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U.S. tells Iran: become a nuclear power.

Article Excerpt
Top Democratic and Republican leaders absolutely believe that Iran is planning to develop nuclear weapons. And one of their seemingly strongest arguments involves a process of deduction. Since Iran has so much oil, they argue, why develop nuclear power?

In an op-ed commentary former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote that "for a major oil producer such as Iran, nuclear energy is a wasteful use of resources," a position later cited approvingly by the Bush administration.

But U.S. leaders are engaging in a massive case of collective amnesia, or perhaps more accurately, intentional misdirection. In the 1970s the United States encouraged Iran to develop nuclear power precisely because Iran will eventually run out of oil.

A declassified document from President Gerald Ford's administration, for which Kissinger was Secretary of State, supported Iran's push for nuclear power. The document noted that Tehran should "prepare against the time--about 15 years in the future--when Iranian oil production is expected to decline sharply." (1) The United States ultimately planned to sell billions of dollars worth of nuclear reactors, spare parts and nuclear fuel to Iran.

The Shah even periodically hinted that he wanted Iran to build nuclear weapons. In June 1974, the Shah proclaimed that Iran would have nuclear weapons "without a doubt and sooner than one would think." (2) Iranian embassy officials in France later denied the Shah made those remarks, and the Shah disowned them. But a few months later the Shah noted that Iran "has no intention of acquiring nuclear weapons but if small states began building them, then Iran might have to reconsider its policy." (3)

If an Iranian leader made such statements today, the United States and Israel would denounce them as proof of nefarious intent. They might well threaten military action if Iran didn't immediately halt its nuclear buildup. At the time, however, the comments caused no ripples in Washington or Tel Aviv because the Shah was a staunch ally of both.

Nukes and Party-Mad Dictators

In the 1970s, successive U.S. administrations were tickled pink with the Shah's regime. As far as the United States was concerned, the Shah had a stable government that was modernizing an economically and religiously backward society. True, he ran a brutal dictatorship unconstrained by elections or an independent judiciary. The National Security and Intelligence Organization (SAVAK), his secret police, was infamous for torturing and murdering political dissidents. But the Shah made sure that Iran provided a steady supply of petroleum to U.S. and other western oil companies. He had his own regional ambitions and also acted as a gendarme for the United States.

But beginning in the late 1960s, the Shah began to worry about Iran's long-term electric energy supplies. Iran had less than 500,000 electricity consumers in 1963, but those numbers swelled to over 2 million in 1976. (4) The Shah worried that Iran's oil deposits would eventually run out, and that burning petroleum for electricity would waste an important resource. He could earn far more exporting oil than using it for power generation.

Successive Republican and Democratic administrations in the United States backed the Shah's elaborate plans to make nuclear power an integral part of Iran's electrical grid, in no small part because he would buy a lot of his nuclear equipment from the USA.

The United States established Iran's first research reactor in 1967 at Tehran University. In November...

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