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Is Iran's Nuclear Activity An Issue Of National Sovereignty

“Is Iran’s Nuclear Activity an Issue of National Sovereignty?”

Iran's nuclear program began in the mid-1970s with help from the West. Iran was a key ally in the US strategy to contain Soviet expansion in the Middle East and avoid Soviet threats to the supply of oil to the West. According to the National Security Decision Memorandum 292 dated 22nd April 1975, the Ford administration agreed to provide Tehran "with material to be fabricated into fuel in Iran for use in its own reactors" (National Security Council). It also offered to sell the shah of Iran a reprocessing facility for extracting plutonium from nuclear reactor fuel (El-Khawas 75). Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, the power behind the deal, supported this stance because it would generate significant new business for corporate America, including Westinghouse and General Electric (Kissinger 3). The justification was that Iran needed "to prepare against the time—about fifteen years in the future—when Iranian oil production is expected to decline sharply (Linzer 46-52). However, it was after the Islamic revolution of Iran, when Mullahs declared nuclear energy against the Islamic decree and as such all nuclear activity was forbidden. The Shah’s plan to build 23 nuclear power reactors by the 1990s was regarded as grandiose, but not necessarily viewed as a “back door” to a nuclear weapons program, possibly because Iran did not then seek the technologies to enrich or reprocess its own fuel. There were a few suspicions of a nuclear weapons program, but these abated in the decade between the Iranian 1979 revolution and the end of the Iran-Iraq war, both of which brought a halt to nuclear activities. Iran’s current plans — to construct seven nuclear power plants (1000 MW each) by 2025 — are still ambitious, particularly for a state with considerable oil and gas reserves. Iran argues, as it did in the 1970s, that nuclear power is necessary for rising domestic energy consumption, while oil and gas are needed...