"US encouraged the pro-Western shah of Iran to develop nuclear power..."

[flpoljunkie]

From a June, 2003, article in the St. Petersburg Times...

"A nuclear-free Mideast?'

Ironically, Iran's own nuclear program is said to have started with America's blessing. In the early '70s, the U.S. government encouraged the pro-Western shah of Iran to develop nuclear power as an alternative energy source.

"Americans advised Iran to generate 20,000 megawatts of electricity . . . and submitted plans for building power plants. Now they say Iran does not need nuclear power since it has abundant oil and gas," Iran's former president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, angrily noted last month.

The nuclear program was suspended twice - first in 1979, when the shah was overthrown, and again in the late '80s when Iraqi air strikes damaged the reactors at Bushehr.

Russia is now building a reactor at the same site, one of several nuclear power plants Iran says it will need in the future. The country's population of 67-million is expected to nearly double over the next three decades.

Iran has 9 percent of the world's oil, but "at the rate of energy consumption today, it will become a net importer of petroleum products by the year 2020 or 2025," says Amirahmadi of the American Iranian Council. "The argument that Iran has oil and gas and therefore does not need nuclear technology is not a good argument."

more...

http://www.sptimes.com/2003/06/08/news_pf/Worldandnation/Nuclear_Iran_on_the_U.shtml

[enough]

1. Good find.

[GreenPartyVoter]

2. We have our fingers in pies all over the world and we so frequently wind

up with those pies smashed in our faces. (Giving weapons to Saddam... The CIA training OBL... anyone? anyone?)

When will we learn?!

[slipslidingaway]

3. Thanks, and "The "28 Mordad" coup, as it is known by its Persian date,

was a watershed for Iran, for the Middle East and for the standing of the United States in the region. The joint U.S.-British operation ended Iran's drive to assert sovereign control over its own resources and helped put an end to a vibrant chapter in the history of the country's nationalist and democratic movements. These consequences resonated with dramatic effect in later years. When the Shah finally fell in 1979, memories of the U.S. intervention in 1953, which made possible the monarch's subsequent, and increasingly unpopular, 25-reign intensified the anti-American character of the revolution in the minds of many Iranians."

http://www.gwu.edu/%7Ensarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB126/index.htm