October 28, 2015 | Quote

Former Iran President Indirectly Admits Country Sought Nuclear Weapons

Former Iranian President Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani indirectly admitted that his country started a nuclear weapons program during the Iran-Iraq war.

According to interviews Rafsanjani gave to Iranian media in recent days, he and supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei personally wanted to meet the man behind Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan. The Iranians held talks with the scientist.

The NCRI said that the former Iranian president acknowledged that from the beginning there was a comprehensive clandestine nuclear plan.

“At the time that we started, we were at war and we were looking to have this capability [the nuclear bomb] for the day that our enemy would want to resort to the nuclear bomb,” said Rafsanjani in the interview.“

Our basic doctrine was peaceful usage of the nuclear technology although we never abandoned the idea that if one day we are threatened and it is imperative, we would have the capability for going the other path [to a nuclear weapon] as well.”

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According to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies Iran Project, Rafsanjani gave a separate interview to Etemad, also discussing the history of the country’s nuclear program.

“At some point, we lost faith in the Germans and began thinking of alternative approaches. We had talks with the Pakistanis, a scientist called Mr. Abd al-Qadir Khan [A.Q. Khan].”

“At any rate, it was agreed that they should help us a bit – for example, by delivering second-hand first-generation centrifuges, along with some designs – so that we could build it ourselves,” said Rafsanjani.

He also said that at the beginning of their enrichment work, they used Pakistani equipment and placed “a workshop next to it in order to build the components ourselves.”

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Issues:

Iran