When Donald Trump ordered a military attack on the Iranian nuclear program, he was faced with a crisis that the United States unconsciously triggered deceased earlier, providing Tehran with the seeds of nuclear technology. Hidden in the northern outskirts of the city of the Islamic Republic – reconstructs the New York Times – there is a small nuclear reactor used for peaceful scientific purposes with a high symbolic value: it was sent to Iran by the USA in the 1960s as part of the “Atoms for Peace” program of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who shared nuclear technology with the American allies eager to modernize their economies and approach them Washington in a world divided by the Cold War. The reactor became the monument to the relationships of the two countries, and also to the way the US introduced Iran – then governed by a secular and pro -western monarch, the scià Mohammed Reza Pahlavi – to nuclear technology. The Iranian atomic program has quickly become the subject of national pride, first as an engine of economic growth and then, with the dismay of the West, as a potential source of military supremacy.
“It is the inheritance – underlines the NYT – of a radically different world, in which America had not yet understood how quickly the nuclear secrets revealed at the end of the Second World War would have represented a threat to the United States”. “Atoms for peace” was born from a speech pronounced by Eisenhower to the United Nations in December 1953, in which he warned by the dangers of a nuclear armament race with the Soviet Union and explained that the world should have better understood such a destructive technology and that its secrets should have been shared and used constructively. The US administration then saw the program as a way to obtain influence on important pieces of the global chessboard of the Cold War, including Israel, Pakistan and Iran, to whom information, training and nuclear equipment to be used for peaceful purposes, such as science, medicine and energy were provided.