Tehran is officially halting its collaboration with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in the wake of the recent US and Israeli air strikes.
“As long as the security of Iranian nuclear facilities is not ensured, Iran will suspend its cooperation with the IAEA,” parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said on state television last week, with President Masoud Pezeshkian signing off on the move this Wednesday.
The specifics of the measure, however, remain unclear.
For example, it is not yet known how it would affect the IAEA inspectors that remained in Iran throughout the 12-day conflict.
The Vienna-based UN agency hopes to gain more information on the state of the three of Iran’s top nuclear facilities — in Fordo, Isfahan and Natanz — which were targeted by the US-Israeli bombing.
It also unclear if Iran is willing to remain in the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the cornerstone of global arms control, after its facilities were hit.
“The fact that these facilities were attacked while under (IAEA) safeguards, while there is no evidence that they were being used for weaponization, is stirring the debate in Iran about whether the NPT still provides security value,” Kelsey Davenport, the Director for Nonproliferation Policy at the Arms Control Association think tank, told DW.
Ahead of the Israeli strikes on Iran, the IAEA warned that Iran was the only nation without nuclear arms that is enriching uranium at nearly weapons-grade levels and that it had enough material for several nuclear bombs. At the same time, however, the IAEA stressed it did not have “any proof of a systematic effort to move into a nuclear weapon.”
US helped Iran launch nuclear program
Tehran’s nuclear program has a long and complicated history going back to the 1950s and Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
The US-backed monarch decided to join an initiative launched by US President Dwight D. Eisenhower known as “Atoms for Peace,” which aimed to give other nations — especially developing ones — access to civilian nuclear technology. Iran took advantage of the offer to build the foundations of its own nuclear program.
Tehran also joined the IAEA in 1958, just a year after the UN agency was founded in Vienna.
The nuclear program was seen as a prestige project in Iran. The country wanted to boost its production of electricity and eventually produce its own nuclear fuel independently of foreign suppliers while also reducing the consumption of oil and gas.
In 1970, Iran signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which allows for civilian use of nuclear energy under the IAEA supervision.
After the revolution
The Islamist Revolution of 1979 left Iran in chaos.
The US stopped its deliveries of nuclear fuel to the research reactor in Tehran. In 1980, Iraq attacked Iran to take control of its oil fields, sparking an eight-year war. Western companies, including German ones, abandoned their cooperation with the Iran nuclear program.
In the early 1980s, rumors began circulating that Iraq was building a nuclear weapon.
Israel, who regarded the Saddam Hussein regime as more of a threat than the Iranian mullahs, actually used information provided by the Iranian secret services to bomb Iraq’s nuclear reactor Osirak in 1981.
After the Iran-Iraq war ended in 1988, Iran started importing technology from Pakistan, China and Russia to enrich uranium and develop its own nuclear fuel.
The regime hoped to prove that Iran was capable of pursuing high-tech projects, and its nuclear program became a symbol of the nation’s strength.
Iranian officials never denied the fact that Tehran also had the capacity to build a nuclear weapon in case of an emergency.
Akbar Etemad, the man known as the father of Iran’s nuclear program, believed that no country has the right to dictate how other nations pursue its nuclear policy, and he maintained that position even after the Islamist Revolution in 1979.
Fereydoun Abbasi, who led Iran’s atomic agency until he was killed in recent Israeli air strikes, also publicly stated that Iran needed to be able to quickly reach weapons-grade levels of enrichment if the government demands it.
Trump’s vain hope of a ‘better deal’
In 2003, IAEA inspectors and satellite surveillance indicated the possibility of Iran pursuing a secret military nuclear program.
Germany’s foreign minister at the time, Joschka Fischer, convinced his counterparts in the UK and France to start negotiations with Iran, aiming to impose stricter controls of the Iranian nuclear program with the help of the IAEA.
After 12 long years of talks, the US, China, Russia and the three European powers came to a comprehensive nuclear agreement with Iran knowns the JCPOA.
In 2018, however, US President Donald Trump took his country out of the agreement to get a “better deal.” Iran responded by gradually forgoing its commitments and began high-level uranium enrichment in 2019.
Today, Iran has about 400 kilograms (more than 880 pounds) of highly enriched uranium and many advanced centrifuges used to process the radioactive element.
Libya as a lesson to Iran
Despite the US claiming that Iran’s nuclear program has now been “obliterated,” many experts warn that Iran could rebuild its nuclear facilities.
The Iranians “retain a significant capability to restart their nuclear program and make a nuclear weapon if that’s what they want to do,” said Jeffrey Lewis, a non-proliferation expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California.
Lewis told DW that “there are many facilities that were not struck” in the bombing.
And Iran is very unlikely to compromise in the near future, said Iranian-born reporter Mehrdad Farahmand.
“Iran sees backing down in a wartime situation as weakness” and this perception is possibly the biggest obstacle to a revival of diplomacy, he said.
Looking ahead, Iran’s perspective is likely to be shaped by the examples of Libya and North Korea, according to Kelsey Davenport.
“It wouldn’t be surprising if the advisors around the supreme leader are arguing that Iran needs nuclear weapons to defend itself from further attack,” the non-proliferation expert told DW.
“Iran looks at the example of Libya, where Moammar Gadhafi gave up the country’s nuclear weapons program, returned to good standing in NPT, and then later was overthrown by Western-backed forces,” Davenport said.
In turn, North Korean abandoned the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 2003, developed its nuclear weapons, and the regime — now lead by Kim Jong Un — remains firmly in power.
This article has been translated from German