After the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear technology came to be seen as both an existential threat and a potential tool for improving daily life, the account said.
That vision underpinned President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1953 “Atoms for Peace” initiative, described as a risky attempt to balance war and peace and to reconcile state secrecy with international cooperation on civilian atomic research.
Iran, then ruled by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and closely aligned with Washington, joined the program. In 1957, Iran signed an agreement with the United States on cooperation in research into the peaceful use of nuclear energy, the text said.
Under the arrangement, talented young Iranian scientists were sent to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, including women who were to make up a quarter of the nuclear program’s staff, it said. The United States supplied Tehran’s Nuclear Research Center with a 5-megawatt research reactor fueled by enriched uranium, which went critical in 1967.
In the following decade, the shah drew up plans to build 23 nuclear power plants by 2000 and deepened cooperation with Western European countries that began building additional reactors, the account said. Although Iran was an early signatory of the 1970 nuclear non-proliferation treaty, Pahlavi’s ambitions fueled growing U.S. distrust.
In 1978, the administration of newly elected President Jimmy Carter sought changes to a contract for Iran to purchase eight U.S. reactors, aiming to include clauses that would bar Iran, without U.S. consent, from processing reactor fuel in ways that could be used to produce material for nuclear weapons, it said. The deal was never implemented after the 1979 Islamic Revolution toppled the shah and severed relations with Washington.
The new regime initially showed little interest in the costly nuclear program associated with the West, the text said, but changed course after the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Iran bought components for uranium-enrichment centrifuges from Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, according to the account. Pakistan, itself once a beneficiary of “Atoms for Peace,” has said it was not involved in the transaction.
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Source: Polish Radio