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Iran's nuclear dreams may survive even a devastating American blow

President Trump declared a 'spectacular military success,' saying that American bombs had knocked out key pillars of Iran's nuclear program. Even if he is right, the operation may not have delivered a death blow to a program that is deeply embedded in Iran's history, culture, sense of security, and national identity. Since Iran first embarked on an ambitious civilian nuclear program in 1974 under the shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, Iran's leaders have viewed it as a proud symbol of the country's leadership in the Muslim world, a reflection of its commitment to scientific research, and an insurance policy in its dangerous neighborhood. What was true under the shah has been true under the theocratic rulers of post-revolution Iran. And it would be true, several experts on Iran said, of any potential future Iranian government, even if the current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, does not survive an escalating conflict with Israel and the United States. 'In the short term, under immense pressure, Khamenei or his successors will have to make concessions,' said Roham Alvandi, director of the Iranian History Initiative at the London School of Economics. 'In the long run, any Iranian leader will come to the conclusion that Iran must have a nuclear deterrent.' By joining Israel's military campaign against Iran, Trump has greatly raised the costs for Iran's leaders in refusing to accept stringent curbs on their uranium enrichment program. Yet however this conflict ends, he may have given them even more compelling reasons to seek a nuclear deterrent, experts say. 'Any strategic thinker in Iran, present or future, realizes that Iran is located in the Middle East, that its neighbors are Netanyahu's Israel, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and M.B.S. in Saudi Arabia,' said Professor Alvandi, referring to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. To that list of threats, Iran can now add the United States. The American bombardment likely inflicted serious damage on the enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordo, and the research complex at Isfahan. Earlier Israeli strikes killed several of Iran's prominent nuclear scientists, as well as damaging installations. Taken together, that could set back Iran's program by years. But bombs alone cannot erase the knowledge that Iranians have accumulated over nearly seven decades, since 1957, when Iran first signed a civil nuclear cooperation agreement with the Eisenhower administration. The United States was then encouraging countries to engage in the peaceful exploration of nuclear science through President Dwight D. Eisenhower's 'Atoms for Peace' initiative. In 1967, with American help, Iran built a small research reactor in Tehran that still exists. A year later, it signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, a symbol of the shah's desire to be accepted into the club of Western nations. Flush with cash from 1973 oil shock, the shah then opted to rapidly expand Iran's civil nuclear program, including developing a homegrown enriching capacity. He sent dozens of Iranian students to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study nuclear engineering. The shah viewed it as a prestige project that would vault Iran into the front ranks of Middle Eastern countries. But that put him at odds with the United States, which worried that Iran would reprocess spent fuel into fissile material that could be used in a weapon. 'It was an icon of the country having arrived as a major power, with the side idea that if Iraq ever threatened Iran, it could be diverted to military uses,' said Professor Alvandi, who published 'Nixon, Kissinger and the Shah: The United States and Iran in the Cold War.' The shah even said that Iran would have nuclear weapons 'without a doubt and sooner than one would think,' a statement he later disavowed. Henry A. Kissinger, then the secretary of state, sought to impose safeguards on Iran's program, which the shah rejected. As a result, France and Germany, rather than the United States, won lucrative contracts to build Iran's industry. German companies began constructing the Bushehr nuclear power plant in 1975, a project that was halted after the Iranian revolution in 1979. Iran's new rulers initially viewed the nuclear program as a wasteful extravagance on the shah's part. They mothballed it until the end of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988, when Iraq's repeated bombing of the Bushehr plant, not to mention its use of chemical weapons in the conflict, persuaded the Iranians that a robust nuclear program would have a useful deterrent value. (Bushehr, rebuilt by the Russians, is still running.) 'In some ways, the Islamic Republic's calculations were the same as the shah's — an expression of power and prestige,' said Ray Takeyh, an expert on Iran at the Council on Foreign Relations. The nuclear program became inseparable from the government's rabid nationalism, the cudgel behind daily state-organized protests with their cries of 'Death to America' and 'Death to Israel.' In 2006, during the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it was turned into almost a fetish. Dancers held vials said to contain some form of uranium in performances celebrating Iran's right to enrich. The program operated on an aggressively dual track: a civilian program, which contributed little to Iran's energy needs, and a covert enrichment program, which put Iran on a collision course with Israel and the United States. The decades of investment in, and veneration of, the program will make it hard for any leader of Iran to simply give it up, say analysts. Even among Iranians who are angry at the government or pay little attention to calculations about strategic deterrence, the nuclear program has become a source of national pride. 'A successor regime, whoever it is and however it comes to power, will have similar view' about pursuing the country's nuclear ambitions, said Takeyh, who is the author, most recently of 'The Last Shah: America, Iran and the Fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty.' 'It will emphasize nuclear science as the highest form of scientific inquiry,' he said. 'It will seek to have a nuclear program of some elaboration and indigenously driven.' The question, Takeyh said, is whether 'it is going to be more acceptable to the US, as the shah's ambitions were, to some extent.' For now, said Abbas Milani, the director of Iranian studies at Stanford University, 'Khamenei faces an existential double bind.' 'He can heed his own rhetoric and the advice of those radicals in his inner circle,' Professor Milani said, which would mean trying to shut down the Straits of Hormuz and retaliating against American ships and bases in the region. Or he can publicly play down the damage to the nuclear facilities and seek an accommodation with the United States, thus 'saving his regime to fight another day.' 'The innocent people of Iran will pay a heavy price either way,' Professor Milani said.