Iran's nuclear activities far predate the current crisis and even Iran's Islamic Republic. Understanding the history of Iran's atomic program and the role of the West in its founding is important for any analysis of both the political and technical disputes of the current crisis. Indeed, Iran's accusations in recent years of double standards and discrimination by the United States and international community are rooted in the support that the West lent to the Iranian monarchy but then withdrew after the Islamic Revolution,1 helping to spur Iran's drive for nuclear self-sufficiency that continues to this day.
The Shah and the Cold War
With Iran's strategic location and vast oil reserves, its international standing has long been a function of its relationships with the great powers. Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi succeeded his father to the throne of Iran during World War II, and during the Cold War became a key ally of the United States, which in 1953 collaborated with the British in instigating a coup against democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in the Shah's favor.
Until the Shah's overthrow in 1979, the United States propped up his sultanistic regime, providing considerable military and economic aid including assistance for the development of Iran's infrastructure and energy sector. From the early 1950s until 1979, tens of thousands of students-myself included-were sent to the United States each year to receive education at American schools and universities in all fields, including medicine, nuclear physics, networks for communications, and all aspects of engineering and dam building, as well as all forms of business, banking, and commerce. This large group of American-educated Iranians still plays a constructive role in Iran.
Such was American influence over Iran that the country's foreign policies were largely dictated by its membership in the anticommunist bloc. The United States brought Iran tightly into the fold of its Cold War alliance system, including through the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) that Iran signed with American-allied Iraq, Turkey, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom. President Richard Nixon and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, referred to Iran as "the linchpin of stability in the Middle East."2
What the U.S. government did not do was urge the Shah to allow a democratic political process or enact a just system under the rule of law. Doing so could have prevented the 1979 revolution in Iran and could have had huge positive consequences for the long-term partnership between Iran and the West and specifically the United States. Instead, the Shah's regime became increasingly unpopular and was perceived as brutal and deeply corrupt. Efforts made by the U.S. government in the late 1970s to persuade the Shah to open up the political system to democratic governance were too late to be effective. To the end, the Pahlavi regime remained an autocracy. Although he relied on the counsel of a coterie of trusted advisers, the Shah was the ultimate decisionmaker for all of the state's policies, foreign and domestic.
Iran-West Nuclear Cooperation
before the Islamic Revolution
The United States Laid the Foundation for a Nuclear Iran
The year 1956 is considered the starting point of Iran's interest in nuclear energy. It was then that the Iranian government's negotiations with the White House resulted in the first agreement for the nonmilitary use of nuclear energy, which was concluded in 1957,3 the year I was born. The agreement, which laid a framework for nuclear collaboration between Iran and the United States, consisted of a preamble and eleven articles that were ratified by the National Consultative Assembly on February 1, 1959. Made possible by the general alignment between Tehran's and Washington's economic and political interests, and the spirit of the American Atoms for Peace initiative, the agreement laid the foundation for a nuclear Iran.
Existing evidence shows that despite relative sensitivity of the White House toward the possibility of diversion of Iran's nuclear program to military use, that concern was not expressed as seriously with Iran as with some other countries. The United States was supportive of enrichment facilities in Iran but skeptical about plutonium reprocessing, though the Shah firmly pushed for the development of both technologies in Iran. The United States had also set rules for nuclear cooperation with other countries that were enforced through bilateral agreements. Those rules, which put special emphasis on disposal of spent nuclear fuel, constituted a model for organized cooperation to address concerns about possible diversion.
As nuclear cooperation between Tehran and Washington developed, the Nuclear Science Institute of CENTO was relocated from Baghdad to Tehran in 1957 and based at the University of Tehran. The institute admitted students from Iran and other countries, including Turkey and Pakistan, and was a forerunner to the Tehran Nuclear Research Center, which was formally established by Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1959. Later on, U.S. President John F. Kennedy, in accordance with the Atoms for Peace agenda, endorsed the construction of a five-megawatt (MW) research reactor in Tehran. Known as the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR), it used highly enriched uranium to produce radioactive isotopes for medical uses and plutonium production.
Iran signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968, on the very day the NPT opened for signature. The Tehran Research Reactor finally came into operation in November 1967 after six years of construction. The United States delivered 5.54 kg of highly enriched uranium and 112 grams of plutonium to the University of Tehran in September 1967,4 signaling a turning point in the Iranian government's ten years of nuclear activities. Using the Tehran Research Reactor and banking on hot cell facilities,5 which had been given to Iran by the United States to separate plutonium, Tehran eventually came up with a long-term plan for the all-out development of nuclear technology. The plan included the manufacture of accelerators and establishment of a nuclear medicine center at the University of Tehran.6 The Shah also signed nuclear cooperation agreements with other countries. For example, Iran signed a scientific cooperation agreement with Canada ensuring support for the development of Iran's nuclear activities, especially "nuclear equipment, materials, and facilities." The agreement was signed on January 7, 1972, and underlined the need for "free access to equipment and facilities" by both countries' scientists as well as bilateral "scientific visits."
Meanwhile, the prospect of greater export revenue from elevated global oil prices in 1973 and 1974, in addition to considerations of Iran's political weight in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East, prompted Iran's government to take serious measures to use nuclear technology for domestic power generation.7 With U.S. encouragement, the Shah in March 1974 announced plans to generate 23,000 MW of nuclear energy within twenty years, beginning with two reactors at Bushehr, and to acquire a full nuclear fuel cycle-including facilities to enrich uranium, fabricate fuel, and reprocess spent fuel.8The Nixon administration was eager to take part in this plan. Dixy Lee Ray, the chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, was sent to Tehran in May 1974 and offered to provide a "clearinghouse" for Iranian investments. According to a recently declassified State Department memo, she "urged Iran to embark on the job as soon as possible."9
The Shah's government reached an agreement in 1974 with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the education of a large number of Iranian students in the field of nuclear technology. Iran provided MIT with millions of dollars in funding, and MIT admitted dozens of Iranian students for a three-year master's program. Ali Akbar Salehi, Iran's foreign minister and the former president of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization (from 2009 to 2010), earned his Ph.D. from MIT in the late 1970s, though not as part of this special program.10
This push for progress in nuclear technology and expertise was viewed as essential for the achievement of Iran's development goals and was even recommended by some American politicians. The Stanford Research Institute, which Iran's Plan and Budget Organization commissioned in 1974 to formulate the country's "Twenty-Year Vision Plan," recommended that the government diligently follow plans for power generation from a variety of sources. The institute's report, which in twenty volumes addressed Iran's economic, social, and cultural development plans, advised the Iranian government to take all necessary measures to generate 20,000 MW of nuclear power in twenty years (from 1974 to 1994).
The decision to commit to "nuclear power generation" was a watershed moment, entailing other significant steps, including the establishment of the Iran Atomic Energy Organization (IAEO). The IAEO was charged with developing civilian nuclear science and technology, building the country's nuclear infrastructure, and managing international nuclear cooperation and representation, including through the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Considerable resources were poured into the organization as nuclear energy emerged as a symbol of national pride and modernization. On the Shah's order, its employees were the most highly paid in the government. By 1976, the IAEO's budget was $1.3 billion, the largest of any public economic institution except Iran's state oil company.11
Nuclear power generation was one of the most important goals of the IAEO. The available evidence indicates that the Iranian government pursued short- and long-term plans to supply nuclear fuel to power plants. Purchasing fuel was the most important short-term strategy, while mastering the nuclear fuel cycle and fuel production was the country's long-term goal. Thus, extensive negotiations were undertaken with foreign partners for the purchase of enrichment technology and equipment in parallel to Iran's signing of nuclear fuel purchase contracts with the United States, West Germany, and France in the mid-1970s. Iran dispatched specialists to Western countries, and the IAEO hired scientists from the United States, United Kingdom, India, and Argentina to help build local nuclear fuel-cycle capability. These foreign scientists, hired by the IAEO as advisers, played a significant role in technology transfer and the buildup of domestic nuclear capability.12
Before the Islamic Revolution, Western countries, including the United States, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Canada, by and large supported Iran's nuclear activities; indeed, they competed for lucrative nuclear projects to nuclearize Iran. Iran followed short- and long-term strategies to develop nuclear power generation and build a nuclear fuel-cycle capability. Following the logic of Atoms for Peace and widespread expectations that nuclear energy would fuel global development and bring profits to exporters, Western countries encouraged the Iranian government's nuclear ambitions. The economic attraction to industrialized countries of selling Iran nuclear power plants initially was powerful enough to brush aside any concern about possible deviation toward a military nuclear program.13 Some believe that the Carter administration strengthened U.S. nonproliferation policy as it applied to Iran,14 but from a geopolitical perspective, the dependence of the Pahlavi dynasty on the United States, as well as Iran's situation in the Middle East as envisaged by the White House, added strategic importance to nuclear collaboration between Iran and the United States. It also meant that Mohammad Reza Shah's late efforts to build nuclear weapons would be largely ignored until his downfall.15
The U.S. offer, details of which appear in declassified documents reviewed by the Washington Post, proves that the United States tried to accommodate Iranian demands for plutonium reprocessing, which produces the key ingredient of a bomb. According to the newspaper, after balking initially, President Gerald R. Ford signed a directive in 1976 offering Tehran the chance to buy and operate a U.S.-built reprocessing facility for extracting plutonium from nuclear reactor fuel. The deal was for a complete "nuclear fuel cycle"-reactors powered by and regenerating fissile materials on a self-sustaining basis. That is precisely the ability the current administration is trying to prevent Iran from acquiring today.16
The United States laid the foundation for a nuclear Iran. The first nuclear test by India in 1974, however, created an international crisis about nuclear proliferation that prompted a pullback and eventually led to the ratification of relevant regulations by the U.S. Congress in 1978. Although that pullback was also extended to Tehran, Iran was in practice usually treated with more lenience.17 While Secretary of State Henry Kissinger initially pursued a policy of restricting fuel-cycle technology to a few centers internationally, he never protested Mohammad Reza Shah's obvious efforts to enrich uranium (revealed by, among other things, Iran's role in prospecting for uranium at mines in Namibia).
U.S. National Security Council documents declassified in the second half of the 1990s clearly prove that the United States pursued two goals in its negotiations with Iran during the 1970s. The first was to allow the establishment of fuel reprocessing facilities in Iran that would be used by other regional states. The second was to prevent Pakistan from building independent nuclear facilities by securing Islamabad's agreement to commission plutonium reprocessing facilities in Iran.18
Washington did its best to advance U.S. economic interests through its nuclear cooperation with Iran. This was done by imposing regulations to guarantee the United States exclusive rights and through the imposition of special contracts. Akbar Etemad, the former head of the IAEO, said in a 1997 interview that Iran was obliged to accede to U.S. regulations, which were designed to guarantee Washington's economic interests and its control over Iran's lucrative nuclear activities.
During that period, the United States had indicated its readiness to sell eight light-water reactors to Tehran and also to provide Iran with complete facilities to build several additional nuclear power plants. This deal, whose economic value has been estimated at $6.4 billion,19 was signed after a number of prominent congressmen visited Iran in the mid-1970s with a letter from President Ford addressed to the Shah calling for the speedy implementation of the agreement.
A 1976 Ford strategy paper noted that the "introduction of nuclear power will both provide for the growing needs of Iran's economy and free remaining oil reserves for export or conversion to petrochemicals." Etemad recounted this cooperation from the Iranian perspective:
Iran and the U.S. established a joint economic cooperation commission, of which I was a member. . . . Iran was obliged to purchase eight nuclear power plants according to that contract, although this was not our initial mission. . . . This issue was never put up for discussion in commission meetings. This shows that the pressure was high. Could Iran purchase eight nuclear power plants from the United States at once? This was to be recorded in official cooperation documents of the two countries. Political pressure was high. Senators later came to meet with the Shah. He was also regularly visited by the U.S. President's special envoys. They insisted that a bilateral agreement be prepared [for the power plant purchase].20
The U.S. Department of Energy granted Jeffrey Eerkens, a nuclear physicist and expert in uranium enrichment, a license to sell four lasers to Iran, and the lasers were shipped in October 1...