What You've Been Told vs What Actually Happened

Atoms for the Shah

by Iran Prism 9 min read

The Physicist

In June 2025, an Israeli airstrike killed Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani. He was a laser physicist, a former head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, and a man who had survived one assassination attempt already — a magnetic bomb attached to his car in Tehran traffic in November 2010. He had returned to work on the nuclear program that defined his career. The second attempt did not fail.

Abbasi-Davani was Western-trained. He had studied physics in the era when Iranian doctoral students moved freely through European and American university departments, funded by a government that believed nuclear energy was the rational future of a petrostate. The country that educated him and the country whose ally killed him had once been partners in the same nuclear project.

His trajectory — from Western-educated physicist to assassination target to airstrike casualty — is the biography of the nuclear program itself. What began as international cooperation ended with a bomb through the roof. But his trajectory was not inevitable. It was chosen — at specific moments, by specific people, when alternatives existed. To understand how, you have to go back to a handshake in 1957.

The Handshake

President Dwight Eisenhower launched “Atoms for Peace” in 1953 as a Cold War initiative: offer friendly nations access to nuclear technology, bind them to the American sphere, and demonstrate that the atom could serve humanity rather than only destroy it. Iran — the United States’ most important Middle Eastern ally, governed by a monarch who had been restored to power with CIA assistance four years earlier — was a natural recipient.

The 1957 US-Iran civil nuclear cooperation agreement committed the United States to transfer dual-use nuclear capability to a government that Washington trusted implicitly.1 A decade later, the transfer became physical. In 1967, American Machine and Foundry delivered a 5-megawatt pool-type light water reactor to the Tehran Nuclear Research Center in Amirabad. The United States provided approximately 5.54 kilograms of highly enriched uranium to fuel it.2

5.54 kilograms is below the threshold for a weapon. But it is above the threshold for education. Iranian scientists learned to handle fissile material — the safety protocols, the measurement techniques, the physics of controlled chain reactions. The first generation of Iran’s nuclear cadre was trained on American fuel in an American-built reactor.

That reactor is still running in February 2026. Fifty-nine years after American engineers installed it, it sits in Tehran producing medical isotopes — the most durable product of a partnership that destroyed everything else it touched.

The Ambition

The Shah was building a power grid.

In 1974, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi established the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran and announced a target of 23,000 megawatts of nuclear electrical capacity within two decades.3 The 1973 oil crisis had quadrupled oil prices and emboldened the Shah — but the strategic logic pointed toward conservation, not celebration. Iran sat on vast oil reserves that were too valuable to burn for electricity. Every barrel consumed domestically was a barrel that couldn’t be exported at the new prices. Nuclear power would free oil for revenue.

Western governments agreed — and competed for the contracts. The logic was commercial as much as strategic: Iran was offering billions of dollars in construction deals to whichever Western firms could build fastest.

Germany’s Siemens KWU won the signature project: two 1,293-megawatt pressurized water reactors at Bushehr on the Persian Gulf coast.4 The contract was worth billions of Deutsche Marks. By the time of the revolution, thousands of German engineers were living in purpose-built compounds near the construction site. Unit 1 was approximately 85 percent complete. Unit 2 was at 50 percent. The cooling towers were visible from miles away — a monument to a future that was about to be canceled.

France took a different path. In 1974, Iran lent $1 billion to the French Atomic Energy Commission to finance the Eurodif uranium enrichment plant at Tricastin.5 In exchange, Iran acquired a 10 percent indirect equity stake through a joint venture called Sofidif — entitling Tehran to 10 percent of the plant’s enriched uranium output. This was not charity. It was an investment, with contractual returns that France would later refuse to honor.

The Ford and Carter administrations were willing to go furthest. Documents from the period show the United States negotiating the sale of up to eight nuclear reactors to Iran — and offering reprocessing technology: the chemical process that separates plutonium from spent nuclear fuel. Reprocessing is the direct pathway to a nuclear weapon. In the 1970s, America was prepared to hand Iran that key.

The Western Nuclear Marketplace:

Ford and Carter offered Iran reprocessing technology — the plutonium pathway to a weapon. Germany was 85% through building a power reactor. France had taken a billion-dollar loan in exchange for enrichment access. Not one of these partners expressed concern about proliferation. Iran was an ally. Allies get nuclear technology. The concern materialized only after the alliance ended.

The Pipeline

The hardware was only half the transfer. The other half was human.

In the mid-1970s, the Iranian government established a special endowment at MIT to fund Iranian doctoral students in nuclear engineering. The program was not a scholarship for promising youth. It was a strategic human capital investment — a pipeline designed to produce the scientists and engineers who would operate the 23,000-megawatt nuclear grid the Shah envisioned.

Ali Akbar Salehi received his PhD from MIT in 1977 with a thesis on “Resonance Region Neutronics.”6 He would later serve as head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, as Foreign Minister, and as the chief technical negotiator for the 2015 JCPOA — the deal designed to constrain the very program his education had helped build.

Salehi was not unique. He was the product of a system — dozens of Iranian graduate students cycling through Western nuclear engineering departments, absorbing knowledge that would prove impossible to sanction, bomb, or assassinate out of existence. You can destroy centrifuges. You can level enrichment halls. You cannot un-educate a physicist. Knowledge does not have a half-life. It compounds.

The Abandonment

In February 1979, the Shah fell.

The regime’s preferred narrative technique for what comes next is false inevitability — presenting every subsequent decision as an automatic consequence of what the West did, as though a betrayed country had no choice but to pursue nuclear weapons. The abandonment was real. It was severe. And it does not explain what came next, because other countries faced the same betrayal and chose differently. Here is the abandonment.

The consequences for the nuclear program were immediate and total. The United States halted all fuel supplies and canceled reactor negotiations. Germany abandoned Bushehr — Unit 1 at 85 percent, its cooling systems half-installed, its containment vessel standing empty on the coast. France froze Iran’s billion-dollar stake in Eurodif and refused to deliver the enriched uranium Iran was contractually entitled to receive. French courts would spend decades dodging Iran’s legal claims.

Imagine enrolling your best students in a university program, paying full tuition, completing three years of a four-year degree — and being told the school no longer recognizes your enrollment. Your credits are void. The institution that took your money now calls you a threat. That is the experience of a country whose nuclear partners walked away overnight — not because Iran violated any agreement, but because its government changed.

The lesson was real: dependence on foreign powers for strategic capability is a vulnerability.

South Korea lost its nuclear partnership with the United States in the 1970s when Washington discovered Seoul’s covert weapons research and forced it to stop. South Korea complied — and became a global leader in civilian nuclear energy without pursuing weapons.7 Taiwan abandoned its weapons program twice under American pressure, in 1976 and again in 1988, when the IAEA discovered undeclared plutonium research.8 Brazil dismantled a military nuclear program in the early 1990s after a democratic transition and joined the NPT as a non-weapons state. All three had been abandoned or pressured by their principal ally. None chose the path Iran’s regime took.

Khamenei himself has explained why. In a private conversation disclosed by former President Khatami: “Iran needs enmity with America. The revolution needs enmity with America.”9 The nuclear weapons pursuit was not an inevitable reaction to Western betrayal. It was a deliberate strategic choice made by a regime that required permanent confrontation with the West as a pillar of its own legitimacy. The abandonment provided the grievance. The regime provided the decision.

The Honest Ledger

The Western genesis of Iran’s nuclear program is undeniable, and this article has not softened it. The Shah’s program was open, legal, and internationally endorsed. America built the reactor, supplied the fuel, and trained the scientists. Germany was 85 percent through constructing a power reactor. France had taken a billion-dollar loan in exchange for enrichment access. Ford and Carter offered reprocessing — the direct pathway to a weapon. Then every partner walked away overnight, not because Iran violated any agreement, but because its government changed. That betrayal was real.

But the decision to weaponize was the regime’s.

After 1979, the Islamic Republic faced a genuine choice — the same choice South Korea, Taiwan, and Brazil faced when their nuclear partnerships collapsed. Iran chose Natanz: a secret underground enrichment facility built over seventeen years without declaring it to the IAEA.10 Iran chose the A.Q. Khan black market: purchasing P-1 and P-2 centrifuge designs from a Pakistani proliferation network, then concealing the P-2 acquisition for years.11 Iran chose Fordow: a hardened facility buried inside a mountain next to an IRGC military base, whose origins trace to the AMAD weapons plan — a program designed to produce five nuclear warheads.12 Iran chose Arak: a heavy water reactor whose specifications were, by every expert assessment, optimized for plutonium production rather than civilian power.

At each fork, alternatives existed. The regime chose weapons capability — not because the West left it no option, but because a regime built on permanent confrontation with the West needed the ultimate instrument of that confrontation. The IRGC hijacked a legitimate civilian nuclear program — one that Western-trained physicists had built for energy and medicine — and turned it into a tool of regime survival. The scientists who studied reactor physics at MIT did not train for this. What the regime built in their name is a corruption of the institutions those scientists created.

The American reactor in Tehran is still running. Fifty-nine years after American engineers installed it, it sits in Amirabad producing medical isotopes — the partnership’s original purpose. What the regime built in the desert, underground, behind seventeen years of concealment, was something else entirely. And it was a choice.

This article is part of The Nuclear Pursuit. For the covert sabotage campaign, see The Shadow War. For the deal that was supposed to constrain the program, see Heroic Flexibility.

Footnotes

  1. K=1 Project, Columbia University, “From ‘Atoms for Peace’ to ‘JCPOA’: History of Iranian Nuclear Development” ↩

  2. World Nuclear Association, “Nuclear Power in Iran,” country profile ↩

  3. World Nuclear Association, “Nuclear Power in Iran,” country profile; Al Jazeera, “Major Milestones of Iran’s Nuclear Programme” ↩

  4. World Nuclear Association, “Nuclear Power in Iran,” country profile (Bushehr construction details) ↩

  5. Nuclear Threat Initiative, “Iran: Nuclear Overview”; Columbia K=1 Project, Eurodif partnership details ↩

  6. Ali Akbar Salehi biographical profile; LAist/NPR, “Iranian Nuclear Scientists Studied in U.S.” ↩

  7. Arms Control Association, “The Nuclear Disarmament and Non-Proliferation Record of South Korea” ↩

  8. David Albright, Institute for Science and International Security, “Taiwan’s Former Nuclear Weapons Program” ↩

  9. Karim Sadjadpour, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, quoting former President Khatami’s disclosure of Khamenei’s private statement ↩

  10. IAEA Board of Governors Reports, 2003-2004; Institute for Science and International Security, Natanz concealment timeline ↩

  11. INMM Conference Proceedings, A.Q. Khan network court records; IAEA GOV/2004/11 ↩

  12. Mossad nuclear archive (2018); Harvard Belfer Center authentication review, 2019 ↩