The truth about Tehran

Iranian efforts to acquire a clandestine nuclear-weapon capability go back to 1987. At that time, Iran was fighting the last year of its eight-year war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Saddam’s aggression was supported by the United States and many Arab countries. The Muslim Ummah, the world over, did not condemn Saddam’s aggression and his use of chemical weapons on Iran, or the hundreds of missiles he sent raining on that country. The Indian Government of that day did not worry about Shia feelings. When Iran took the issue of the use of weapons of mass destruction to the United Nations, the US and European countries sat on their hands and took no action against Saddam. At that stage, Iran approached Khan to help it with the uranium enrichment programme.

The 2005 and 2006 IAEA resolutions were about the inadequacy of Iranian cooperation with the IAEA in clearing up the uranium enrichment issue involving Khan. For other countries of the world (including the various Islamic countries), it was an issue of proliferation in some distant country. For India, it was a case of clandestine proliferation involving Pakistan, Khan, the US and various West European countries which were the sources for Khan’s proliferation. India would have made a laughing stock of itself if it had ignored Khan’s activities. According to the former Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers (a disclosure he repeated during his visit to the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses two months ago), Khan had been allowed to go free by the Dutch authorities, after his arrest twice in 1975 and 1986, on the intervention of the CIA. Therefore, it is a fair assumption that the US knew what Iran and Khan were up to in 1987. Further, the Pakistani chief of army staff told a US assistant secretary in 1990 that Pakistan would sell its uranium enrichment technology to Iran if the US invoked the Pressler Amendment.

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