Guilty as Charged: How America and Israel Created the Iranian Nuclear Programme They Now Use as a Pretext for War

Guilty as Charged: How America and Israel Created the Iranian Nuclear Programme They Now Use as a Pretext for War

 

By Lim Tean

 

Lim Tean is the Secretary General of the People’s Alliance For Reform Singapore

Facts For Working People publishes this article for our readers interests and is not affiliated with the Alliance for Reform. on Facebook.

 

The Great Game

 

Ariel Sharon publicly called for IRAN’S VICTORY in 1982. Israel had 100 military advisers living in Tehran throughout the war. America supplied Iran with weapons-grade uranium. Now read what they say about Iran today — and ask yourself who the real rogue states are.

 

The Western narrative on Iran’s nuclear programme is built on a foundational lie — and the evidence to demolish it has been hiding in plain sight for decades. The United States and Israel, who present themselves today as the last guardians standing between a fanatical Iran and nuclear catastrophe, are in fact the two nations most responsible for Iran’s nuclear existence. 

 

They built it. They armed the state they now bomb. And the historical record convicts them on both counts.

 

Let the prosecution begin.

 

COUNT ONE: America Created Iran’s Nuclear Programme

Iran’s nuclear programme began under the Shah in 1957, after the United States and Iran agreed to a civilian nuclear cooperation arrangement known as the Cooperation Concerning Civil Uses of Atoms, through Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace programme. This was no accident of history. According to archival documents, a non-aligned Iran was viewed as a cornerstone in a deterrence strategy against the Soviet Union, and Atoms for Peace served to solidify Iran’s allegiance to the West. Tehran was not given nuclear technology out of benevolence — it was given nuclear technology as a Cold War bribe.

 

In November 1967, the Tehran Research Reactor went critical, initially fuelled with 93% highly enriched uranium provided by the United States. Read that sentence again. Washington supplied Tehran with weapons-grade fuel. The beneficiaries of the Atoms for Peace programme included Israel, India, Pakistan — and Iran, then ruled by the US-backed Shah. The same nations America would later spend decades accusing of nuclear adventurism were all schooled in the nuclear arts by Washington itself.

 

This programme was actively supported by the major Western powers, and the United States, France, and Germany sought lucrative power reactor sales to Iran. Lucrative. The word is important. This was never purely strategic calculation — it was commerce dressed as security policy.

 

COUNT TWO: America and Germany Built Bushehr

The Bushehr nuclear power plant was the idea of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who wanted a national electrical grid powered by nuclear plants. In August 1974, the Shah declared: “Petroleum is a noble material, much too valuable to burn… We envision producing, as soon as possible, 23,000 megawatts of electricity using nuclear plants.”

 

Washington did not object. Washington encouraged it. Preliminary agreements with Siemens KWU and Framatome for four nuclear power plants were signed. In 1975, construction of two reactors was started near Bushehr by Siemens KWU — modelled on Germany’s own Biblis B reactor. Some $3 billion was paid. Around 5,500 German nationals lived at the construction site. There had never been a German construction project abroad on that scale.

 

The Shah also sent dozens of Iranian students to MIT to study nuclear engineering in the mid-1970s, with the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran concluding a formal agreement with MIT in 1975 to provide a specialised master’s programme to train Iranian nuclear engineers.

 

America was not merely permitting this — it was actively shaping Iran’s nuclear scientific class. The engineers who today run Iran’s nuclear installations were trained, in no small part, by the United States of America.

 

Then 1979 came. The Shah fell. Washington’s man was gone. And the entire programme America had constructed — the reactors it had blessed, the engineers it had trained, the fuel it had supplied — suddenly became an existential threat. Nothing about Iran’s physical nuclear infrastructure had changed. What changed was the flag flying over Tehran.

 

This is not nonproliferation policy. This is geopolitics with a moral mask.

 

COUNT THREE: Israel Armed Khomeini’s Iran

Now we arrive at the most spectacular hypocrisy in modern Middle Eastern history.

 

Israel supported Iran throughout the Iran-Iraq War to provide a counterweight to Iraq, to re-establish influence in Iran lost with the overthrow of the Shah, and to create business for the Israeli weapons industry. Israel sold Iran $75 million worth of arms in Operation Seashell in 1981, including antitank guns, TOW missiles, and spare parts for tank and aircraft engines. 

 

Arms sales totalled an estimated $500 million from 1981 to 1983. Other experts placed the true figure at more than $500 million per year, with internal US government reports suggesting total Israeli arms sales to Iran approached $2 billion annually in the early 1980s.

 

This was not marginal, deniable activity. There were never less than around one hundred Israeli advisers and technicians in Iran at any time throughout the war, living in a carefully guarded camp just north of Tehran, where they remained even after the ceasefire. While Iranian leaders called for Israel’s destruction at Friday prayers, Israeli military personnel were embedded in the Islamic Republic’s war machine.

 

And what did Israel say about this arrangement? Israeli Defence Minister Ariel Sharon told the Washington Post in May 1982: “Iraq is Israel’s enemy and we hope that diplomatic relations between us and Iran will be renewed as in the past.” Four months later, he told a Paris press conference: “Israel has a vital interest in the continuing of the war in the Persian Gulf, and in Iran’s victory.”

 

Israel’s most celebrated military strategist — the man later to become Prime Minister — was publicly calling for Iran’s victory and hoping for renewed diplomatic relations with the Khomeini government. He was not some rogue voice. Israel’s participation in the arms transfers was approved by Prime Minister Shimon Peres. This was state policy, authorised at the highest level.

 

COUNT FOUR: Washington Covered for Israel While Publicly Blockading Iran

By 1982, it was evident to the US State Department that Israel was routinely selling American-made military material to Iran without Washington’s case-by-case consent, as was part of the original agreement between Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Secretary of State Alexander Haig. The Reagan administration’s response? It replenished Israel’s weapons stockpile — even as American weapons were visibly flowing to Tehran.

 

This wilful ignoring of Israel’s arms sales occurred despite the fact that the Reagan administration began in 1983 an aggressive public campaign, known as Operation Staunch, to stop worldwide weapons sales to Iran.

 

Operation Staunch — publicly strangling Iran’s arms supply while privately allowing Israel to sustain it. The cynicism is breathtaking.

 

THE VERDICT: Power, Not Principle

The prosecution rests. Let us state plainly what the evidence establishes:

America launched Iran’s nuclear programme in 1957. America supplied it with highly enriched uranium. America trained its nuclear engineers at MIT. America and Germany built the Bushehr reactor to near-completion. Israel armed the Islamic Republic throughout an eight-year war, with hundreds of its own personnel embedded in Tehran, while its Defence Minister publicly called for Iran’s victory.

 

Then — the moment Iran ceased to serve Western and Israeli strategic interests — the same programme became an abomination against civilisation. The same nuclear infrastructure became proof of genocidal intent. The same nation they had armed, trained, and enriched became the supreme threat to regional order.

 

What changed was not Iran. What changed was the calculus of domination.

Today, as Israel prosecutes a war that its own strategic class has long sought — the destruction not of Iran’s weapons but of Iran as a functional state, a war aimed at cementing Israeli military supremacy from the Nile to the Euphrates — we are asked to accept the framing that this is about nonproliferation. That this is about protecting the world from nuclear catastrophe.

 

It is not. It never was.

 

The rules-based international order has always been a legitimacy laundering operation — a mechanism by which the powerful dress their interests in universal principle. The history of Iran’s nuclear programme is among the most complete indictments of that system ever assembled. It was built by the West when Iran was useful, condemned by the West when Iran became independent, and is now being bombed by the West in service of a regional hegemony project its architects dare not name openly.

 

The architects of Iran’s nuclear existence are now its executioners. History will record the rank hypocrisy. When you hear Trump declare repeatedly that Iran will never have nuclear weapons, bring to his attention the facts I have set out in this post and laugh at him in his face!  

 

Lim Tean is the Secretary General of the People’s Alliance For Reform Singapore