Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has declared that Iran will seek nuclear-powered ships. This comes after he alleged that the U.S. has violated the Iran nuclear deal. Let’s put aside the fact that if Rouhani believes the United States to be in violation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, there is a procedure Iran must go through to walk away; Rouhani was never truly committed to the deal. He had
He had bragged about his deception during previous rounds of negotiation and once outlined a strategy by which he would lull Americans into complacency with dialogue before delivering a knock-out blow.
Nor is Iranian military bluster anything new. In September 2011, for example, Mansour Maghsoudlou, Iran’s head of naval research, said Iran would build aircraft carriers. That same month, Admiral Habibollah Sayyari said Iran would deploy into the Atlantic Ocean. In June 2012, Admiral Abbas Zamini, the technical affairs chief for the Iranian navy, said Iran would also construct nuclear submarines.
The latter statement, of course, predated Secretary of State John Kerry’s nuclear talks with Iran, but it also is potentially the most dangerous. The problem isn’t that Iran can actually build nuclear submarines—they can hardly manage their diesel submarines—but rather moral equivalency: Some U.S. nuclear submarines operate on highly-enriched uranium and so any nuclear-powered ship work might provide Iran with an excuse to enrich uranium to bomb-grade even without admitting that its goal is a nuclear weapon.
Kerry’s negotiation collapse may have won him the spotlight and advanced his desire for a Nobel Prize, but basically came at the cost both of $100 billion in sanctions relief and new investment and the collapse of an international front carefully crafted by years of sanctions and UN Security Council Resolutions pushed through unanimously or near unanimously. Iran’s nuclear navy talk might be bluster, but, behind the rhetoric, there is a very real danger.