Iran’s Presidential election on Friday will be a decisive verdict by public to reflect on whether they want to keep hard-line President Ahmadinejad in power or replace him with Mir Hossein Mousavi, a reformist more open to closer ties with the West. One of the major issues that dominated the Iranian Presidential campaigns is the future of its nuclear programme… President Ahmadinejad during his press briefings averred that, we won’t hold any talks [on the matter] before the elections… they’re insisting on starting before the elections.” He further went on to claim that US President Barack Obama had “called a number of times, and also agreed to wait with the talks until after the elections.”
President Ahmadinejad’s campaign was marked by his strongly worded defense of Iran’s nuclear program, his declared ambition to make Iran one of the world’s most powerful nations. While attacking his rival the hardliner president criticized as “disgraceful” a 2003 deal his predecessor reached with Europe to freeze the country’s nuclear program, saying his own decision to stand up to the West restored Iran’s dignity.
Ahmadinejad’s main challengers advocate better relations with the United States. They promise to ensure that Iran's nuclear program will have strictly peaceful purposes. Mir Hossein Mousavi, a former prime minister who is backed mainly by Tehran's educated urban elite, has stressed that he would calm international opposition to Iran's nuclear program by providing guarantees -- which he has not specified -- that Iran will not turn its research on atomic energy into an effort to build nuclear weapons. The administration of former President Mohammad Khatami, a reformist who favors improving ties with the West, struck a deal with Britain, France and Germany in October 2003 to suspend Iran’s uranium enrichment program and give the UN nuclear watchdog unrestricted access to the country's nuclear facilities. The deal, which was signed at Sa'adabad Palace in Teheran, was aimed at easing Western fears that Iran was seeking to build nuclear weapons - a charge Teheran has denied. Uranium enrichment can produce fuel for a nuclear reactor or material for a bomb.
Meanwhile demonstrating the increasing sophistication with its medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs), Iran carried out its first successful flight test of a two-stage solid-fuel ballistic missiles on May 20. The test “shows that Iran has a major program on solid-propellant missiles,” former UN weapons inspector Geoffrey Forden said in a May 20 e-mail. Iran is believed to have deployed an extended-range version of its Shahab-3 missile. That missile has an estimated range of about 2,000 kilometers, making it capable of reaching parts of eastern and southeastern Europe.
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Asian Nuclear, Missile & Space Digest - Vol 1, No. 34
Space Security: Need for a Proactive Approach
India in a Changing Global Nuclear Order