When President Trump ordered a military strike on Iran’s nuclear program, he was confronting a crisis that the United States unwittingly set in motion decades ago by providing Tehran with the seeds of nuclear technology.
Tucked into Tehran’s northern suburbs is a small nuclear reactor used for peaceful scientific purposes, which has so far not been a target of Israel’s campaign to eliminate Iran’s nuclear weapons capability.
The Tehran Research Reactor’s real significance is symbolic: It was shipped to Iran by the United States in the 1960s, part of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” program that shared nuclear technology with U.S. allies eager to modernize their economies and move closer to Washington in a world divided by the Cold War.
Today, the reactor does not contribute to Iran’s enrichment of uranium, the arduous process that purifies the raw ingredient of nuclear bombs into a state that can sustain a massive chain reaction. It runs on nuclear fuel far too weak to power a bomb. Several other nations, including Pakistan, bear at least as much responsibility for Iran’s march to the threshold of nuclear weapons capability, experts say.
But the Tehran reactor is also a monument to the way America introduced Iran — then governed by a secular, pro-Western monarch — to nuclear technology.
