deal outright, President Clinton imposed
sweeping sanctions on Iran to prevent the sale of dual-use
technologies. Some of Iranís procurement activities had raised
eyebrows in Washington. The U.S. also lobbied others to join in the
embargo, with only limited success. Germany and France took umbrage at
the policy.

The Iranian government has flatly denied the charges of
proliferation. The Iranians have also protested the punitive U.S.
treatment, which they regard as a violation of their right under
article IV of the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) to develop nuclear
power for peaceful use. In May 1995 Iranian President Ali Akbar
Hashemi Rafsanjani told ABC News that Iran was not seeking nuclear
weapons. Rafsanjani challenged the critics to produce evidence of a
secret bomb program. As recently as December 2002 the current Iranian
president Mohammad Khatami stated that his countryís willingness to
return the spent fuelmention the diabolical possibility, however
remote, that spent fuel might be diverted for reprocessing and
bombmaking. The Iranians need to understand that such a diversion
would ultimately threaten them.

The U.S. Record

Nevertheless, the critics, especially those in the U.S., have
conveniently forgotten the central role the U.S. played over many
years in touting the "many peaceful applications of nuclear
energy." The critics need to be reminded that it was the U.S., no
one else, who, beginning in the 1950s, aggressively promoted the
miracle of cheap and inexhaustible nuclear energy for world economic
development. That "vision" was conceived in Washington, not
Tehran. Are we now to hold the Iranians responsible because the failed
U.S. policy succeeded too well? Are the Iranians to blame because they
internalized the false values that Washington strove mightily to
inculcate worldwide? The Iranians are not alone. In recent