With much less damage to Iran's and Iraq' economy would they have enough to funnel into their nuclear programs and both get the bomb in the nineties?
The Iranian nuclear weapons program began in the late 1960s, using nuclear technology provided by the United States under the ‘
Atoms for Peace' program
. (The nuclear weapons programs of India, Pakistan and Israel, all began with nuclear technology provided by ‘
Atoms for Peace’, as did the abandoned weapons programs of South Africa, Australia and Argentina; the ‘
Atoms for Peace’ program must therefore rank as the most counterproductive and stupid foreign aid program in U.S. history.) Following the Islamic revolution, the nuclear program, the overt civil program as well as the cover military program it supported, were considered by Ayatollah Khomeini to be vanity projects of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi; of no benefit to the Islamic Republic or its people. As a consequence, work on Iran’s nuclear facilities was halted following the revolution. Khomeini disapproved of nuclear technology in general and considered nuclear weapons to be morally reprehensible and un-Islamic.
While he was later persuaded that a limited nuclear energy program could be beneficial to Iran, permitting work to resume on two nuclear reactors at Bushehr in 1984, he maintained his abhorrence of nuclear weapons. Consequently, even if the Iran-Iraq war had ended earlier, there would not have been an Iranian nuclear weapons program while Ayatollah Khomeini was alive. He died of a heart attack in June 1989, aged 86 years. Khomeini’s strong disapproval of all things nuclear seems to have held sway well after his death; Iran did not resume interest in of a civil nuclear program until 1995 despite the capacity to afford one much earlier, and interest in a military nuclear program did not begin until the 2000s.
If anyone has doubts that morality was the decisive factor in nuclear weapons decision making, they should consider the Iranian decision not to develop chemical weapons; in 1983 Iran notified the United Nations that Iraq was using chemical weapons and this was independently verified by international chemical weapons experts. Iran at the time did not possess chemical weapons, but its domestic chemical industries were more than capable of rapidly producing mustard and phosgene gas unassisted, and could have made more complex nerve gasses if they’d purchased the requisite chemical formulas from Europe. They chose not to. Khomeini considered chemical weapons to be cruel, immoral and un-Islamic. They did not even develop the weapons to deter further Iraqi attacks, reasoning that even if they had such weapons Saddam would not be deterred and if they possessed them then the pressure to use them would then be overwhelming after another Iraqi CW attack. Therefore, to prevent their moral downfall, the Iranians chose not to manufacture the weapons and simply rely on preventative measures to counteract Saddam’s chemical attacks.
Meanwhile, the Iraqi nuclear weapons program commenced in 1975 with assistance from the French, who built a 40MW light-water reactor for Saddam at Al Tuwaitha, on the outskirts of Baghdad (actual construction beginning in 1979). In addition to the reactor, the Iraqi’s built, with Italian assistance, a plutonium separation and handling facility on the same site. The reactor was nearing completion in June 1981 when the Israeli air force bombed the site, destroying the reactor and related facilities (Operation
Babylon). Initially France agreed to rebuild the facility, but then pulled out of discussions in 1984, principally because the Iraqis were unable to meet the cost of reconstruction.
If the Iran-Iraq War had ended in 1982, then Saddam would have been more than capable of meeting the cost of rebuilding the facility at Al Tuwaitha, or building a nuclear plant in a more defensible location. Assuming construction of a new reactor beginning in 1983, then Saddam would have a working nuclear reactor by 1986, and with it the facilities necessary extract plutonium. From there, depending on the size and type of reactor he chose to build, he would begin to manufacture nuclear weapons.
As it was, without having a completed nuclear reactor, and using only the 75kg of enriched uranium supplied by the French in the initial contract, Saddam had been a matter of months away from having a nuclear weapon when he invaded Kuwait in 1990; Iraqi explosives experts were already working on implosion lenses in 1990, and Saddam’s ‘
crash program’ would have delivered 25kg of highly enriched uranium (HEU) by the end of 1991 (15kg of UEU is necessary for an implosion device). If the Iran-Iraq war was ended in 1982, and this work, which largely commenced in 1988, were brought forward, then Saddam could be expected to have had a nuclear weapon any time from 1985 onwards, if not earlier.
We know from the Saddam tapes (Saddam’s propensity for taping his meetings made Nixon look like a mere amateur) that he believed the Arab nation to be threatened from three outside powers: Iran, Israel and the United States. He’d gone to war in 1980 in an effort to
‘liberate’ Arabistan (Khuzestan); the invasion of Kuwait was a further step in his efforts to unite the entire Arab nation under his control (either directly or indirectly) prior to ultimately attacking Israel, driving the Zionists from the region and liberating the Al-Aqsa mosque. If the Iran-Iraq War had ended in 1982, Saddam’s objectives would still have been the same, but he would not have been faced with the enormous debts to the Kuwait and the other GCC members that he did; this might have left him with feeling that he had more room to manoeuvre and greater flexibility – he might therefore have had the patience to wait until he had acquired nuclear weapons with which to deter the United States from interfering in the Arab nation, and ultimately to destroy the Zionists.