Publication

For years a group of six nations – Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States – has been working on curbing Iran’s nuclear programme, which is widely suspected of having military ends. As Iran continues to defy UN requests to halt sensitive nuclear activities and intensify cooperation with the UN nuclear watchdog, the group’s approach, based on a combination of sanctions and incentives, has come in for growing criticism. However, while the approach is perfectible, its rationale is still valid. A scrutiny of the empirical evidence available and a plausible analysis of Iran’s behaviour throughout the nuclear dispute period seem to indicate that its leadership has yet to take a final decision on whether to go nuclear.