In the early hours of Sunday, November 28, 2013, the mullahs’ regime signed an agreement with the P5+1 in Geneva, with Rouhani congratulating Khamenei and describing it as a victory. Rafsanjani compared it to the signing of the UN Security Council resolution 598 in 1988 (which Khomeini described as drinking from the chalice of poison) and said: “We survived a plight”. On November 27, Mullah Hosseinian described the signing of the agreement as a retreat from the regime’s strategy.
The nuclear bomb and the regime’s survival
A bill aimed at establishing and building the Tehran University Nuclear Center was approved by the Majlis (parliament) in 1956.
Iran joined the International Atomic Energy Agency and became a member state in 1958.
The Shah founded the Nuclear Organization in 1974 and quickly entered talks to build nuclear power complexes, signing an extendible 10-year agreement with the United States, Germany and France to procure nuclear fuel.
The Shah had a plan to build 23 nuclear reactors across Iran, which had to be up and running around the country before the mid-1990s.
With Shah’s overthrow, Khomeini’s regime cancelled all existing agreements between Iran, the US, France and Germany in line with supporting the Shah’s nuclear programs and bringing an end to Iran’s nuclear programs.
With the beginning of the Iran-Iraq War he regretted his decision and began reviving the Shah-era nuclear assets with the goal of obtaining nuclear weapons. Following numerous discussions and preparations made in 1983, the Special Nuclear Research Unit was founded under the Revolutionary Guards Research Center located in northern Tehran near Vanak Square.
This special and secret center attempted to round up and hire the country’s best nuclear experts. In 1983, Rafsanjani summoned experts of the Nuclear Energy Organization – which had been suspended – and requested they re-initiate their work in the organization.
On January 14, 1986, Khamenei – the regime’s then president – visited Pakistan along with a senior military and political delegation. In this visit the military officials accompanying Khamenei reached agreements with Pakistani military and nuclear energy officials, and following these talks Abdol Qader Khan travelled to Iran the following month. This launched the relations between the IRGC and its associated nuclear experts with AQ Khan. In this regard, the IRGC placed specific plans on the agenda aimed at obtaining the nuclear bomb. In this regard in January 1987 the government of Mir Hossein Mousavi (already having serious economic problems resulting from the war with Iraq) decided to allocate a huge budget for the plan to build nuclear weapons.
In July 1988, in a report given to Khomeini by Rafsanjani and war commanders from the field, any type of victory in the war was conditional on having nuclear weapons. Therefore, on July 18, 1988, Khomeini accepted the UNSC resolution 598 (ceasefire with Iraq) and later on said he drank from the chalice of poison. He went on to stipulate that his regime must be equipped with the ‘atom’ (nuclear) bomb)
Therefore, the mullahs’ nuclear activities in the IRGC were aimed at obtaining nuclear weapons. The Bushehr nuclear reactor that they pursued later on was aimed at covering up these activities, not the country’s need for electricity. Rafsanjani’s cabinet came to power in 1989. While it was known as the government of reconstruction, inside the regime it was named the nuclear government. Rafsanjani placed intense efforts on obtaining nuclear weapons as soon as possible. In this regard the Preventive Defense Strategy plan was adopted in 1988 in the regime’s Supreme Security Council, founded on three pillars:
– Ability to tolerate high casualties in long wars
– A huge arsenal of middle and long-range missiles to compensate for the country’s weakness against air attacks
– A nuclear arsenal to deter major powers, including the US
Following the adoption of the preventive strategy Khamenei said: “Iran’s national defense demarche will have no value or credibility without nuclear power.” An IRGC commander said describing this strategy said: “The main deterring axis of this strategy is obtaining nuclear weapons to prevent attacks.”
In a meeting with regime officials in 2003 following the Coalition forces attack against Iraq, Khamenei made a comparison between Iraq and North Korea, coming to the conclusion that the reason why the US did not attack North Korea and negotiated with Pyongyang was the fact that it had nuclear weapons and if Iraq had nuclear weapons, the Coalition would not have entered a war with it.
Following this, he reiterated that the adoption of the Preventive Defense Strategy in 1989, on the necessity of obtaining nuclear weapons, was a correct and timely decision. Therefore, it is necessary that we (the mullahs’ regime) set aside the obstacles and equip ourselves as quickly as possible.
The main focus of Rafsanjani’s 8-year rule was to advance this preventive strategy, concentrating on obtaining nuclear weapons. He personally followed up these activities with the IRGC Special Nuclear Unit and the Nuclear Energy Organization, and in foreign trips – especially to China and Russia – sought to provide for the infrastructure to obtain nuclear weapons. In 1991 in a joint session with the IRGC Special Nuclear Unit and the Nuclear Energy Organization he made the following strategic decisions:
1. Numerous resources and assets from various countries must be activated to obtain nuclear equipment and technology, and obtain this technology through secret and contraband deals.
2. Send trustworthy Iranian nuclear engineers and experts to European countries under various pretexts to obtain necessary technology through spying.
3. Take maximum advantage of the USSR downfall to hire special expertise assets.
It was following these instructions that they used the conditions after the former USSR in 1991 and hired Russian scientists and dozens of front companies in the Mostazafan Foundation, the Defense Industries Organization, and other institutions and military entities were founded to procure this technology.
Hassan Rouhani, in his book, termed the nuclear diplomacy of Khatami’s presidency as the era of ‘nuclear technology development as national priority’. Khatami established the Supreme Council of New Technology on November 30, 1998, with the goal of building the infrastructures needed to obtain nuclear weapons. Members of this organization included the Minister of Defense, officials of the ‘Defense Ministry Defensive Research Training’ and head of the Nuclear Energy Organization. This council continuously held sessions every two-weeks chaired by Khatami himself, reviewing plans to obtain nuclear weapons, the problems and solutions.
In 1999, after numerous sessions with nuclear experts involved in these projects, the Supreme Council of New Technology adopted a plan to obtain nuclear bomb fuel through enrichment with centrifuges, plutonium fuel and laser enrichment. It was after this decision that the Natanz site to install 54,000 centrifuges, and the heavy water and 40 MW reactor in Arak to obtain plutonium fuel, were approved. One of Khatami’s deputies said: “65 percent of nuclear advances were made in Khatami’s era.”
In a TV program, Hassan Rouhani admitted in a report on the first 100 days in office that Ahmadinejad’s government was the richest government in oil and non-oil revenues. During those 8 years, Iran had $750 billion in revenue. However, he handed over an empty treasury with billions of dollars of government debt.
Rouhani doesn’t say where this huge revenue went and what happened? What is clear is that the main portion of this revenue has been swallowed by the terrorist Quds Force to intervene in Syria and Iraq, and by the Sepand Organization of the Ministry of Defense to build 10 underground nuclear sites during Ahmadinejad’s tenure.
