Introduction

Iran’s nuclear program had alarmed the international community in the 1990s, but it came to the forefront of international security concerns in 2000. Although Tehran still maintains that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, in the recent past it has admitted to possessing enriched uranium as part of its uranium enrichment program, which has unnerved the international community in general and the United States in particular. Iran’s nuclear drive has been probed by scholars and policy-makers and although there is controversy on whether or not Iran is aiming to build nuclear weapons, most scholars who believe that Iran’s nuclear program has dual purpose argue that the country has been motivated to acquire nuclear weapons for security purposes, as has been the case with almost all regional proliferators. The general understanding is that regional proliferators proliferate for regional security determinants. While this remains the primary driving force, no one has examined why Iran, in the absence of a hostile Iraq after Saddam Hussein’s rule since 2003, still chooses to keep its nuclear weapons option alive and, in fact, remains more focused on the nuclear program. This deficiency begs a salient question which this study investigates: What drives Iran to acquire nuclear weapons and relentlessly move on with its nuclear weapons program in a less-hostile regional environment? The objective is to demonstrate that Iran’s nuclear ambition is related to both regional and global environment due to its regional and global conflict engagements, which means that both regional and global security threats for Iran need to be absent before Tehran can give up its nuclear ambition. It is argued that Iran’s hostility with the US remains the major causal factor for its serious proliferation activities since the 1990s and unrelenting effort in that realm since 2000. Iran’s protracted conflict with the US started at the end of the Shah period and the beginning of the Islamic Revolution in the country in 1979. Although the development of the conflict almost coincided with the beginning of the Iran-Iraq War in 1980 which kept Iran focused on Iraq and the war, since 1979 Iran’s leaders have perceived the US as the principal enemy of the Islamic states which supported their enemy, Israel, in the Middle Eastern region. Thus, in addition to having two protracted conflicts since the late 1940s and early 1950s with Israel and Iraq respectively, Iran developed a new intractable conflict with the US in 1979. From then Iran had three enemies – Iraq, Israel, and the US – to worry about for the next 30 years. Initially, Iraq was Iran’s principal enemy in the region due to the territorial

conflict that they were engaged in and for fighting one of the bloodiest and protracted wars in the region from 1980 to 1988. The two major regional rivals also strived for regional dominance and, consequently, this was also a structurallydetermined rivalry. Israel, on the other hand, was an enemy state since its creation in 1947, but became Iran’s important rival in the region since the 1980s due to the war in Lebanon and the creation of Hezbollah by Tehran which fights Iran’s proxy wars in Lebanon against Israel. In the nuclear realm, Iraq and Israel’s nuclear weapons programs alarmed Iran and the Islamic Republic became anxious to develop a deterrent capability against Iraq, with whom it fought one of the longest wars in the region, and Israel, whose existence in the Middle East Iran denies, and its nuclear program initially was developed to address its dual regional security concerns. The third conflict it got engaged in with the US made it more attracted to the nuclear program since this was an asymmetric conflict where Iran was a weak regional state trying to defend itself against a global opponent. Thus, the number of conflict engagements and conflict types determined Iran’s nuclear choice. However, the pace of its nuclear weapons program was relatively slow till 2000 even though from 1990 to 2000 its nuclear program received renewed attention from the Islamic leadership. This was the period when the cold war ended, but Iran was still engaged in a conflict with the world’s only superpower, the US, that identified Iran as a rogue state that was determined to jeopardize regional peace and stability in the otherwise orderly post-cold war world. The systemic change made matters more troublesome for Iran. With the US administration pursuing aggressive foreign policies toward Iran since 2000, the latter’s security threat intensified. The Bush administration’s declaration of Iran as one of the “Axis of Evil” states severely threatened and humiliated Iran; the threat exacerbated with the administration’s war on Iraq in 2003 on the pretext that it was in possession of weapons of mass destruction. A society that was and still is split on many of the important domestic issues including democratization, modernization, and westernization, the Iranians remained united on the nuclear issue after the war on Iraq. The US decision to attack Iraq without the approval of the United Nations demonstrated the power of Washington in a unipolar world and proved that in the absence of a nuclear deterrent capability, Iran would soon be in the same position as Iraq and would be the US’s next target in the Middle East for being one of the “Axis of Evil” states. Addressing its security concerns pertaining to this asymmetric conflict with the acquisition of a deterrent capability became pertinent for Iran. Consequently, Iran became relentless in its drive to acquire nuclear weapons and boldly announced its decision to enrich uranium so that the US would not be confused about its nuclear status. Improved and non-aggressive US policies toward Iran, which can be instrumental in terminating the prolonged Iran-US conflict, can convince Iran to renounce its nuclear weapons ambition.