As Hassan Rouhani prepares to
become the next president of the Iranian Islamic Republic, it is worth
recalling the leading role he played as Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator in late
2003, when the clandestine program run by the Revolutionary Guards to produce a
nuclear weapon was halted.
The halt in the weaponization
program — as distinct from the program for uranium enrichment,
power production and civilian research — was acknowledged in
November 2007 by American intelligence services in their National Intelligence
Estimate, and confirmed by the International Atomic Energy Agency in November
2011 in a report from the director general, who wrote: ‘‘work on the AMAD
Plan [i.e. the undeclared nuclear weaponization program] was stopped rather
abruptly pursuant to a ‘halt order’ instruction issued in late 2003 by senior
Iranian officials.’’
Based on conversations that I
had at the time, as French ambassador to Tehran, with high Iranian officials
close to the matter, I firmly believe that Rouhani was the main actor in the
process. Of course, Iranians could not admit to a foreigner that such a program
ever existed, and I cannot name the officials I spoke to. But two conversations
in particular remain vivid in my mind.
The first one took place a
little after Rouhani became Iran’s top nuclear negotiator in October 2003 and
had reached an agreement about the suspension of Iranian sensitive enrichment activities
with the German, British and French foreign ministers during their joint visit
to Tehran.
A high-ranking official
confided to me that after this meeting Rouhani issued a general circular
asking all Iranian departments and agencies, civilian and military, to report
in detail about their past and ongoing nuclear activities. The official
explained to me that the main difficulty Rouhani and his team were encountering
was learning exactly what was happening in a system as secretive as Iran’s.
A few weeks after, I heard from
another official, a close friend of Rouhani: ‘‘The Rouhani team is having a
hard time ... People resist their instructions ... But they will prevail.’’ He
went on to complain how difficult it was to convince researchers to abruptly
terminate projects they had been conducting for years.
I told him of a similar case in
Europe when a country had to implement the freshly signed Chemical Weapons
Convention. The researchers were given enough time and funds to archive all the
data they had collected in order to protect their achievements for the
future. A while later, my interlocutor happily reported: ‘‘I conveyed your
message ... It worked!’’
My conviction that these
officials were talking about the weaponization program was reinforced
when the November 2011 I.A.E.A. report about the termination of that
program noted that ‘‘staff remained in place to record and document the
achievements of their respective projects.’’
Of course, closing down a
program run by the powerful Revolutionary Guards required the concurrence of
the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. There were two strong
reasons for such a move:
First, by the end of 2003,
Iran’s arch enemy, Saddam Hussein, had been eliminated by the United States,
and it had been confirmed that the Iraqi clandestine nuclear program was
stopped after Saddam’s defeat in 1991. It was the Iraqi program that had driven
the Iranians to launch a similar endeavor in the 1980s, when they were fighting
Iraq in the ‘‘War of Sacred Defense.’’ So the main motive behind Iran’s need
for a bomb was gone.
Two, in October 2003, during
the visit of the German, British and French foreign ministers, Rouhani
had agreed not only to suspend Iranian enrichment activities but also to sign
and put into immediate effect the I.A.E.A. Additional Protocol, which opened
the whole of Iranian territory to intrusive inspections. The risk of having
I.A.E.A. inspectors find nuclear military activities forbidden by the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty was now too high.
Rouhani cannot claim credit for
halting the weaponization program because officially it never existed. But the
actions I believe he took in 2003 raise hopes that as president of the Islamic
Republic he will be able to find and implement a negotiated solution for the
continuing nuclear crisis.
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