How the US helped create Iran’s nuclear programme

WASHINGTON – When US President Donald Trump ordered a military strike on Iran’s nuclear programme, he was confronting a crisis that the US unwittingly set in motion decades ago by providing Iran with the seeds of nuclear technology.

Tucked into the northern suburbs of Tehran, the Iranian capital, is a small nuclear reactor used for peaceful scientific purposes, which has so far not been a target of Israel’s campaign to eliminate Iran’s nuclear weapons capability.

The Tehran Research Reactor’s real significance is symbolic: It was shipped to Iran by the US in the 1960s, part of then president Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace programme that shared nuclear technology with US allies eager to modernise their economies and move closer to Washington in a world divided by the Cold War.

Today, the reactor does not contribute to Iran’s enrichment of uranium, the arduous process that purifies the raw ingredient of nuclear bombs into a state that can sustain a massive chain reaction.

It runs on nuclear fuel far too weak to power a bomb. Several other nations, including Pakistan, bear at least as much responsibility for Iran’s march to the threshold of nuclear weapons capability, experts say.

But the Tehran reactor is also a monument to the way the US introduced Iran – then governed by a secular, pro-Western monarch – to nuclear technology.

Iran’s nuclear programme quickly became an object of national pride, first as an engine of economic growth and later, to the West’s dismay, as a potential source of ultimate military power.

It is a legacy of a dramatically different world, one in which the US had yet to grasp how fast the nuclear secrets it unlocked at the end of World War II would pose a threat to the US.

“We gave Iran its starter kit,” said Mr Robert Einhorn, a former arms control official who worked on US negotiations with Iran to limit its nuclear programme.

“We weren’t terribly concerned about nuclear proliferation in those days, so we were pretty promiscuous about transferring nuclear technology,” said Mr Einhorn, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

“We got other countries started in the nuclear business.”

Atoms for Peace was born of a speech Mr Eisenhower delivered at the United Nations in December 1953, in which he warned of the dangers of a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union and vowed to lead the world “out of this dark chamber of horrors into the light”.

Mr Eisenhower explained that the world should better understand such a destructive technology, and that its secrets should be shared and put to constructive use.

“It is not enough just to take this weapon out of the hands of the soldiers,” he said. “It must be put into the hands of those who will know how to strip its military casing and adapt it to the arts of peace”.

The gesture was more than altruistic. Many historians argue that Mr Eisenhower was providing cover for an American nuclear arms buildup already under way.

He was also influenced by scientists, including Dr J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had helped to develop the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan less than a decade earlier.

Mr Einhorn said: “It was their contrition for participating in the development of the bomb.”

The Eisenhower administration also saw the programme as a way to gain influence over important pieces on the global Cold War chessboard.

They included Israel, Pakistan and Iran, which were given nuclear information, training and equipment to be used for peaceful purposes, such as science, medicine and energy.

The Iran that received an American research reactor in 1967 was very different from the country ruled today by clerics and generals.

It was led then by a monarch, or shah, Mr Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a Swiss-educated aristocrat installed in a 1953 coup backed by the Central Intelligence Agency, to the lasting anger of many Iranians.

Mr Pahlavi was determined to modernise his nation and make it a world power, with US backing.

He liberalised Iranian society, promoting secularism and Western education even as he harshly repressed political opposition.

He banned the woman’s veil and promoted modern art – Andy Warhol once painted his portrait – while investing in literacy and infrastructure.

Kick-started by Atoms for Peace, Mr Pahlavi budgeted billions of dollars for an Iranian nuclear programme that he saw as a guarantee of his country’s energy independence, despite its existing vast oil production, and a source of national pride.

The US welcomed young Iranian scientists to special nuclear training courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Expanding its programme in the 1970s, Iran struck deals with its European allies. During a visit to Paris in 1974, Mr Pahlavi was celebrated at Versailles before signing a billion-dollar agreement to purchase five 1,000-megawatt nuclear reactors from France.

At first, the shah was a poster boy for the peaceful use of nuclear power. A group of New England utility companies put out full-page advertisements featuring an image of the shah, who was then widely admired in the US.

Mr Pahlavi “wouldn’t build the plants now if he doubted their safety”, the ad said. “He’d wait. As many Americans want to do.”

But although the US had persuaded Iran to sign the 1968 Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, in which the country accepted international safeguards and officials forswore nuclear weapons, suspicions about Mr Pahlavi’s intentions were growing in Washington.

A New York Times article in 1974 noted that Iran’s reactor deal with France made “no public mention of safeguards against using the reactors as a base for making nuclear weapons”.

Soon, the shah was talking about Iran’s “right” to produce nuclear fuel at home, a capability that can also be applied to nuclear weapons development.

He denounced discussions about outside limits on Iran’s nuclear activity as a violation of national sovereignty – talking points still used by Iran’s leadership.

As Washington expressed greater concern, Mr Pahlavi turned to a wider range of nations for nuclear assistance: Germany would build more reactors, and South Africa would supply raw uranium, or “yellowcake”.

By 1978, the Carter administration was alarmed enough to insist that an Iranian contract to purchase eight American reactors be amended.

The new version would prohibit Iran from reprocessing without permission any US-supplied fuel for its nuclear reactors into a form that could be used for nuclear weapons.

The American reactors were never delivered. In 1979, the Islamic Revolution, fuelled in part by hatred of the US and its support for the shah, swept across Iran and deposed Mr Pahlavi.

For a time, the problem of Iran’s nuclear ambitions seemed to have solved itself. Iran’s new clerical rulers, led by Mr Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, initially showed little interest in continuing an expensive project associated with the shah and Western powers.

But after a brutal eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s, Mr Khomeini reconsidered the value of nuclear technology.

This time, Iran turned east – to Pakistan, another Atoms for Peace beneficiary that was by then within a decade of testing a nuclear bomb.

The Pakistani scientist and nuclear black marketeer Abdul Qadeer Khan sold Iran centrifuges to enrich uranium to bomb-grade levels of purity.

Iran’s acquisition of centrifuges was the real reason its nuclear programme escalated into a global crisis, said Dr Gary Samore, the top White House nuclear official in the Clinton and Obama administrations.

“Iran’s enrichment programme is not the result of US assistance,” Dr Samore said. “The Iranians got their centrifuge technology from Pakistan, and they have developed their centrifuges based on that Pakistani technology – which itself was based on European designs.”

But those centrifuges were put to use by an Iranian nuclear establishment created by the US decades earlier.

For years, Iran secretly advanced its nuclear programme, building more centrifuges and enriching uranium that could one day be fashioned into a bomb.

After Iran’s secret nuclear facilities were exposed in 2002, the US and its European allies demanded that the country stop its enrichment and come clean about its nuclear activities.

After more than 20 years of diplomacy – and now air strikes by Israel and the US – the confrontation remains unresolved. Despite Mr Trump’s initial claims that the June 21 bombing raid “totally obliterated” three Iranian nuclear sites, portions remain intact.

The US can still learn from its painful experience, Dr Samore said.

The Trump administration has continued negotiations, begun under US President Joe Biden, for the potential transfer of US nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia – another Middle East ally ruled by a strongman with grand ambitions for modernising his nation.

It has been US policy for decades not to share the know-how to produce nuclear fuel – which can also be used to make bombs – with countries that do not already have it, Dr Samore noted.

“And we’ve gone out of our way to block allies, including South Korea, from acquiring fuel enrichment and reprocessing capabilities,” he said.

The Saudis are ostensibly seeking the ability to enrich uranium for nuclear power.

“But this kind of technology can also be used for nuclear weapons,” Dr Samore added.

“And from my standpoint, it would be a terrible precedent to help a country like Saudi Arabia, or any country that doesn’t have that capability.” NYTIMES