When You Play With Fire...

Just days after delivering a vitriolic speech to the United Nations General Assembly—in which Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared Iran’s inalienable right to enrich uranium and develop nuclear power—the hard-line president gave another highly distressing address. During a military parade, he told cheering crowds: “Those who decide to misuse our nation’s honor…should know that the flames of the nation’s wrath are very hot and destructive.” Amidst the parade, banners proclaimed “Israel should be wiped off the map” and “We will trample America under our feet.” These are not the words of the head of a nation interested in peaceful nuclear technology.

Iran should not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons; the world will become a more dangerous place with another nuclear power. This is a simple policy with an equally simple, but vitally important rationale—it is the basis of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which has stemmed the spread of atomic weapons for more than 30 years.

Yet today, the Treaty stands in danger of being undermined. Iran, a signatory to the Treaty, has promised that its nuclear program is entirely peaceful, yet has consistently demonstrated a desire to covertly develop illegal technology as well as a complete lack of respect for the will of the international community. If the world continues to allow Iran to publicly dissemble, it will not be long before Iran joins the nuclear club, with devastating consequences for global stability.

Objectively, Iran’s claim that it needs nuclear power just doesn’t make sense. The nation is swimming in fossil fuels: Iran is the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries’s second largest oil producer (it holds ten percent of the world’s proven oil reserves) and the world’s second largest natural gas reserve. Yet Iran has extremely limited deposits of uranium—producing energy via nuclear means makes far less financial sense than producing it by conventional means.

Even putting aside the issue of nonsensical economics, Iran’s history clearly demonstrates that it cannot be trusted to develop nuclear technology that can easily be converted to military use. The nation hid development of a gas centrifuge cascade that could be used to make weapons-grade uranium and development of a nuclear reactor capable of producing plutonium from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for several years.

The latest developments are extremely alarming. Last month, Iran not only flatly rejected an extremely conciliatory European Union offer to provide trade and technology incentives in exchange for abandoning uranium-enrichment work, it resumed uranium conversion, the crucial first step before enrichment. And just a few days ago, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator threatened that it would resume full-scale uranium enrichment if Iran was referred by the IAEA to the Security Council.

We think that Iran should be referred anyway. It is time for the international community to show its backbone; merely settling for one more feeble protest and a wrist-slap will send Iran the message that if it continues to overtly protest that the international community is violating its sovereignty, it can resume covertly inching towards nuclear weaponization.

Unfortunately, Russia and China have threatened to vote “no” if France, Britain, and Germany bring referral to the Security Council to an IAEA vote. Russia and China’s positions, however, are highly suspect: Russia signed a multimillion dollar deal earlier this year to supply Iran with nuclear fuel, and Iran is China’s second largest supplier of oil.

While it is important to respect Iran’s sovereignty as much as possible, and it does have a right under the Non-proliferation Treaty to use peaceful nuclear power, Iran’s history and motives demonstrate that allowing it to inch any closer to its goal would be to risk far too much. Iran’s recent rejection of a very reasonable European Union proposal to supply it with nuclear technology as long as the EU retained control over the actual nuclear material confirms that Iran has no intention of stopping with peaceful technology.

The international community cannot allow Iran’s intransigence to go unpunished once again. Anything less would be to slide further down a slippery slope indeed.