Washington – When the President Donald Trump He ordered a military attack on the nuclear program of Iran, he was facing a crisis that the United States unintentionally triggered decades ago by providing the seeds of the seeds of nuclear technology.
Also read:
Hidden in the northern suburbs of Tehran, Iranian capital, is a small nuclear reactor used for peaceful scientific purposes, which has not been the target of Israel’s campaign so far to eliminate Iran’s war nuclear capacity.
Continues after advertising
The true importance of Tehran’s research reactor is symbolic: it was sent to Iran by the United States in the 1960s, as part of the program “Atoms for peace” President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who shared nuclear technology with anxious American allies to modernize his economies and approach Washington in a world divided by the Cold War.
Today, the reactor does not contribute to the enrichment of Uranium of Iran, the hard process that purifies the gross ingredient of nuclear bombs to a state capable of sustaining a massive chain reaction. It works with too weak nuclear fuel to feed a pump. Several other nations, including Pakistan, have at least as much responsibility as the US in Iran march towards war nuclear capacity, experts say.
But Tehran’s reactor is also a monument to the way the US introduced Iran-then governed by a secular and pro-confidential monarch-to nuclear technology.
Continues after advertising
The Iranian nuclear program quickly became an object of national pride, first as an engine of economic growth, and then to the disgust of the West as a potential source of supreme military power.
Also read:
It is a legacy of a dramatically different world, in which the US had not yet understood how fast nuclear secrets that unlocked at the end of World War II would represent a threat to them.
Continues after advertising
“We gave Iran your initial kit ”, Said Robert Einhoron, a former gun control officer who worked on US negotiations with Iran to limit his nuclear program.
“At that time, we were not very concerned about nuclear proliferation, so we were quite liberal in the transfer of nuclear technology,” said Einhoorn, a senior researcher at Brookings Institution. “We put other countries in the nuclear business.”
What was the program “Atoms for Peace”?
“Atoms for Peace” was born from a speech that Eisenhower made at the UN in December 1953, in which he warned of the dangers of a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union and promised to lead the world “of this dark room of horrors to light.”
Continues after advertising
Eisenhower explained that the world should better understand this destructive technology, and that its secrets should be shared and used for construction purposes. “It’s not enough to get that gun out of the soldiers,” he said. “It must be placed in the hands of those who will know how to remove their military coating and adapt it to the arts of peace.”
The gesture was more than altruistic. Many historians argue that Eisenhower was covering an American accumulation of nuclear weapons already underway. It was also influenced by scientists, including J. Robert Oppenheimerwho helped develop the atomic bomb which destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan less than a decade earlier. “It was their regret for participating in the development of the bomb,” said Ehorn.
The Eisenhower administration also saw the program as a way of gaining influence on important pieces on the Global Cold War board. They included Israel, Pakistan and Iran, which received nuclear information, training and equipment to be used for peaceful purposes such as science, medicine and energy.
How was Iran in the 60s
Iran that received an American research reactor in 1967 was very different from the country governed today by clerics and generals. At that time, it was led by a monarch, or xá, Mohammad Reza Pahlavian aristocrat educated in Switzerland, installed in a 1953 coup supported by the CIA, for the lasting wrath of many Iranians.
Pahlavi was determined to modernize his nation and make it a world power, with US support. He liberalized Iranian society, promoting secularism and western education, even while harshly repressing political opposition. He prohibited the female veil and promoted modern art – Andy Warhol even painted his portrait – While investing in literacy and infrastructure.
Driven by “atoms for peace,” Pahlavi allocated billions of dollars to an Iranian nuclear program that saw as a guarantee of energy independence of the country, despite the vast oil production existing, and as a source of national pride. The US received young Iranian scientists for special nuclear training courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Expanding its program in the 1970s, Iran closed agreements with its European allies. During a visit to Paris in 1974, Pahlavi was celebrated in Versailles before signing a billionaire agreement to buy five 1,000 megawatts nuclear reactors from France.
At first, the Shah was a symbol of Pacific use of nuclear energy. A group of New England public service companies has published full page ads with the name of the Shah, then widely admired in the US. Pahlavi “would not build the plants now if he doubted his safety,” said the announcement. “He would wait. As many Americans want to do.”
But while the US had persuaded Iran to sign the 1968 nuclear non -proliferation treaty, in which the country accepted international safeguards and the officers resigned nuclear weapons, suspicions about Pahlavi’s intentions grew in Washington. An article from the New York Times in 1974 noted that Iran’s agreement with France did not mention “publicly safeguards against the use of reactors as the basis for manufacturing nuclear weapons.”
Soon the Shah spoke about Iran’s “right” to produce nuclear fuel internally, a capacity that can also be applied to the development of nuclear weapons. He denounced discussions on limits external to Iranian nuclear activity as a violation of national sovereignty – arguments still used by Iranian leadership. As Washington expressed greater concern, Pahlavi sought nuclear assistance in a larger range of countries: Germany would build more reactors, and South Africa would provide gross uranium, or “Yellowcake.”
In 1978, the Carter Administration It was sufficiently alarmed to insist that an Iranian contract to buy eight American reactors were changed. The new version would prohibit Iran from reprocessing without permission any fuel provided by the US to its nuclear reactors in a form that could be used for nuclear weapons.
Os American reactors have never been delivered. In 1979, the Islamic revolutionfueled in part by hatred to the US and its support for the Shah, swept Iran and deposed Pahlavi.
For a while, Iran’s nuclear ambition problem seemed to have resolved. The new clerical rulers of Iran, led by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeiniinitially 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 1980sKhomeini reconsidered the value of nuclear technology. This time, Iran turned to the east-to Pakistan, another beneficiary of the “atoms for peace” that was less than a decade of testing a nuclear bomb. Pakistani scientist and nuclear trafficker Abdul Qadeer Khan sold centrifuges to Iran to enrich uranium to pump levels.
The acquisition of centrifugal by Iran was the real reason why its nuclear program climbed into a global crisis, said Gary Samore, the White House’s main nuclear officer in Clinton and Obama administrations.
“Iran’s enrichment program is not a result of US assistance,” said Samore. “The Iranians obtained their technology of Pakistan centrifuges, and developed their centrifuges based on this Pakistani technology – which in turn was based on European designs.”
But these centrifuges were used by an Iranian nuclear structure created by the US decades earlier.
For years, the Iran secretly advanced its nuclear programbuilding more centrifugal and enriching uranium that could once be turned into a bomb. Following the exhibition of Iran’s secret nuclear facilities in 2002, the US and its European allies required the country to stop enrichment and reveal its nuclear activities.
After more than 20 years of diplomacy – and now air strikes from Israel and the US – the confrontation remains unresolved. Despite Trump’s initial allegations that Saturday’s air strike “totally destroyed” three Iranian nuclear places, parts remain intact.
What lessons can the US take from this?
The United States can still learn from their painful experience, said Samore. The Trump administration continued negotiations, started under Presidente Joe Biden, for the possible US Nuclear Technology Transfer to Saudi Arabia – Another Middle East ally governed by a strong man with great ambitions to modernize his nation.
For decades, US policy is not to share knowledge to produce nuclear fuel – which can also be used to make bombs – with countries that do not yet have it, Samore noted. “And we have done everything to prevent allies, including South Korea, acquire enrichment capabilities and fuel reprocessing,” he said.
Saudi ostensibly seek the ability to enrich uranium for nuclear power.
“But this type of technology can also be used for nuclear weapons,” added Samore. “And from my point of view, it would be a terrible precedent to help a country like Saudi Arabia, or any country that has no such capacity.”
This article was originally published in The New York Times.
