 Iran seems to be caught between a rock and a hard place. Its people want quick economic progress while those in power insist on pursuing the controversial nuclear program. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran is now serving a second term in office. The former mayor of Tehran became the first non-cleric to be elected president after defeating former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani in 2005. Much as the world then expected a liberal to occupy the country's presidential office, it turned out that he represented Iran's hardline face as he did not see the development or reform of political institutions with a favorable eye, he was certainly not pro-West and held a strongly aggressive view on the country's nuclear program. A vast majority of Iranians supported him then.
When he fought elections again in 2009, the public mood had changed and he scraped through with a narrow victory against the moderate Mir Hossein Mousavi. The fact that the former prime minister gave Ahmadinejad a tough time reflects the newly emerging national outlook - namely, that the people would like the country to tread the middle path and come out of the partial isolation that it has existed in since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
The revolution euphoria of 1979 had presented Iran as a country where everything was going its way after the clerics had forced the Shah out and had systematically eliminated his supporters. The social landscape is said to have evolved progressively over the years. For one thing, Iran's population has almost doubled in the last three decades. In demographic terms, Iran is a young nation now, considering that almost 70% of its citizens are below 30. Iran also has one of the highest literacy rates in the Muslim world - over 85% - which means that today's generation is better educated than the previous ones. The only problem is that most of these educated young are unemployed - a factor that gives rise to a general sense of discontent among the people.
The higher education levels have created in the people the desire to come out of the narrow world view that their elders held and despite the state not having a favorable stance on the people's appetite to openly communicate with the rest of the world, there are currently some 700,000 weblogs in the Persian language ruling the Internet. Iranians would like their government to have normal relations with the rest of the world, including America and rather than having a religious autocracy, they desire their country's governance to be more liberalized.
What has kept Iran in focus over the past years is mainly its stand on its nuclear program. Iran is one of the world's major oil-rich states and most Iranians feel it should make more headway by taking advantage of this wealth rather on developing nuclear capability.
The Iranian nuclear program was launched in the 1950s with the help of the United States. The support, encouragement and participation of the United States and Western European governments to the program continued until the 1979 Islamic revolution that toppled the Shah of Iran. After the Revolution, the Iranian government temporarily disbanded elements of the program and then revived it with less Western assistance. The program currently comprises several research sites, a uranium mine, a nuclear reactor and uranium processing facilities that include three known uranium enrichment plants.
The first nuclear power plant, Bushehr I, was expected to be operational in 2009. There are no current plans to complete the Bushehr II reactor, although construction of 19 nuclear power plants is envisaged. Iran has announced that it is working on a new 360 MWe nuclear power plant to be located in Darkhovin. The government has also indicated that it will seek more medium-sized nuclear power plants and uranium mines for the future.
The controversy over Iran's nuclear program is focused in particular on the failure to declare sensitive enrichment and reprocessing activities to the IAEA. Enrichment can be used to produce uranium for reactor fuel or (at higher enrichment levels) for weapons. Iran says its nuclear program is peaceful and has enriched uranium to less than five percent, consistent with fuel for a civilian nuclear power plant. Iran also claims that it was forced to resort to secrecy after U.S. pressure caused several of its nuclear contracts with foreign governments to fall through.
After the IAEA Board of Governors reported Iran's non-compliance with its safeguards agreement to the UN Security Council, the Council demanded that it suspend its nuclear enrichment activities while Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has argued that the sanctions are "illegal," imposed by "arrogant powers," and that Iran has decided to pursue the monitoring of its self-described peaceful nuclear program through "its appropriate legal path," the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Iran's nuclear program is said to be based on three pillars: one, perception of security threats from regional powers such as Israel as well as from the United States; two, domestic economic and political dynamics; and three, national pride.
Iranian officials are said to have little confidence in the international community because of its behavior during the Iran-Iraq War in the ‘80s. The larger and more highly populated Iran had the upper hand in the war but to close the geographic and demographic gap, Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Iranian troops and civilians. These weapons killed and injured thousands of Iranians and played a major role in turning the war in favor of Iraq. The international community was notably indifferent, doing little to condemn Iraq or to protect Iran.
 Shahram Chubin, Director of Studies at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, asserts that in response to this, "Iran has learned from its war with Iraq that, for deterrence to operate, the threatening state must be confronted with the certainty of an equivalent response. The threat of in-kind retaliation (or worse) deterred Iraq's use of chemical weapons in Desert Storm; it appears that the absence of such a retaliatory capability facilitated its decision to use chemical weapons against Iran."
The Iranian authorities still deny seeking a nuclear weapons capacity for deterrence or retaliation since Iran's level of technological progress cannot match that of existing nuclear weapons states and the acquisition of nuclear weapons would only spark an arms race in the Middle East.
President Ahmadinejad, in an interview with NBC in 2008, dismissed the utility of nuclear weapons as a source of security: "... did nuclear arms help the Soviet Union from falling and disintegrating? For that matter, did a nuclear bomb help the U.S. to prevail inside Iraq or Afghanistan? Nuclear bombs belong to the 20th century. We are living in a new century... nuclear energy must not be equaled to a nuclear bomb. This is a disservice to the society of man.
The people of Iran also feel that the country should not focus at all on acquiring or developing nuclear weapons and should instead work on developing its capabilities in trade and commerce and encourage investment to create more jobs. They do not see a future dominant power role for their country and want good relations with other players in the region; to them the area of greater concern is fast-track development of the economy. They believe that their nation's future prosperity hinges on nothing else but economic progress and they can make great headway if the rulers keep their obduracy on the nuclear program aside and take full advantage of the country's oil wealth, geographical location and educated manpower. 
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