- Iran's nuclear programme began with US help under the Atoms for Peace programme in the 1960s
- The Shah of Iran pursued nuclear power with Western support and deals from France and Germany
- The 1979 Islamic Revolution halted US-Iran nuclear cooperation and worsened bilateral relations
When American scientists helped install a nuclear reactor in Tehran in the 1960s, they did so under the banner of peace. Decades later, US warplanes bombed Iranian nuclear sites to halt what they now see as a threat.
It began with the 'Atoms for Peace' programme, launched by President Dwight D Eisenhower to share civilian nuclear technology with allies. At the time, Iran, ruled by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was a model Cold War partner, secular, West-leaning, and eager to modernise. The US responded by helping install the Tehran Research Reactor, training Iranian scientists at elite institutions like MIT, and encouraging partnerships with European allies.
To Washington, it was a strategy to extend influence, contain Soviet power, and showcase the "benevolent" use of atomic energy. In practice, it created an entire ecosystem of nuclear capacity inside Iran that would long outlast the Shah's regime.
"We gave Iran its starter kit," said Robert Einhorn, a former US arms control negotiator and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "We weren't terribly concerned about nuclear proliferation in those days, so we were pretty promiscuous about transferring nuclear technology."
The concern was not about what Iran might do with the technology one day, but what the Soviet Union could do at the time.
Under the Shah, Iran's ambitions scaled. Despite sitting on massive oil reserves, Iran was determined to become a nuclear power in both symbolism and capability. France and Germany signed multibillion-dollar reactor deals.
US media ran ads touting the Shah's responsible embrace of nuclear power. Behind the public enthusiasm, intelligence officials in Washington were growing wary. The Shah's insistence on uranium enrichment, legal under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), but dual-use in nature, was raising flags.
By the late 1970s, US policymakers tried to restrain Iran's growing autonomy by modifying reactor contracts and insisting on fuel restrictions. But by then, the nuclear infrastructure was already embedded.
And then came the 1979 Islamic Revolution, sweeping away the Shah from power and replacing him with a clerical regime hostile to the US.
US-Iranian relations collapsed overnight.
Initially, the new rulers had little to no interest in the nuclear project. It was expensive, Western-built, and closely tied to the ousted regime. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini saw little value in continuing it.
Iran's brutal war with Iraq in the 1980s, marked by chemical weapons and massive casualties, forced its leadership to reassess national defence. Once again, nuclear technology looked less like a luxury and more like a deterrent. But this time, the US wasn't the supplier.
Instead, Iran turned to Pakistan.
There, Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, provided Iran with designs and components for uranium enrichment centrifuges. That transfer, based on stolen European technology, gave Iran its first real tools for weaponization of nuclear energy.
Yet the foundation that enabled Iran to absorb that technology had been laid by the United States decades earlier.
By the early 2000s, the world discovered Iran's secret enrichment sites. Tehran claimed it was within its rights under the NPT. The US and its allies were unconvinced.
From there, the crisis hardened: sanctions, sabotage, and shadow wars replaced dialogue.
The 2015 nuclear deal, formally known as the JCPOA, briefly froze the crisis. But the Trump administration withdrew from the deal in 2018.
That unravelling triggered a return to confrontation, ending in the very airstrikes meant to destroy the kind of capability the US once helped cultivate.
