April 14, 2015
In 2003, a “perfect storm” of intersecting developments saw Tehran caught with one hand in the nuclear weapon cookie jar (secretly enriching uranium), despite having joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and given assurances that it would do no such thing. The Iranian regime was humiliated.
India and Pakistan had endured sustained condemnation when they declared their nuclear-armed status via a blizzard of tests in 1998, but they were known proliferation risks and had declined to join the NPT. Even the DPRK—not a state that anyone wants to be compared to—had gone through the formality of withdrawing from the NPT in April 2003, to (redundantly) signal its intent to pursue a nuclear weapon capability.
Iran opted to bluff its way through. Tehran steadfastly denied that it had an obligation to restore confidence in its compliance with the NPT. It insisted that everything the IAEA could discover was consistent with its intention to build a substantial network of nuclear power stations. It maintained that it was also exercising its rights under the NPT to acquire its own capacities to fuel its future reactors with enriched uranium and (potentially) plutonium. For its part, the US insisted that Iran had to get out of the enrichment business.
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