The death in April 2025 of Akbar Etemad, the godfather of Iran’s nuclear programme, reminds us of the contradictory and often haphazard approach of the Islamic Republic to nuclear developments. Etemad was a passionate supporter of Iran’s right to develop nuclear energy and advocated energetically for it. Appointed the first head of the Atomic Energy Agency of Iran (AEOI) by the last Shah in 1974, Etemad was swiftly adopted by the officials of the Islamic Republic in support of their own agenda, in an attempt to emphasise  the continuity of the programme.

The reality, of course, was not so simple. After the overthrow of the Shah, the nuclear programme had been shut down. Etemad fled and his colleagues were imprisoned for a programme that the revolutionaries considered a Western-inspired waste of money. It was only amid the Iran-Iraq war, and the discovery of an Iraqi programme, that prompted an abrupt volte-face in policy. The scientists were released and put back to work, albeit in an environment transformed.

Iran’s nuclear programme can be described as aspirational, in the sense that it has long been viewed as a prestige project, the success of which would indicate to all who cared that Iran had arrived, both in a scientific sense and industrially. An early adopter of Eisenhower’s ‘atoms for peace’ in 1957, Iran’s initial foray into nuclear physics had effectively stuttered to a halt in 1969. Despite that, Iran was among the first signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1970. For Iranian statesmen and scientists, developments in nuclear science offered Iran the opportunity to have a front row in the next industrial revolution.

As Etemad said to me, there was real frustration that, despite abundant hydrocarbon resources, Iran did not have an oil industry of its own. It managed it, but it did not produce much of the machinery and technical equipment that powered it. This time, however, it would be different. Being at the forefront of nuclear physics would provide Iran with an unparalleled industrial base from which many things other than nuclear power might develop.

Etemad’s enthusiasm found a receptive ear in the person of the Shah. Throughout the 1960s, he had overseen a dramatic economic boom that, by the early 1970s, had captured the imagination of Western partners. In 1972, while on a visit to London, discrete inquiries were made with regard to the Shah’s interest in nuclear energy. By 1974, buoyed by the oil boom of the previous year, the Shah was ready to launch Iran’s own programme. Etemad was drafted in from his position as Chancellor at Bu Ali Sina University in Hamedan to head the new Atomic Energy Organisation. It proved an inspired choice.

The year 1974, as far as Iran’s nuclear ambitions were concerned, can be considered both the best of times and the worst of times. Flush with money, the Shah encouraged Etemad to be ambitious with his plans for an indigenous nuclear industry. Yet the detonation of a nuclear device by India in May 1974 affected the international mood in ways that were to prove frustrating to Iran. To develop an ‘industry’ required that Iran not be dependent on a foreign power for any aspect of the nuclear cycle, including, crucially, enrichment technology. Iran was confident that, as an early signatory of the NPT, its right to enrich uranium – if in limited quantities – would be recognised.

It was soon to find itself disappointed in this assumption. Contrary to what officials in Iran say today, the United States was never supportive of an indigenous enrichment programme (India’s surprise nuclear test in 1974 had soured the mood considerably). Instead, Washington urged the Shah to seek his uranium from established international consortia. The Shah invested accordingly, but it was clear that the Iranians were frustrated. Nonetheless, as plans proceeded, they found a surprising partner in the UK Atomic Energy Authority (AEA).

There were undoubtedly personal bonds of friendship at work in the person of Walter Marshall, the deputy chair of the AEA and chief scientist at the Department of Energy, who Etemad knew well. But Etemad’s calculations were pragmatic as well as personal. Britain had been at the cutting edge of nuclear developments, but, like in much of its industrial policy, had found itself lagging behind its competitors. Marshall was keen to revive it. Etemad was keen to oblige on the basis that collaboration with the United Kingdom provided the best opportunity for Iran. The French were deemed too expensive, the Germans only dealt in turnkey projects (this did not prevent one contract being granted in 1975 for the fateful power plant in Bushehr), and the Americans were simply too slow.

Crucially, Britain understood the need for technology transfer and conceded that Iran would probably master the enrichment cycle by the end of the century (a prescient assessment, as it happened), and, as such, it would be better to be engaged. For 18 months, from February 1977, British and Iranian officials thrashed out a detailed strategic plan for collaboration that would have seen Iran invest $20bn in Britain’s nuclear industry in return for the construction of 20 nuclear reactors (two a year from 1984), delivering some 24,000 MW into the grid by 1994 – around a third of Iran’s estimated energy needs by that date.

How these figures were assessed was never clear to Etemad, but the ambition was clear. As to the possibility of weaponisation, the Shah dismissed concerns on the basis that his armed forces were – currently at least – superior to any immediate threat. There was a clear hedging here against future developments and the British were acutely aware of the dangers of facilitating or transferring enrichment technology. It was in part because of these anxieties and the fear of long-term political instability (though not, it has to be said, of imminent revolution) that the plans stuttered to halt in mid-1978.

It was this programme that the revolutionaries initially closed down and then abruptly picked up in 1984. The difference now was that the environment had changed dramatically, on multiple levels, while the plans remained remarkably static. If the Shah found Western obstructions frustrating, such problems were to multiply for a revolutionary regime that defined itself in opposition to the West. American objections to enrichment in Iran were simply reinforced within an international environment that, since the debacle of the Three-Mile Island accident in 1979, had moved increasingly against nuclear power – a trend that accelerated after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.

If Iran was to prove less attractive to Western partners, it was also no longer the economic powerhouse of the region with whom engagement was an imperative. After 1979 it had less money, and revolutionary politics made it less friendly for business. Perhaps more problematic were revolutionary mentalities, which at once condemned the ancient regime and sought to emulate it to a degree that demanded no change. The plans laid out in the 1970s envisaged a diversifying of energy sources away from oil towards nuclear, hydroelectric and even solar power for a population that would gradually reach 40 million. As the Islamic Republic emerged exhausted from the Iran-Iraq War, it had already reached 58m and was growing rapidly.

This would clearly have consequences for energy consumption, and even if the Shah’s figures were ambitious, one would have expected some sort of reassessment to have taken place, to say nothing of the fact that there were now fewer allies and less money. But there is little evidence that serious adjustments were made to the plan outlined in 1977. It was no doubt partly because of this incongruity that Iran’s nuclear plans were viewed with less alarm than its support for terrorism. Indeed, as far as any anxieties in the West about Iranian WMDs were concerned, their focus lay squarely on biological and chemical weapons.

It was assumed nonetheless that Iran’s own recommencement of its nuclear programme, having been triggered by the realisation that the Iraqis had a programme, was not entirely peaceful, and, indeed, one clear problem for the programme was that its ambitions were no longer matched by the realities on the ground. Developing an indigenous nuclear industry might have made some sense in the 1970s, less so in the 1990s. Therefore, the assumption, not wholly misplaced, was that there was a military dimension to Iran’s nuclear programme, and NATO assessments concluded that Iran was building the infrastructure for a bomb but would not take the next step.

Taken on its own, this kept Iran on the right side of the NPT. It was more problematic when considered in the context of ballistic missile developments (itself a direct consequence of ‘lessons learned’ during the Iran-Iraq War) as well as the regime’s anti-Israeli ideology, regularly expressed in the sort of bombast that did nothing to reassure Israel or its allies. In this sense, even if the Islamic Republic’s nuclear hedging mirrored that of the Shah’s, it never appreciated the changed international environment, which the Republic’s leaders themselves had done so much to create. Iranian officials for example regularly expressed bewilderment that the US took against them after 1979.

Meanwhile, there is little doubt that the decision of South Asia to go nuclear with detonations in Pakistan and India raised considerable anxieties in Iran, and not a little envy, and in all probability accelerated research and development. This, rather than the apparent threat posed by Israel, focused minds in Iran. This was soon to be matched by a concentration of minds in the West following 9/11.

With the launch of the Global War on Terror, the European Troika (Britain, France and Germany) moved with alacrity to prevent a potential extension of the conflict to Iran, swiftly opening negotiations that would hopefully allay wider fears. The protracted nature of the discussions need not allay us here. Suffice to say that opportunities to settle the matter were missed by both sides until, in 2009, the Obama administration decided to take matters in hand and focus squarely on the problem.

Iran in the meantime had problems of its own in a looming domestic crisis created largely by its mercurial President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who combined a deft millenarianism (including anti-Israeli rhetoric and Holocaust denial) with a resolute conviction that Iran had the ‘right’ to enrich uranium, citing Article IV of the NPT. The entire exercise became one of ‘national rights’, evoking the memory of oil nationalisation in 1951 and mobilising many in the Persian diaspora, some of whom proved more enthusiastic for the cause than many in Iran itself. The West, and the United States in particular, continued as they had done since 1974 to challenge this interpretation, but this approach itself required refinement given Iran’s progress on enrichment technology.

Iran’s investment in, and progress on, nuclear technology made all the incongruities of the 1990s even more stark. For all the aspiration for a civil nuclear programme, these remained just that. Iran had a single power plant in Bushehr, abandoned by the Germans and now taken up by the Russians, whose progress towards completion was, if anything, even slower. While the Shah’s vision had incorporated a diverse range of energy sources, the Islamic Republic had eschewed any development of solar power and had refused to contemplate the abandonment of its nuclear ambitions in return for the development of gas and hydroelectric. The fact that Iran enjoyed the second highest reserves of recoverable natural gas, which it had barely touched, did not help its argument on the necessity of nuclear energy

By 2012, progress on a diplomatic solution appeared to have turned a corner. Iran’s political economy was in crisis, accentuated by severe sanctions imposed from 2011, and Obama took the fateful decision to recognise Iran’s right to enrich, overturning four decades of US policy. The question now was to what level. But the principle having been conceded, negotiations began in earnest, leading ultimately to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2015, in which Iran bargained away aspects of its programme in return for sanctions relief.

Hailed as a triumph of diplomacy, it was not without its problems, accentuated by the fact that, far from being the start of a longer process of engagement, it soon took on the status of a stand-alone agreement. While the basic architecture was sound, there were incongruities that needed to be addressed, but, such was the mutual exhaustion of all concerned, these were deferred or ignored on the optimistic basis that they would work themselves out.

From the Iranian perspective, a key problem was the asymmetric nature of the commitments, which meant that the Iranians had to deliver their side of the bargain before sanctions relief – an initial suspension rather than wholesale cancellation – would be implemented. More damning for the Iranians was their concentration on UN sanctions rather than the extensive range of US ordinary sanctions, which denied them access to the US dollar. That the Iranians never considered this important showed their acute lack of understanding of the global financial markets. Their rather myopic view was to make the sanctions relief meaningless as banks refused to engage.

From the Western side, the problems were less immediate, but they nonetheless existed. Having entered the negotiations arguing that Iran would be allowed minimal enrichment capability – no more than 500 centrifuges – the end result was more than ten times that number. Accepting the fact that many of these were of an earlier generation, the agreement did not prevent work on more advanced centrifuges. Moreover, the restrictions were not indefinite and there were clear differences on the implications of the sunset clauses.

Western diplomats seemed to be operating on the erroneous assumption that the time afforded by the restrictions would allow political changes to take place that would render the restrictions unnecessary – an extraordinary gamble in the circumstances – with the added assumption that Iran would submit to an extension on the restrictions if this was not the case. The Iranians unsurprisingly did not see it that way and regularly boasted of the industrial scale of their ambitions; at one stage, they even claimed that they planned to export enriched uranium.

For a country that had yet to develop a meaningful strategy for the construction of power stations, these plans seemed both absurd and dangerous. Bushehr had become operational, but it contributed little more than two per cent of Iran’s total energy needs and there were no other power plants on the horizon. Moreover, it did not help that officials regularly made vague claims about possible weaponisation – threats that increased once President Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018. Great store had been placed on a fatwa the Supreme Leader has supposedly issued, outlawing nuclear weapons, though no one could find it and it was soon apparent, as many had warned, that fatwas – as religious judgements – could change with circumstances.

In this as in many other things the Islamic Republic was simply echoing the Shah. Yet it was doing so in vastly different circumstances that it systematically failed to adapt to, leading to incongruities that raised already heightened suspicions. There is little doubt that, like the Shah, the Islamic Republic is keen on becoming a threshold state, but there is also little evidence that it was in any rush to cross that threshold. In more reflective moments, former foreign minister Zarif would opine that constructive ambiguity was a much better option for Iran and that the threat of weaponisation offered considerably more scope for diplomatic leverage.

Still, there are growing voices in Iran who argue that had Ukraine retained its nuclear weapons, it would not have been vulnerable to attack, and that Iran needs its own deterrent. Others point out that this argument betrays an old, 1970s-style of thinking and that Iran should pay more attention to the fate of the Soviet Union. Given the enormous capital expended on a prestige project that has yielded so little – Iran is struggling to meet the demands of its electricity needs – it is a view that is gaining traction.