How the United States Created Iran’s Nuclear Program
By: Jacquie Devigne
Tags: USA, Foreign Policy, Nuclear, Iran, History

How the United States Created Iran’s Nuclear Program

It seemed like a good idea at the time

The Iranian flag (iStock.com/Rainer Puster)

President Dwight Eisenhower recognized a paradox concerning the new field of nuclear physics: on the one hand, uranium could be militarized into nuclear weapons, and on the other hand, it could be utilized to produce energy.

In 1953, Eisenhower delivered his “Atoms for Peace” speech to the United Nations General Assembly. Among other aspects of the speech, Eisenhower outlined a program between the United States and developing nations that wished to develop civilian nuclear programs. The United States would provide reactors, fuel, and scientific training; in return, participating developing nations would agree to use the technology only for peaceful purposes.

Eisenhower’s speech provided the ideological basis for the International Atomic Energy Agency and provided some political cover for the arms race. He also publicly channeled his desire to ensure global peace and bring prosperity to the developing world. The “Atoms for Peace” program, however, would have some unintended consequences in the following decades.

President Eisenhower and Mohammad Reza Shah in Tehran, 1959. (Source Unknown; Public Domain)

Among the participating developing nations eager for nuclear technology was Iran. Under Mohamed Reza Shah’s thumb due to a 1953 coup that Eisenhower supported, Iran signed a civilian nuclear cooperation arrangement with the United States in 1957. The Shah established the Tehran Nuclear Research Center (TNRC) at the University of Tehran in 1959. In 1967, the United States supplied the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR), along with highly enriched uranium, to the TNRC. This five-megawatt nuclear reactor is still operational to this day.

The Shah believed that Iran’s nuclear program was central to the country’s economic development. The TRR was nearly empty for the first decade of its existence, Iran simply did not have enough nuclear scientists to run the reactor properly. As a result, in 1975 the Shah made an agreement with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to train Iranian students in their Nuclear Engineering Master’s program. This program would provide the first class of Iranian nuclear scientists with technological training on nuclear energy. The Shah budgeted $1 billion to this venture — oil money went a long way. The MIT hired extra professors and allocated research labs specifically for the influx of new Iranian students, and the size of the Nuclear Engineering Master’s program effectively doubled.

While Iran’s nuclear program is a source of instability in the Middle East today, this was not the situation in the mid-1970s. State Department archives show that American officials encouraged the Shah to invest Iran’s immense oil profits into expensive American nuclear technology. For his part, the Shah wanted to convert Iran’s energy grid to nuclear energy, which would free up its vast oil reserves for export. The price of oil was unstable during this decade. Stabilizing the oil market while ensuring investment in American technology was seen as a mutually beneficial arrangement.

The program had its critics, and the Iranian students’ arrival was controversial among MIT faculty and students. Noam Chomsky was critical that the university was, “leasing the Nuclear Engineering department to the Shah in exchange for an unspecified amount of money.”

Anti-Shah demonstrators protest in Tehran, 1978. (AP Photo/Michel Lipchitz)

The arrangement was ultimately short-lived. The first students arrived in 1975, but by 1979 the Shah had fallen due to the Iranian Revolution. While some students had already returned to Iran, the ones still studying then faced a choice: either remain in the United States or return to a new, fundamentally different, Iranian regime that was hostile to the West.

The Boston Globe attempted to track down the thirty-five Iranian students in the program. Of those thirty-five students, it located twenty-eight in total. About two-thirds of the students stayed in the United States.

Of the former students who returned to their home country, two became instrumental to Iran’s nuclear program: Mansour Haj Azim, the supposed leader of a suspected nuclear weapons site and deputy director of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, and Mohammad Zaker, who became head of a research reactor in Tehran. Their work in their country’s nuclear program in part contributed to the tense relationship between the United States and Iran.