President Gerald R. Ford and the Shah of Iran confer over a map during the Shah's May 1975 visit to Washington, D.C. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger sits in the background. (Photo courtesy of Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library)During the 1970s the Shah of Iran argued, like current Iranian leaders today, for a nuclear energy capability on the basis of national "rights," while the Ford and Carter administrations worried about nuclear weapons possibilities, according to newly declassified documents published today by the National Security Archive for the first time. Uranium enrichment capability is now the major point of controversy between Tehran and the world community, while during the 1970s Washington's greatest concern was that Iran sought a capability to produce plutonium, but in both instances the implication was that a nuclear weapons option might not be far away.
The documents, obtained by the Archive through a mandatory review request, show that two U.S. presidents dealing with the Shah of Iran, Ford and Carter, put concerns over proliferation and the Shah's possible desire to build a nuclear bomb front and center when they approved negotiating positions for a deal to sell nuclear reactors to Iran. While Iranian officials argued then, as they do today, that Iran had "rights" under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to develop nuclear technology, the U.S. government successfully sought an agreement that put nonproliferation controls over U.S.-supplied nuclear material.
The 1979 Iranian Revolution derailed the agreement, but the approach that the Ford and Carter administrations took shows significant continuity with contemporary U.S. and world policy, which holds that Iran must not use its technological capabilities to produce nuclear weapons. The documents contradict the 2005 claim by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that non-proliferation was not an issue in the 1970s negotiations; this was a "commercial transaction," Kissinger told The Washington Post.
The 1970s nuclear negotiations have other parallels with the current situation. The Bush administration has raised questions about Iranian claims that its interest in a nuclear energy program are peaceful, while the declassified record indicates that U.S. policy-makers during the 1970s were also skeptical of, but ultimately willing to accept, the Shah's similar claims, as long as a nuclear agreement with Iran restricted its freedom of action in the nuclear field. Significantly, the Bush administration also disparages Iran's assertion that it needs to develop alternative fuels in anticipation of the eventual decline in the country's extensive oil reserves. But the Shah and his government made the exact same statements in the 1970s.
The record also shows that the Shah's regime and the current Iranian government have made the same claims that their pursuit of nuclear technology was an inherent national entitlement. No country "has a right to dictate nuclear policy to another," said the Shah's chief atomic energy official in 1977.
Among the disclosures in the new documents:
* In 1974 Department of State officials wrote that if the Shah's dictatorship collapsed and Iran became unstable, "domestic dissidents or foreign terrorists might easily be able to seize any special nuclear material stored in Iran for use in bombs." Moreover, "an aggressive successor to the Shah might consider nuclear weapons the final item needed to establish Iran's complete military dominance of the region."
* According to national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, the Ford administration hoped that the Shah would commit himself to a "major act of nuclear statesmanship: namely, to set a world example by foregoing national reprocessing."
* When officials from Oak Ridge National Laboratory received briefings on the planned Esfehan Nuclear Technology Center (ENTEC), they concluded that the "bears watching" because "unusually large" size of the facility "makes it theoretically possible to produce weapons-grade material (plutonium)" and the ENTEC plans include a "large hot lab," the first step toward reprocessing.
* Questioning U.S. efforts to restrict Tehran's freedom of action, Iranian officials argued that "Iran should have full right to decide whether to reprocess" and the "right to effective control of the management and operation of … reprocessing facilities."
* By the summer of 1978, Tehran and Washington had overcome differences and agreed to a nuclear pact that met U.S. concerns and the Shah's interest in buying reactors, but the agreement closely restricted Iran's ability to produce plutonium or any other nuclear weapons fuel using U.S. supplied material without Washington's "agreement."
Drawing on the new documents, National Security Archive senior analyst William Burr has written an article to give perspective to the nuclear talks: "A Brief History of U.S.-Iranian Nuclear Negotiations," now appearing on-line in the January-February 2009 issue of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. While the documents available so far illuminate the negotiations, more needs to be learned from U.S. government files. To a great extent the intelligence side of the story remains an unknown. So far, the Central Intelligence Agency has denied all documents gleaned from the Archive's mandatory review request, although they are presently under appeal.
The Iranian Nuclear Program, 1974-1978
Edited by William Burr
Next to a statement by the Shah disavowing an interest in reprocessing plutonium, a staffer at the Pentagon's Office of International Security Affairs drew a little picture of a bull to express his skepticism.
To provide some historical background on the current controversy over the Iranian nuclear program, National Security Archive senior analyst William Burr has written an article, "A Brief History of U.S.-Iranian Nuclear Negotiations," now appearing in the January-February 2009 issue of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The Iranian nuclear controversy makes it worth looking at the years before the 1979 revolution, when the Shah of Iran was setting his sights on major nuclear power investments. Seeking a huge electrical power generating capability, Shah Mohammad Rez Pahlavi negotiated nuclear reactor deals with France and West Germany and wanted to buy eight reactors from the United States. This nuclear power initiative overlapped with Washington's growing concern over nuclear proliferation triggered by India's "peaceful nuclear explosion" in May 1974. While the Shah had publicly disavowed a nuclear weapons capability, the Iranians declared that they had the "right" to a full nuclear fuel cycle, including reprocessing of spent fuel. Not sure about the Shah's ultimate purposes, neither the Ford nor the Carter administrations would sell reactors without strings attacked.
Washington policymakers tried to use the nuclear negotiations as leverage to minimize the extent to which Iran could develop any of the critical elements of a nuclear weapons capability. The Carter administration would go further than its predecessor in attempting to reduce Iran's freedom of action, but both Presidents insisted on the tightest controls possible over Iran's ability to use U.S.-supplied nuclear technology and fuel for producing plutonium. While the Iranians made nationalist arguments asserting their "rights" to reprocessing and other activities under the NPT, by the summer of 1978, the two sides had reached an agreement, which the Iranian revolution effectively nullified.
Interestingly, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who presided over the negotiations during 1974-1976, has downplayed the role of proliferation during the nuclear negotiations with Iran. In a 2005 Washington Post interview, he said that "I don't think the issue of proliferation came up"; "They were an allied country, and this was a commercial transaction. We didn't address the question of them one day moving toward nuclear weapons."
Certainly no one saw an Iranian nuclear weapons capability as a likely near-term possibility, but Kissinger and the State Department never treated the agreement as simply a "commercial" proposition. First, Ford administration officials wondered whether the Shah of Iran would move toward a nuclear weapons option, should the regional balance of power change. Second, Kissinger and his senior advisers would only sign off an agreement that constrained Iran's capability to use U.S.-supplied resources for producing nuclear weapons material. This was no less true of the Carter administration; both Ford and Carter wanted to ensure that the terms of the agreement met U.S. nuclear nonproliferation goals.
What made the The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists article possible is the ongoing declassification of documentation on the nuclear negotiation from the Ford and Carter administrations--State Department and Tehran embassy cables, Defense Department papers, and White House and National Security Council memoranda and studies—that provide significant insight into the positions that Washington and Tehran took on the nuclear deal. All of the documents cited in the footnotes of the article, as well as a few more items, are reproduced in this briefing book (see below). As rich as the documentation is, however, more needs to be learned from U.S. government files, including materials at the Ford and Carter presidential library. For example, to a great extent the intelligence side of the story remains an unknown. So far, the Central Intelligence Agency has denied all documents gleaned from a mandatory review request to the Department of Defense, although they are current under appeal.
You can read cables and documents here
Source: National Security Archive
