The first nuclear reactor was "gifted" to Iran by US President Eisenhower

When Donald Trump ordered a military strike on Iran's nuclear program, he was facing a crisis that the United States unwittingly ignited decades earlier by providing Tehran with the seeds of nuclear technology. Hidden in the northern outskirts of the city of the Islamic Republic - the New York Times reconstructs - is a small nuclear reactor used for peaceful scientific purposes with a high symbolic value: it was shipped to Iran by the United States in the 1960s as part of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's "atoms for peace" program, which shared nuclear technology with American allies eager to modernize their economies and get closer to Washington in a world divided by the Cold War.

Iranian National Pride

The reactor became a monument to the two countries' relations, and also to the way the US introduced Iran - then ruled by a secular, pro-Western monarch, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi - to nuclear technology. Iran's atomic program quickly became a subject of national pride, first as an engine of economic growth and then, to the West's dismay, as a potential source of military supremacy. "It is the legacy - the NYT emphasizes - of a radically different world, in which America had not yet understood how quickly the nuclear secrets revealed at the end of World War II would pose a threat to the United States."

Eisenhower's reasoning

Atoms for Peace grew out of a speech Eisenhower gave to the United Nations in December 1953, in which he warned of the dangers of a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union and argued that the world needed to better understand such a destructive technology and that its secrets should be shared and used constructively. The US administration also saw the program as a way to gain influence over key players on the global Cold War chessboard, including Israel, Pakistan and Iran, which were provided with nuclear intelligence, training and equipment to be used for peaceful purposes, such as science, medicine and energy.