Editor’s note: This is the third of a four-part series on Israel, Iran’s nuclear program, and the U.S. Parts One and Two examined six use-of-force crises where Israel and the U.S. were at odds. In all but one case, things ended pretty well despite divergent views. The exception was Suez, a catastrophe that determined the course of U.S. policy for six decades. Part Three turns to Iran’s original civilian nuclear program and then to the Islamic Republic’s sprint for a bomb, set against historical examples.

Iran’s Nuclear Quest

Iran’s quest to join the nuclear club can be divided into three phases: (1) its civilian nuclear program (1968–1988); (2) its military nuclear program (1988–2014); and (3) the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA (2015–2023).

On July 1, 1968, the text of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) was put out for signature. First-day signatories included the U.S. and Iran, the latter then under the rule of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. The NPT formally went into effect on March 5, 1970. There are 191 states that are party to the NPT, with five states — U.S., Russia, U.K., France, and China — labeled “nuclear weapon” due to their having manufactured and exploded a nuclear weapon or device prior to Jan. 1, 1967. The NPT incorporated, in broad brushstrokes, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s idealistic “Atoms for Peace” proposal, presented to the United Nations General Assembly on Dec. 8, 1953.

Mohammed Reza commenced a civilian nuclear program in 1975, planning to only go military if rival nations did so; in 1975, he told the New York Times: 

I am not really thinking of nuclear arms, [b]ut if 20 or 30 ridiculous little countries are going to develop nuclear weapons, then I may have to revise my policies. Even Libya is talking about trying to manufacture atomic weapons.

So long as the shah remained in power, America faced no nuclear risk. However, American policymakers abandoned the shah in 1978 as the Islamic Revolution picked up steam. Carter administration policymakers were unwilling to prop up a leader whom they believed had been installed by a CIA-backed coup in 1953. As Iran scholar Ray Takeyh, in a just-published op-ed, explains, the CIA’s role was marginal at best. In 1951, Mohammed Mossadegh, who had been appointed prime minister by the shah, wanted to nationalize British Petroleum’s extensive petroleum assets without offering compensation. Mossadegh asked President Harry Truman to broker a compromise; serial efforts by Truman and Eisenhower seeking some compensation for BP were adamantly rejected by Mossadegh. The Brits imposed an oil embargo, economically ruinous for an Iran heavily dependent on oil revenues. Mossadegh soon faced opposition across a broad spectrum of society — the military, students, merchants, and, significantly, the clergy. Eisenhower sent CIA officer Kermit Roosevelt to organize a coup, but, in fact, the military had already done the heavy lifting.

Mossadegh sought to exercise total power as if he, and not Mohammed Reza, were the supreme ruler. A vacillating shah, who had been driven into exile, was brought back and his spine stiffened by the military — not the CIA. The shah exercised his constitutional power to fire Mossadegh. These decisive actions caught the CIA flatfooted.

Upon the shah’s overthrow in February 1979, the nuclear program was suspended. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was preoccupied with seizing total power, which entailed first replacing the provisional government, a task begun in earnest on Nov. 4, 1979, by taking American diplomats hostage. The seizure rallied Iranian students to support the creation of an Islamic regime. Formally named the Islamic Republic of Iran, it was, in fact, a totalitarian clerical fascist regime. Its position was further solidified by America’s April 1980 abysmal failed hostage rescue attempt.

On Sept. 22, 1980, Iraq invaded Iran. In 1985, Saddam Hussein began firing at Iran ballistic missiles armed with chemical warheads. In Revolution & Aftermath: Forging a New Strategy toward Iran, co-authors Eric Edelman and Ray Takeyh note that upon the Aug. 20, 1988, negotiated end to the war, Khomeini decided to resurrect the shah’s nuclear program, this time with nuclear weapons in mind. The regime’s military nuclear program survived Khomeini’s 1989 passing. In 1992, Israel’s then–prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, became the first Israeli leader to publicly describe Iran’s nuclear program — then known to be a civilian program — as an “existential” threat. The Clinton administration refused to call a civilian nuclear program a threat; in this, it followed prior U.S. administrations. Israel, needless to say, stood its ground.

Per Edelman and Takeyh, throughout the 1990s, Iran simultaneously pursued domestic reform (economic reform, anti-corruption efforts — the latter exempting regime power players from investigation). Left unchallenged were Iran’s clandestine pursuit of nuclear military capability, its use of transnational terror against regime opponents, and its worldwide promotion of revolutionary Islamist ideology. In August 2002, the National Council of Resistance on Iran, the political wing of the alleged terrorist group Mujahideen e-Khalq (MeK), publicly outed Iran’s nuclear quest.

The U.S., preoccupied with the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, did nothing. In 2006, the CIA detected the construction of new underground nuclear facilities, yet, in 2007, it issued a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) asserting that Iran stopped its nuclear program in 2003. The Bush administration again did nothing. The finding by the CIA was risible: Israel had taken out clandestine nuclear reactors shielded from inspection. But a true civilian program can be verified by regular monitoring operations of the reactor; Israel could be assured that a strike was not necessary unless a sudden transition brought another Saddam or Assad to power. For such an event, Israel could rely on contingency plans. For a civilian program, Iran would have no need to bury the facility underground — and deny access to it.

A golden opportunity for the U.S. and its Western allies came in early 2009, when a manifestly rigged “election” — restricted to candidates approved by the regime — reelected Mahmoud Ahmadinejad president. Protesters took to the streets in huge numbers. American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael Rubin notes that the regime’s “elections” have always been fraudulent, as the regime “eliminate[s] more than 90 percent of the candidates.”

The Green Movement caught the regime off guard. Edelman and Takeyh show just how far off-guard it was by quoting a 2013 statement by Ali Khamenei, successor as Supreme Guide to Khomeini, admitting that the regime had been “on the edge of a cliff.” Gen. Muhammad Ali Jafari, who commanded Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps from 2007 to 2013, said that the 2009 election that spawned the Green Movement ushered in “greater danger” for the Islamic Republic than that during the Iraq–Iran War: “We went to the brink of overthrow in this sedition.”

But Khomeini had a friend in Washington, D.C., the recently sworn-in president, Barack Hussein Obama. Obama sided with the regime and deflated the 2009 protest movement. Edelman and Takeyh point out that protests resurfaced in 2018 across a broader spectrum than did the 2009 protests.

In September 2022, a renewed mass protest movement began over the regime forcing women to wear Islamic dress; it spread nationwide but currently appears in remission. This time, unlike earlier, the students, fed up with life under clerical fascism, joined the protests. Many mosques were empty as worshippers joined the street uprising. For the first time, all elements of Iranian society opposed the regime.

Failed Efforts to Stop Iran

Every American administration sought to identify genuine moderates but only succeeded in finding the pseudo-variety. The apogee of such efforts, prior to the ascension of Obama, had come during President Ronald Reagan’s second term. The 1986–87 Iran hostage negotiations ended — Reagan’s contrary intentions notwithstanding — as an arms-for-hostages swap. The upshot was that America delivered Hawk surface-to-air missiles, which Iran used against Iraq; Iran showed its gratitude by taking more Americans hostage. As was memorably put by several Washington wits, “A moderate Iranian is one who has run out of ammunition.”

A final effort came from Israel when, serially in 2010, 2011, and 2012, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to persuade his cabinet to authorize an airstrike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. But only former Prime Minister Ehud Barak — who had defeated Bibi in the 1999 election — would go along.

Life Under the JCPOA: From the Cliff to the Cusp

Obama managed to get Congress by a simple majority to endorse JCPOA as an executive agreement, bypassing the Constitution’s two-thirds supermajority treaty-ratification requirement. In May 2018, President Donald Trump pulled out of the JCPOA, calling it “one of the most incompetently drawn deals I’ve ever seen.” That year, the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had identified Iran’s unexplained activities.

Trump imposed strict economic sanctions, but our European allies continued to ignore them so as to gain access to Iranian oil. They also are largely ignoring Iran’s growing ballistic missile threat to Europe.

On Jan. 20, 2021, President Joe Biden began occupying the Oval Office. He promptly sought to revive the JCPOA and began negotiations with Iran to get it to reenter an accord that the regime never intended to honor in the first place. In mid-2023, Iran stands on the cusp of nuclear-club membership, having enriched uranium to 60 percent — with some fragments even enriched to 83.7 percent. Estimates earlier this year were that Iran has enough highly enriched uranium (HEU) to make several A-bombs, according to sources of the U.N. (several, no time specified), the U.S. (one in 12 days), and Israel (5 bombs), in a matter of weeks. A more recent and detailed estimate was issued by the Institute for Science and International Security. It concluded that Iran, using its stocks of 60 percent, 20 percent, and 5 percent low-enriched uranium (LEU), could make enough weapons-grade uranium (WGU) to fuel one A-bomb in 12 days, four more within the first month, two more in a second month, and one more in a third month — in all, a total of eight. Intelligence estimates add several months for Iran to fabricate WGU into nuclear warheads. Iran’s near-total lack of cooperation with the IAEA makes definitive verification of these timetables impossible.

But Iran has yet to mate a nuclear warhead to a missile, by far the most feasible delivery system, and how close it is is not clear to analysts. According to Iran Watch, which posts a database of Iran’s extant ballistic missiles, Iran has fielded four missiles with a range of at least 1,600 kilometers. Matching this missile-range table to distances from Iran to Israel shows that Iran’s IRBM arsenal can cover all of Israel. But Iran’s IRBM warhead is much smaller than that of an ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) and hence requires more warhead miniaturization.

Nuclear Proliferation: Successes and Failures

Success in stemming the tide of nuclear proliferation has always involved a measure of voluntary conduct. South Africa scrapped its small arsenal (six A-bombs) in 1989, signed the NPT in 1991, and was certified by the IAEA to have completed dismantling its program in 1994. Its decision can be considered semi-voluntary, as sanctions against South Africa were imposed before any knowledge of its atomic program. The benefit derived by South Africa was an end to its pariah-nation status — due primarily to its ending apartheid and the accession of Nelson Mandela as prime minister.

As indicated in Part Two, Iraq’s second nuclear quest was stopped by American airstrikes during the 1991 Gulf War. The year 1994 saw the final withdrawal of Russia from Eastern Europe and the consolidation of all nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union. Kazakhstan and Belarus sent their nuclear arsenals to the Russian Federation, and Ukraine did so in exchange for the Budapest Memorandum, under which the U.S., Russia, and Great Britain guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity. A final success came in 2004 with the voluntary ending of Libya’s program. Col. Muammar Qaddafi saw the U.S. dismantle Saddam’s regime in 2003 and feared Libya would be next on the list.

Failures fall into several categories. Among U.S. allies, three countries decided to deploy nuclear arsenals: Britain in 1952, France in 1960, and Israel in 1967. The U.S. withheld promised technology sharing, but Britain had learned enough from British scientists working with the Manhattan Project. France developed its own indigenous nuclear program. Israel, pressed hard in 1963 by U.S. President John F. Kennedy to abandon its program, forged ahead nonetheless.

Among U.S. adversaries, the former Soviet Union stole the blueprints for the “implosion” bomb from the Manhattan Project and tested its first bomb in 1949. China initially received help from the Soviets, but after they halted assistance in 1959, China continued its program, detonating its first atomic bomb in 1964 and its first hydrogen bomb in 1967. The Soviets considered using nuclear weapons against China’s then-sparse nuclear facilities during the border clashes along the Ussuri River in March 1969. They approached the U.S. through back channels to find out how the Nixon administration felt about it and were told we’d disapprove. The Soviets did not wish to scupper their U.S. détente quest and scrapped attack plans.

Officially neutral but tilting toward the Soviet Union, India conducted its “peaceful” atomic “Smiling Buddha” test in 1974. Pakistan, a sometimes ally of the U.S. that played a double game, began its nuclear Islamic Bomb program after mortal enemy India’s test. U.S. intelligence judged by the late 1980s that Pakistan had joined the nuclear club, but it was not until Pakistan conducted a series of atomic tests in 1998 that its status was confirmed. (Both India and Pakistan, like Israel, declined to join the NPT.) Rogue North Korea signed the “Agreed Framework” accord with the U.S. in 1994, then clandestinely pursued its nuclear quest. In 2002, it withdrew from the NPT, but the U.S. did not consider North Korea to have joined the charmed circle until it actually tested a bomb in 2006.

Political Taxonomy: Identifying True Moderates

As if determined to learn nothing from prior bad misjudgments, seven U.S. administrations abjectly failed to find genuine moderates. As noted earlier, each U.S. president doubled down, looking for moderates within clerical fascist Iran’s governing structure; each failed to grasp that “reformers” left the regime’s revolutionary aspirations untouched, used transnational terror to target enemies of the regime, and engaged in clandestine pursuit of nuclear weapons.

No Iranian moderates were even permitted to run for office or be appointed to high office. Any true moderates would have been purged by the regime.

Evidence-Based Assessments: Avoiding Einstein’s Trap

Albert Einstein famously quipped that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. Five interwar examples stand out.

In 1935, Hitler and Mussolini began a series of aggressive moves: Mussolini’s troops invaded Ethiopia; Hitler’s troops moved into the Rhineland in 1936; the Luftwaffe tested warplanes over Guernica, Spain, in 1937; the Anschluss (“connection”) saw the Germans occupy Austria in 1938; and, finally, the Germans got the Allies later that year to surrender the Sudeten province of Czechoslovakia by March 15, 1939.

This final European surrender was the bitter fruit of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s September 1938 Munich parley with Hitler, after which he declared upon returning home that he had achieved “peace in our time.” His illusions became a cropper on Sept. 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland.

Then there are three historic monumental failures by U.S. intelligence, as first documented (familial pride #1!) by Roberta Wohlstetter in her 1962 Bancroft Prize–winning Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision. In the 11 days prior to the Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor, Japan’s fleet sailed north of commercial shipping lanes and turned south toward its airstrike launch point. On Saturday night, the Japanese broke off diplomatic negotiations. On Sunday, they planned to deliver a note in Washington at 1 p.m. EST, breaking off diplomatic relations, with no mention of a sneak attack. At that point, the lead Japanese planes would be in the air one hour, halfway to Pearl Harbor. Due to communications problems, the note was not delivered until 2:05 p.m. — 10 minutes after the first planes began their attack at 7:55 a.m. local time. Roberta’s path-breaking book was the first to identify the root causes of the massive intelligence failure: A combination of convenient assumptions and departmental “stovepiping” created background noise that obscured signals that Japan would attack. This was true even though U.S. cryptanalysts had cracked the Japanese secret diplomatic code and intercepted the coded message “east wind, rain” that indicated a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was imminent.

The second failure was the CIA’s consistent underestimating of Soviet incremental ICBM deployments for 11 years (1962–72) as documented (familial pride #2!) by Albert Wohlstetter in his seminal 1976 article “Racing Forward? Or Ambling Back?” in the book Defending America. Traumatized by an initial, late-1950s overestimation of the rate at which the Soviets could deploy ICBMs, the agency overcorrected for an entire decade, consistently underestimating ICBM deployment as well as MRBM and IRBM deployments — strictly speaking, launchers were counted as actual missile arsenals could not be verified. By 1963, our overestimation of Soviet ICBM launchers was roughly offset by our underestimation of MRBM and IRBM launchers. (The latter two missile types were the ones placed in Cuba in 1962.)

Of 51 CIA-specific estimates of Soviet ICBM deployment in this period — which included multiple estimates within each year — the high number topped actual deployment only twice. The lows never exceeded actual deployments, and the highs were reached only nine times. Errors of underestimation were “substantial,” and the average of the “highs” was under the actual deployments.

Far from learning from its underestimates, the CIA’s errors grow worse over time. In all, the Soviet ICBM buildup ran from 1961 through 1986. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter’s defense secretary, Harold Brown, who had been a physicist with the Manhattan Project and was highly informed about nuclear matters, told Congress, “When we build, they build; when we cut, they build.”

The intelligence community’s third mega-failure was its belief that Saddam still possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in 2003. It was thinly sourced, as it was thought inconceivable that Saddam would surrender his WMD stocks. Saddam could have saved his regime by letting inspectors in, but rather than accept such humiliation, he sacrificed his regime and, eventually, his own life. The intelligence community took a waterline hit to its reputation that will linger for decades.

Bottom Line: Three Harsh Lessons from Iran’s Nuclear Quest

First, diplomacy alone cannot stop determined nuclear proliferators with the resources to develop nuclear weapons.

Second, the political taxonomy of free countries does not conform to the taxonomy of totalitarian nations; moderates as we know them in Western societies simply are not permitted to exist in absolute dictatorships.

Third, policymakers must not persist — let alone double down — on policies whose desired results are repeatedly contradicted by the weight of inconvenient empirical evidence.

John C. Wohlstetter is the author of Sleepwalking With the Bomb (Discovery Institute Press, 2d. ed. 2014).