All five permanent council members—the governments of the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Russia, and China—who have veto power, backed the resolution. Only the government of Qatar, which is serving a rotating post on the council, voted against.

Washington and its imperialist allies in Europe have been at the center of a campaign to pressure Iran to forfeit its right to produce enriched uranium—an essential component both of fuel for atomic energy and in the production of nuclear weapons—and depend on imported uranium. The right to produce nuclear fuel for atomic energy is codified in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), to which Iran is a signer.

Former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger wrote in a July 31 column in the Washington Post that this step “should be the elaboration of a global system of nuclear enrichment to take place in designated centers around the world under international control—as proposed for Iran by Russia.” Kissinger said this will “establish a pattern for the development of nuclear energy without a crisis with each entrant into the nuclear field.”

Kissinger’s proposal would mean control of the production of nuclear fuel and of its distribution by a small number of states, largely the imperialist powers, most of which possess not only a nuclear energy industry but nuclear weapons too.

“No one in today’s world can accept the convoluted logic that it is okay for some to have nuclear weapons, while others are prevented from developing nuclear energy,” Iran’s UN representative, Javad Zarif, said at the July 31 Security Council meeting. He listed a string of examples of how the Security Council was being used as a tool by the imperialist powers against Iran and other semicolonial countries.

“The Iranian people’s struggle to nationalize their oil industry was touted, in a draft resolution submitted on 12 October 1951, by the United Kingdom and supported by the United States and France, as a threat to international peace and security,” Zarif said. “That draft resolution preceded a coup d’etat, organized by the U.S and the UK…. The people of Iran did, nevertheless, succeed in nationalizing the oil industry, thus pioneering a courageous movement in the developing world to demand their inalienable right to exercise sovereignty over their natural resources.”

Zarif was referring to the 1953 CIA-sponsored coup that toppled the government of Iran’s prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq, who two years earlier had overseen the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian oil company, the British monopoly that controlled all of Iran’s oil wealth. The U.S.-imposed regime, which ruled Iran for the next 26 years, was unable to reverse the nationalization, which was immensely popular.

“In the past few years, a few big powers have spared no effort in turning the Security Council, or the threat of resorting to it, into a tool for attempting to prevent Iran from exercising its inalienable right to nuclear technology for peaceful purposes,” Zarif said.

Zarif noted that the UN Security Council has said nothing while the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel have issued threats to use military force against Iran.

He added that Iran’s nuclear installations have faced “the most robust inspection of any IAEA [the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency] member state.” He said this included “more than 2,000 inspector-days of scrutiny in the past three years” along with “over 53 instances of complementary access to different sites across the country” and “repeated access to military sites.”

After all of that, Zarif pointed out, the IAEA has stated repeatedly that it has found no evidence of a nuclear weapons program.

The Iranian government insists it is developing a nuclear industry to meet the country’s growing energy needs in order to end dependency on oil, the supplies of which are diminishing worldwide.

“All Iranian power plants are now generating electricity from fossil fuel such as gas, gasoline, and mazut [heavy fuel oil] but they cannot meet the country’s future demands,” Iran’s energy minister, Parviz Fattah, told the media in April, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency. “We are duty-bound to generate electricity and for this reason we have to meet our demands by making use of nuclear energy.”

Iran’s population has doubled since the revolution in 1979, when working people toppled the U.S.-backed regime of the shah. But the country’s oil production is now 70 percent of the 1979 level. Two-thirds of the residents of the 30,000 smallest rural villages in Iran’s countryside do not have access to electricity today.
 
 
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