How the U.S. Turned Iran into a Nuclear Power

Before the Islamic Revolution, Tehran was the U.S.’s main ally in the Middle East, and Washington was supporting the nuclear program that is nowadays a cause of concern for the international community.

The Americans’ nuclear plans concerning Iran fell through with the 1979 Islamic Revolution. This happened after the U.S. and Iran had signed a civilian nuclear cooperation agreement in 1957 as part of the American “Atoms for Peace” program and after the U.S. had sent uranium and plutonium transports to Iran for a research reactor.

During the ’70s, plans were drawn up to build 20 nuclear plants on Iranian territory with the help of the U.S., and Tehran signed agreements with several European contractors, including the German company Kraftwerk Union (part of Siemens AG), which started work on the Bushehr plant. The Russians are working on that plant now.

Four years before the Islamic Revolution, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had signed a contract with the Iranian Agency for Atomic Energy to train Iranian engineers in the field of nuclear power.

Friendship with Israel

During the 1950s, Washington’s action of turning Iran into a nuclear power was the equivalent of placing a Trojan horse in a region that was increasingly prone to falling prey to the influence of the USSR and Marxist ideas.

The last Shah of Iran had been brought to power by the U.S., who then made sure that the Iranian aviation was equipped with American aircrafts, a measure they would regret later on when Iran used the planes in the war against Saddam’s Iraq, which was supported by the entire Arab world as well as by France, Great Britain, Germany and the U.S.

During the years before the Islamic Revolution, the collaboration between Iran and the U.S. expanded so as to include Israel. As a matter of fact, when the Jews in Iraq were forced to leave, Iran supported the evacuation procedures and provided planes and shelter to the Jews on their way to Israel.

Moreover, according to American historians, the Mossad trained the Shah’s secret police, the SAVAK, famous for its torture methods. The U.S. and Israel had no idea that the Islamic revolution would take the turn that it did. Washington ignored all warning signs and was completely taken by surprise in 1979.

Gradually, and especially after the staff in the American Embassy in Tehran were taken hostage, Iran went from being a friend to being the number one enemy, and George W. Bush eventually included it in the Axis of Evil.

With the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran put an end to the nuclear program, but, in 1982, it suddenly announced that it would enrich the country’s own uranium at the nuclear center in Isfahan.

Poker with the Great Powers

The Iranian nuclear program, although confiscated via propaganda by the current regime in Tehran, has no connection to ideologies or centers of power. Given the fact that it enjoys wide support among the population and that it is superimposed on nationalist feelings, a halt of the nuclear program would be a political suicide in the domestic sphere.

This is a further reason, one related to political survival, which serves Iran’s amazing strategy of negotiation with the great powers; it is a game of nerves, of aces up sleeves, of promises intermingled with more or less veiled threats.

“Iran says the opposite of what it thinks and does the opposite of what it says, which does not necessarily mean that it does the opposite of what it thinks,” [http://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&tbo=1&q=%22iran+says+the+opposite+of+what%22&btnG=] said a European diplomat, quoted in the book “Iran and the Bomb: The Abdication of International Responsibility” by Thérèse Delpech.