency gave the Iraqi government in 1989 for cyclotron research. In fact, evidence suggests that the core of the Iraqi calutron uranium enrichment program was funded by the IAEA.
The experience in Iraq should have shown us that we in the West will consistently underestimate the technological capabilities of the Third World. Our cultural blinders are particularly cumbersome when it comes to nuclear weapons development. We tend to forget that our own Manhattan Project was developed with what today would be dismissed as Third World technology. As one who had warned early on about Iraq’s nuclear attentions – I first wrote about the renewed Iraqi program in 1985 – the IAEA consulted me after Desert Storm about Iraq’s nuclear facilities, purchases, procurement networks and key individuals. I spent long hours discussing the Iraqi program with the chief IAEA inspector, Professor Maurizio Zifferero.
I was stunned one afternoon in Vienna when Dr. Zifferero mused about the cultural incompatibility of countries such as Iraq and Iran with the scientific rigor needed to make an atomic bomb. The Iranians, he said, would never be capable of doing it. The Iraqis were years away from assembling an atomic bomb, he believed, when their program was crippled in Operation Desert Storm. In fact, he said he could foresee the day in the not-so-distant future when the IAEA could once again approve the sale of a nuclear research reactor to Iraq.
The Ziffereros of this world – and there are many of them – will continue to believe that Iran is incapable of developing a nuclear weapon until the ayatollahs have actually exploded a device; and when that happens, they will probably say it was a fluke. I believe, on the contrary, that all the signs of a full-blown nuclear weapons program are there, and have been there for anyone who truly cared to discover them. One of the first clues appeared in the foreign edition of Tehran’s Keyan newspaper on November 6, 1985, when the government ran an announcement inviting all Iranian nuclear scientists who fled during the early years of the revolution to return home, all expenses paid, to attend a nuclear science and technology conference held in March 1986 in Bushir, on the Persian Gulf. During his speech to the conferees at a subsequent session of this same conference in 1988, Ali Akbar Rafsanjani exhorted the exiles to return home permanently. “If you do not serve Iran, who will you serve?” Former Soviet weapons designers are migrating to countries, such as Iran, willing to pay for their work. There are rumored to be in Iraq and Libya. There was a team of 60 ballistic missile scientists enroute to North Korea that was turned back at the last minute at the airport in Moscow in December 1992. This indicates a gradual flight – a brain drain – from the Soviet nuclear archipelago to rogue regimes, to rogue states.
There are many things we do not know about the Iranian nuclear program, but we do know something about special items they have sought to procure abroad. High-speed computers were such a top priority that the Iranians attempted, on several occasions, to acquire them through smuggling rings in California. They have also tried to acquire mass spectrometers, high-powered oscilloscopes and gas chromotography equipment, all of which are useful and necessary for uranium enrichment. We also know that Iran has spent considerable money in the late 1980s to develop its own uranium mines in the eastern part of the country. Today, they have a large supply of unsafeguarded uranium which can be used for enrichment purposes. In 1991, Iran purchased a cyclotron accelerator from the Ion Beam Applications Company in Belgium. This also can be used in uranium enrichment.
China has become a critical partner for Iran in the nuclear sphere. In 1985, the Chinese supplied a subcritical training reactor that was set up in a new nuclear research center in Isfahan. In 1987, the Chinese supplied a small calutron, again, for uranium enrichment. In 1991, the Chinese broke ground on a plutonium reactor in Isfahan. Uranium fuel cycle facilities have also been built there.
As with their missile sales to Pakistan and Syria, the Chinese have been totally unresponsive to U.S. concerns over their nuclear activities in Iran. I believe we have only seen the beginnings of this particular program. Will the Chinese supply Iran, as they did Pakistan, with the blueprints of a workable nuclear device? Are Chinese technicians currently working in Iranian nuclear sites engaged in training Iran’s future bomb designers? Have they established secret uranium enrichment plants? The Revolutionary Guards are also central to the nuclear weapons program. They control the facility at Ma‘allem Kelayeh, for instance, which is believed to house uranium enrichment centrifuges. The IAEA claims it visited this site in February of 1992 and found nothing there. However, the coordinates they went to did not match the location of the actual site. Export records show that companies in France and Italy have supplied special equipment to this plant. We know where the plant is and we know that the IAEA went to a different place, and yet the IAEA insists that they went to the right place and have given Iran a clean bill of health.
The Revolutionary Guards run the Sharif Technical University, which was established in Tehran in the mid 1980s to train technicians for various weapons programs. The Sharif facility and other so-called universities in Iran have been identified as procurement fronts for their nuclear weapons program. Last year alone, Iran attempted to sign nuclear deals with India, Argentina, France and Germany. This year, major contracts for nuclear power plants were signed with China and the Russian federation. Iran claims it is legitimately seeking to meet its growing energy needs. If this were truly the case, a cheaper and easier solution is to make better use of Iran’s vast hydroelectric potential and to build fossil fuel generating plants, in particular natural gas-driven plants. Iran has refused to do so.
What Can Be Done?
The United States must apply pressure on Germany, France, Italy, and other sources to cease supplying Iran with the technology necessary for their unconventional weapons programs. The State Department has consistently been unwilling to do this. Congress has its own mea
Ray McGovern | Who Will Blow the Whistle Before We Attack Iran?
With no perceptible demurral from inside the government, George W. Bush launched a war of aggression, defined by the Nuremberg Tribunal as "the supreme international crime." If this doesn’t qualify for whistle blowing, what does? Let us hope that administration officials, or analysts — or both — will find the courage to speak out loudly, and early enough to prevent the "disconnected-from-reality" cabal in the Bush administration from getting us into an unnecessary war with Iran, writes Ray McGovern.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/021306A.shtml
=================================================
August 31, 1993 in Information, Analysis and News : Security of Israel : Security of Israel-- General Printer friendly version E-Mail this article Subscribe to the Article Digest
Iran: Ever More Threatening
Kenneth R. Timmerman
As Iran struggles to recover from its devastating eight-year war with Iraq, it will pose an ever-growing threat to the security interests of the United States and its allies. The military threat is posed by terrorism, a long-range conventional strike capability, and the development of weapons of mass destruction. The economic threat is posed by attempts to manipulate the price of oil. The political threat is posed by Iran’s subversion of regimes and governments friendly to the United States.
This essay will concentrate on two aspects of the military threat Iran has already begun to pose to the West, Israel, and the moderate Arab regimes of the Middle East: Iran’s conventional military buildup and its development of weapons of mass destruction, especially nuclear weapons.
There are underlying factors that will move Iran increasingly toward confrontation with the U.S. Iran is the only nation in the Middle East that has made it a point to state its hostility to the recent declaration of principles between Israel and the PLO. Iran’s leaders have announced that they will do their best to subvert the agreement and have openly called on their proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Sudan, and elsewhere to violently oppose the implementation of the agreement and to assassinate those in favor of peace. The recipe for an increase in Iranian-sponsored terrorism is clearly there. I think the prospect of accommodation between the Arabs and Israel is one of the factors that will contribute to Iran’s hostility to the United States and to Israel in the future.
However, Iran is not only opposed to Israel’s existence as a viable nation in the Middle East. It is also opposed to a U.S. presence in the region, whether that presence is military, economic or even political. On July 14 of this year, Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Khameini, once again excited crowds of Iranian youths with the cry of “Death to America.” Iran would “defeat the United States in any standoff,” he said, “and would not stray from its Islamic revolutionary path. Today the slogan ‘Death to America’ belongs to each and every Iranian.”
After 14 years of such calls for bloodshed, one might assume that Iran’s revolutionaries would have tired of such worn-out slogans. In fact, they have not. Fomenting hatred for perceived enemies of the revolution is one of the hallmarks of this regime. It is reminiscent of the scare tactics used by other dictatorships, past and present, to stir up hatred of a scapegoat for all the woes of the people.
Economic Downturn
Iran’s hostility toward Israel and toward the United States is likely to grow as Iran’s economic situation continues to deteriorate. Today, the unemployment level is more than 40 percent. The official inflation rate is at an annual 25 percent, and that is a very low estimate. Although the Rafsanjani government is desperately tinkering with the economy in an attempt to win support from the bazaaris, the merchant class, the pauperization of the Iranian middle class and the rural population has become widespread and perhaps irreversible.
Over the past four years, Iran has borrowed close to $30 billion on foreign financial markets, ostensibly to pay for reconstruction and development projects. The money has come from France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Japan, and the World Bank. While some of this money has gone into infrastructure and heavy manufacturing, at least $10 billion, or $2.5 billion per year, has been spent to purchase new military hardware and to build weapons plants, according to public statements by Ali Akbar Torkan, who, until recently, served as Iran’s defense minister.
Iran can ill afford this military effort. Last year, Iran announced that it could no longer meet repayments on its short and mid-term foreign debt. Iran turned to the World Bank for relief. Its loan requests were vigorously and openly opposed by U.S. Secretary of State Christopher, who labeled Iran an international outlaw at a congressional hearing. This led both France and Germany to temporarily suspend government export credits for Iran. Unfortunately, these two governments have since withdrawn from this position.
Western Europe continues to lend Iran money because, contrary to popular belief, Iran is not bankrupt. The French government counsels businesses at export promotion seminars to avoid long-term contracts with Iran because of the high risk of non-payment. However, the French government continues to endorse two-year and three-year contracts with Iran as long as they are pegged to oil or similar tangible goods. To further sweeten the pot, several European governments provide export guarantees for short-term business deals with states such as Iran. Two such programs are the French COFACE guarantees and the German HERMES guarantees.
Despite this, the administration failed to win support from our allies, and in March, the World Bank approved three loans to Iran worth a total of $458 million. The message was clear: Western greed was once again getting the better of strategic good sense. We saw the same thing happen in Iraq.
Conventional Buildup
The huge arsenal of modern jet fighters, main battle tanks, and self-propelled artillery that Iran purchased from the West in the 1970s was virtually wiped out during its eight-year war with Iraq. From 600 combat aircraft before the war, Iran ended up with only a few dozen. A force of 3,400 tanks was reduced to a mere 700. Scarce resources forced Iran’s leaders to focus their procurement efforts after the war, from 1988 to the present, on a few key areas. Iran has abandoned, for the near term at least, any hope of rebuilding the arsenal that had existed before the revolution.
Particular emphasis has been given to standoff weapons, long-range strike aircraft and ballistic missiles, and to anti-shipping weapons. Iran has purchased fast-attack boats and hundreds of Silkworm anti-ship missiles from China and is rumored to have received Sunburst cruise missiles from the Ukraine. A program to build a military reconnaissance drone is now underway in cooperation with a German company. I have seen plans of this particular drone. It is as sophisticated and has a much longer range than the Pioneer drone used in Israel. Su-24 Fencer and Su-22N Backfire bombers, long-range bombers that used to be in the Soviet air forces, have also been delivered to Iran by the Russian federation.
Russia has delivered in recent months two Kilo-class submarines with a third on order and an option on a fourth. These ultra-quiet diesel-powered submarines are based just outside the Straits of Hormuz, in the port of Jasq, and would be the perfect weapon if Iran ever chose to close the straits to international shipping. They could also be used in conjunction with the Iranian navy’s Cosmos minisubs, purchased from a private Italian shipyard, to infiltrate Spetsnaz-type sabotage units into Saudi Arabia, crippling oil installations, power plants and desalinization plants. The shift from U.S.-standard to Soviet-standard weapon systems has been accompanied by a shift in responsibility from the regular armed forces, which were mostly U.S.-trained, to the more ideological revolutionary guards, whose specialists have been trained in North Korea, Cuba, China, and the former Soviet Union.
To summarize: Iran is acquiring a select arsenal of modern weaponry particularly suited to attacking naval forces in the Gulf or long-range targets such as Israel. And, the Iranian armed forces are being led by an increasingly politicized radical Islamic structure. I believe this adds up to a recipe for disaster.
The Nuclear Buildup
If a radical Iran armed with Backfire bombers and ballistic missiles presents a challenge, an Iran capable of packing nuclear warheads onto these delivery systems is a potential nightmare. For instance, the Washington Post noted in late September that in the draft presidential decision directive on nonproliferation now under discussion by the Clinton Administration, only Iran was singled out because of its WMD (weapons of mass destruction)programs. Yet it has taken time for even the nonproliferation establishment to wake up to Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, for its part, still does not recognize the threat.
Ten nuclear facilities in Iran were described in some detail in a study released last year by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. Only six of the facilities have been visited – not inspected – by the IAEA. The Vienna-based nuclear watchdog organization continues to provide technical assistance and financial aid to so-called peaceful nuclear research in Iran, just as it did in Iraq. One detail, which I recently discovered, that is indicative of what goes on at the IAEA is a $500,000 grant the agency gave the Iraqi government in 1989 for cyclotron research. In fact, evidence suggests that the core of the Iraqi calutron uranium enrichment program was funded by the IAEA.
The experience in Iraq should have shown us that we in the West will consistently underestimate the technological capabilities of the Third World. Our cultural blinders are particularly cumbersome when it comes to nuclear weapons development. We tend to forget that our own Manhattan Project was developed with what today would be dismissed as Third World technology. As one who had warned early on about Iraq’s nuclear attentions – I first wrote about the renewed Iraqi program in 1985 – the IAEA consulted me after Desert Storm about Iraq’s nuclear facilities, purchases, procurement networks and key individuals. I spent long hours discussing the Iraqi program with the chief IAEA inspector, Professor Maurizio Zifferero.
I was stunned one afternoon in Vienna when Dr. Zifferero mused about the cultural incompatibility of countries such as Iraq and Iran with the scientific rigor needed to make an atomic bomb. The Iranians, he said, would never be capable of doing it. The Iraqis were years away from assembling an atomic bomb, he believed, when their program was crippled in Operation Desert Storm. In fact, he said he could foresee the day in the not-so-distant future when the IAEA could once again approve the sale of a nuclear research reactor to Iraq.
The Ziffereros of this world – and there are many of them – will continue to believe that Iran is incapable of developing a nuclear weapon until the ayatollahs have actually exploded a device; and when that happens, they will probably say it was a fluke. I believe, on the contrary, that all the signs of a full-blown nuclear weapons program are there, and have been there for anyone who truly cared to discover them. One of the first clues appeared in the foreign edition of Tehran’s Keyan newspaper on November 6, 1985, when the government ran an announcement inviting all Iranian nuclear scientists who fled during the early years of the revolution to return home, all expenses paid, to attend a nuclear science and technology conference held in March 1986 in Bushir, on the Persian Gulf. During his speech to the conferees at a subsequent session of this same conference in 1988, Ali Akbar Rafsanjani exhorted the exiles to return home permanently. “If you do not serve Iran, who will you serve?” Former Soviet weapons designers are migrating to countries, such as Iran, willing to pay for their work. There are rumored to be in Iraq and Libya. There was a team of 60 ballistic missile scientists enroute to North Korea that was turned back at the last minute at the airport in Moscow in December 1992. This indicates a gradual flight – a brain drain – from the Soviet nuclear archipelago to rogue regimes, to rogue states.
There are many things we do not know about the Iranian nuclear program, but we do know something about special items they have sought to procure abroad. High-speed computers were such a top priority that the Iranians attempted, on several occasions, to acquire them through smuggling rings in California. They have also tried to acquire mass spectrometers, high-powered oscilloscopes and gas chromotography equipment, all of which are useful and necessary for uranium enrichment. We also know that Iran has spent considerable money in the late 1980s to develop its own uranium mines in the eastern part of the country. Today, they have a large supply of unsafeguarded uranium which can be used for enrichment purposes. In 1991, Iran purchased a cyclotron accelerator from the Ion Beam Applications Company in Belgium. This also can be used in uranium enrichment.
China has become a critical partner for Iran in the nuclear sphere. In 1985, the Chinese supplied a subcritical training reactor that was set up in a new nuclear research center in Isfahan. In 1987, the Chinese supplied a small calutron, again, for uranium enrichment. In 1991, the Chinese broke ground on a plutonium reactor in Isfahan. Uranium fuel cycle facilities have also been built there.
As with their missile sales to Pakistan and Syria, the Chinese have been totally unresponsive to U.S. concerns over their nuclear activities in Iran. I believe we have only seen the beginnings of this particular program. Will the Chinese supply Iran, as they did Pakistan, with the blueprints of a workable nuclear device? Are Chinese technicians currently working in Iranian nuclear sites engaged in training Iran’s future bomb designers? Have they established secret uranium enrichment plants? The Revolutionary Guards are also central to the nuclear weapons program. They control the facility at Ma‘allem Kelayeh, for instance, which is believed to house uranium enrichment centrifuges. The IAEA claims it visited this site in February of 1992 and found nothing there. However, the coordinates they went to did not match the location of the actual site. Export records show that companies in France and Italy have supplied special equipment to this plant. We know where the plant is and we know that the IAEA went to a different place, and yet the IAEA insists that they went to the right place and have given Iran a clean bill of health.
The Revolutionary Guards run the Sharif Technical University, which was established in Tehran in the mid 1980s to train technicians for various weapons programs. The Sharif facility and other so-called universities in Iran have been identified as procurement fronts for their nuclear weapons program. Last year alone, Iran attempted to sign nuclear deals with India, Argentina, France and Germany. This year, major contracts for nuclear power plants were signed with China and the Russian federation. Iran claims it is legitimately seeking to meet its growing energy needs. If this were truly the case, a cheaper and easier solution is to make better use of Iran’s vast hydroelectric potential and to build fossil fuel generating plants, in particular natural gas-driven plants. Iran has refused to do so.
What Can Be Done?
The United States must apply pressure on Germany, France, Italy, and other sources to cease supplying Iran with the technology necessary for their unconventional weapons programs. The State Department has consistently been unwilling to do this. Congress has its own mea
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