The hidden history of the Iranian nuke deal

“Nuclear power will both provide for the growing needs of Iran’s economy and free remaining oil reserves for export or conversion to petrochemicals.”

No, that’s not Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei speaking in 2015. Rather, that’s what Henry Kissinger wrote in 1975, in a secret National Security Council report, now declassified. In fact, the U.S. government at the time offered Iran far more than what the current nuke deal allows — or what the current Iranian government even bargained for.

When the Washington Post reviewed the relevant declassified documents ten years ago (which it now seems to have forgotten), it reported that the Ford administration, with Kissinger as National Security Adviser, “endorsed Iranian plans to build a massive nuclear energy industry, but also worked hard to complete a multibillion-dollar deal that would have given Teheran control of large quantities of plutonium and enriched uranium—the two pathways to a nuclear bomb.”

Dick Cheney, who now claims that Iran has no need for nuclear energy, was President Ford’s chief of staff when he worked hard to give plutonium and enriched uranium to Iran. Kissinger, too, no longer thinks nuclear energy would be a good thing for Iran’s economy. Only one mainstream reporter, Dafna Linzer, has ever bothered to ask why they tried to give Iran everything it needed to make a nuclear bomb 40 years ago. When she posed the question to Henry Kissinger, he simply explained that the dictator-king of Iran at the time was our good friend, and that “this was a commercial transaction,” with US corporations poised to make billions of dollars on the deal. An insight into the real meaning of “national security,” from the most famous US political advisor of the 20th century.

To read more intriguing history that connects to modern day nuclear arms deals, check out AlternativeNews.com

Sources:

WashingtonPost.com

nsarchive.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb268/doc05a.pdf^[PDF]