Symbolic gestures won’t deter this regime

Times online UK ^ | Amir Taheri

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Iran has pursued its nuclear project with a strategy inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s story The Purloined Letter. In that short story, the police fail to find a stolen letter because they think it must be elaborately hidden. Instead, the thief outwits them by placing it right under their noses.

To those who have followed the evolution of Iran’s military doctrine since the 1980s, the leak to The Times of confidential intelligence documents indicating that Iran is working on a key final component of a nuclear bomb comes as no surprise. The regime in Tehran has not hidden its nuclear ambitions.

The Ayatollah Khomeini in 1988 ordered a resumption of Iran’s “frozen” nuclear project. The Islamic Republic, then at war with Iraq, believed that Saddam Hussein was on a fast track to build the bomb. Although the war ended in 1988, the nuclear project continued at increasing pace. In 1992, acquisition of a nuclear arsenal became one of the three pillars of Iran’s “defence doctrine”, alongside the creation of a mass infantry, the so-called 20-million-man army and the largest missiles stockpile in the Middle East.

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I think it's too late for sanctions alone, Mr Taheri