Iran's atomic journey

National Interest, The, Summer, 2005 by Ilan Berman

Al J. Venter, Iran's Nuclear Option: Tehran's Quest for the Bomb (New York: Casemate, 2005), 451 pp., $29.95.

NO ISSUE looms larger on the contemporary foreign policy agenda of the United States and its European allies than the Islamic Republic of Iran. Over the past three years, unmistakable signs that the Iranian regime is trying to acquire an offensive nuclear capability--and making serious progress toward that goal--have become an almost daily occurrence. Revelations of secret labs for advanced uranium enrichment, disclosures of new mining and refining stations, and elaborate diplomatic evasion tactics vis-a-vis the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) all speak to the Iranian regime's steadfast commitment to its aggressive national nuclear endeavor.

Tehran's advances have generated considerable consternation on both sides of the Atlantic. Echoing their counterparts in Washington, more than a few European officials have publicly warned of dire consequences if Iran succeeds in its atomic efforts. In practice, however, Europe's response has been accommodationist. Since last fall, in a throwback to its failed engagement policy toward the Islamic Republic of the 1990s, the European Union has pursued a diplomatic strategy aimed at blunting Tehran's atomic ambitions through economic inducements. As of this spring, for lack of a better alternative, the Bush Administration has grudgingly signed on to this approach, embracing a policy of economic carrots and diplomatic sticks intended to defuse Iran's nuclear drive.

But trouble is brewing on the horizon. Iranian leaders have taken a hard line in negotiations with their European interlocutors, rejecting the idea of economic incentives in exchange for a lasting freeze on uranium enrichment. The United States and the world, Iranian policymakers now maintain publicly, should "get used to the idea of a nuclear Iran." For its part, Israel--the country most directly threatened by a nuclear Iran--has not-so-subtly put Europe and the United States on notice that diplomatic failure will mean that military action is in the offing.

Given these stakes, a book detailing the scope of Iran's nuclear program was well nigh inevitable. Al J. Venter just happened to write it. Venter, however, brings credibility to his analysis. A veteran defense correspondent for Britain's prestigious Jane's Intelligence Group, Venter has logged time in some of the world's most dangerous places. His Rolodex fairly bulges with the names of important scholars, officials and analysts, and his personal accounts of investigating Iran's nuclear in-roads, particularly on the African subcontinent, make for gripping reading. They also provide a chilling insight into the scope and sophistication of Iran's concerted, multi-decade quest for the atomic bomb.

THERE ARE important insights here. "The Iran-Iraq War permanently altered the course of Iranian history", Venter confirms in his chapter on the subject, which is borrowed wholesale from the Federation of American Scientists. In meticulous detail, the study examines the course of battle between the two hostile neighbors, delving into Iraq's strategic calculations and the Iranian military response. By doing so, it elegantly frames the seminal events that set the Islamic Republic firmly on the path to acquiring weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

Over the years, Iran has matched its overt attempts to acquire the bomb with a formidable clandestine procurement operation. It was through this effort that Tehran attempted, unsuccessfully, to gain access to fissile material in Kazakhstan and in Russia during the early 1990s, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Moreover, this effort is hardly a thing of the past; Iranian opposition elements have recently alleged that Tehran has allocated some $2.5 billion to acquire three nuclear warheads from abroad. Venter tackles this issue as well, touching upon Iran's inroads into the nuclear black market that has cropped up in the post-Soviet space since the end of the Cold War and the quiet scavenger hunt for critical materiel and know-how in central and eastern Europe that has mirrored Tehran's public nuclear contacts with an array of foreign nations. Venter's related examination of the workings of contemporary proliferation networks only serves to hammer home the point that Iran's nuclear program has by now become a truly international affair.

Since the early 1990s, Russia has emerged as Iran's most important strategic ally and a key enabler of the Islamic Republic's nuclear ambitions. Venter draws on the work of a number of noted Russia scholars in his lucid examination of Moscow's atomic ties to Tehran, and of the reasons underpinning them--chief among them the Kremlin's continuing fears of Iranian involvement in the stirrings of radical Islamic separatism that have emerged in the Caucasus. Left unexamined, however, is the shift now visible in the balance of power between the two countries, as Moscow comes to grips with Iran's growing activism in Central Asia and the Caucasus and Tehran's mounting threat to Russia's own national security. That is certainly a shame, because these trends provide hopeful glimpses into a future in which a Russo-Iranian divorce might just be in sight.