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HOW THE UNITED STATES HELPED CREATE IRAN’S NUCLEAR PROGRAM  
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Michael Crowley
June 24, 2025
The New York Times
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_ A reactor in Tehran is a monument to the U.S. relationship with
Iran when the country was led by a secular, pro-Western monarch. _

“Atoms for Peace” was born of a speech President Dwight D.
Eisenhower delivered in 1953, in which he warned of the dangers of a
nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union., Corbis, via Getty Images

 

When President Trump ordered a military strike on Iran’s nuclear
program, he was confronting a crisis that the United States
unwittingly set in motion decades ago by providing Tehran with the
seeds of nuclear technology.

Tucked into Tehran’s northern suburbs 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 United States in the 1960s, part of President
Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” program that shared
nuclear technology with U.S. allies eager to modernize 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 America
introduced Iran — then governed by a secular, pro-Western monarch
— to nuclear technology.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower with Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi of Iran
in Tehran in 1959.Associated Press

Iran’s nuclear program 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 America
had yet to grasp how fast the nuclear secrets it unlocked at the end
of World War II would pose a threat to the United States.

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

“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
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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.”

A boiling water power reactor at the U.S. pavilion of the “Atoms for
Peace” exhibition in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1958. Credit...Albert
Riethausen/Associated Press

The gesture was more than altruistic. Many historians argue that Mr.
Eisenhower was providing cover for an American nuclear arms buildup
already underway. He was also influenced by scientists, including J.
Robert Oppenheimer, who had helped to develop the atomic bomb that
destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki less than a decade earlier. “It was
their contrition for participating in the development of the bomb,”
Mr. Einhorn said.

The Eisenhower administration also saw the program 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, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, a
Swiss-educated aristocrat installed in a 1953 coup backed by the
C.I.A., to the lasting anger of many Iranians.

Mr. Pahlavi was determined to modernize his nation and make it a world
power, with American backing. He liberalized 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 program 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 United States welcomed
young Iranian scientists to special nuclear training courses at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi touring the Saclay nuclear study facility,
west of Paris, in 1974. Agence France-Press/Getty Images

Expanding its program 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 ads
featuring an image of the shah, who was then widely admired in the
United States. 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 United States had persuaded Iran to sign the 1968
Nuclear Nonproliferation 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
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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.”

An advertisement from the August 1977 issue of The New Englander.
Wikimedia

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 U.S.-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, fueled in part by hatred of America 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 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, Ayatollah
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
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enrich uranium to bomb-grade levels of purity.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini speaking in Tehran in 1979. The Muslim
leaders of the Islamic Revolution initially viewed Iran’s nuclear
program as Western infiltration. Associated Press

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

“Iran’s enrichment program is not the result of U.S.
assistance,” Mr. 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 America decades earlier.

For years, Iran secretly advanced its nuclear program, 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 U.S. 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 airstrikes by Israel
and the United States — the confrontation remains unresolved.
Despite Mr. Trump’s initial claims that Saturday’s bombing raid
“totally obliterated” three Iranian nuclear sites, portions remain
intact.

The United States can still learn from its painful experience, Mr.
Samore said. The Trump administration has continued negotiations,
begun under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., for the potential transfer
of U.S. nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia — another Middle East
ally ruled by a strongman with grand ambitions for modernizing his
nation.

It has been U.S. 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, Mr. 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,” Mr. 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.”

_MICHAEL CROWLEY [[link removed]] covers
the State Department and U.S. foreign policy for The Times. He has
reported from nearly three dozen countries and often travels with the
secretary of state._

_Subscribe to the NEW YORK TIMES
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* nuclear weapons
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* nuclear power
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* Iran
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* United States
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* Pakistan
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* Dwight D. Eisenhower
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* Atoms for Peace
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