Tehran: the next earthquake in the Islamic Republic of Iran?

Abstract

Ever since the 1979 Islamic revolution and the return of Ayatollah Khomeini, Tehran, the capital city of Iran, has been much in the news because of the anti-Western theocratic rule of its current Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamene'i, and the behavior of the previous President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad, principally because of worldwide concern that the Islamic Republic of Iran is developing nuclear weapons to use against Israel. The comings and goings of several Iranian presidents over the past few decades, whether hardliners or moderates, have been against the backdrop of the Supreme Leader, supported by the Revolutionary Guards, who is the final authority. Today's president, Hassan Rouhani, appears to be in favor of rapprochement with the West, and a diplomatic solution is now being considered by Iran and Western nations. However, the focus here is on the potential for a devastating earthquake that would destroy much of Tehran and have a major effect on the politics and balance of power of the Middle East. Tehran's earthquake potential has largely gone unrecognized by the media, the general public, and, with one notable exception, Iran's leadership. Iran is an Islamic country but with some qualifications. First, the country is home to significant minority populations of Zoroastrians, Jews, and Christians. Second, the Iranians, historically called Persians, are not Arabs; most of them speak their own language, Farsi. The Persian people have a much older cultural history than the Arabs who swept through the country in the seventh century AD. The first Persian empire was that of the Medes in the seventh century BC, followed by the Achaemenid Empire of Cyrus the Great and Darius. That empire in the sixth century BC was the first world empire, extending from the Indus River of modern Pakistan to the Nile River of Egypt and the Aegean Sea, where the Persian wars against Greece included the burning of the city of Athens in 480 BC. The Achaemenids were conquered by Alexander the Great, who established the Greek-influenced Seleucid Empire, which was itself overthrown by another Persian dynasty, the Parthian Empire, in the third century BC. The Parthians and, later, the Sassanians were in frequent conflict with Rome, but Rome never conquered Persia.