The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the State of Iran
by Yossi Melman and Meir Javedanfar
Carroll & Graf $25.95, 336 pages

In the mid-1970s US corporations adopted the late Shah of Iran as the poster boy for a campaign to promote the virtues of nuclear power. ”Guess who is building nuclear power plants?” the publicity gushed. ”The Shah of Iran... knows the oil is running out - and time with it. But he wouldn’t build the plants if he doubted their safety.”

Iran’s current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who shares the Shah’s tendency to megalomania, has similarly embraced a nuclear energy programme that thinly disguises an ambition to produce a bomb.

In The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran, Israeli authors Yossi Melman and Meir Javedanfar assess the dangers posed by the man and the project to their own country, to the Middle Eastern region and to the world.

Israel has warned for years about the dangers of a resurgent Iran. Indeed, the writers discovered that the Israeli authorities were pleased about Ahmadinejad’s emergence as such a persuasive personification of this threat.

”If he did not exist, we should have invented someone like him,” they quote top officials as saying.

The book is based on interviews with Israeli politicians and former spies, and an exhaustive trawl of the Iranian blogosphere (the Iranians are such online enthusiasts that Farsi is now the world’s fourth most used internet language). But the authors have little new to add to Ahmadinejad’s somewhat hazy biography. No one yet seems able to give a definitive answer to whether he was among students who seized the US embassy in Tehran in 1979.

Iran’s president emerges as a somewhat grey figure, more bureaucrat than revolutionary. What concerns the authors is his evident Messianism - a belief that the end of the world is at hand and that the prophesied redeemer Shia Mahdi is about to return. They fear Ahmadinejad and his circle might try to hasten the day of judgment with a nuclear war.

The West has a history of branding its enemies as crazy. The Iranian president is no exception. He certainly has some strange allies. They include the cleric Ayatollah Meshkini, who, the book says, once claimed the hidden Mahdi himself had signed off a list of newly elected conservative MPs. The president is also close to the Hojjatieh society, a troublesome sect of ultras whose activities have so far, mercifully, focused on the victimisation of religious minorities rather than planning a nuclear holocaust.

It might be, of course, that the Sphinx of Tehran is having us on, playing the fool’s role in an elaborate game of chess. What advantage the Iranian leader would hope to secure in such a game is, so far, ill-defined.

Harvey Morris is the FT’s Jerusalem bureau chief.