ABSTRACT
As the trust defi cit between the Peacock Throne and the White House was widening and deepening, Akbar Etemad’s December 16-26, 1975 visit to India, at the invitation of India’s nuclear legend Dr. Homi Sethna, Chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC), following the latter’s visit to Tehran a few weeks earlier, ruffl ed even more feathers in Washington. 1 During the trip, Etemad met with the Indian Prime Minister and visited IAEC facilities in Trombay, Tarapur, Kalpakkam, and Hyderabad. This visit took place in an atmosphere of Iran-India nuclear solidarity where Etemad toured the Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC) and lavished praise on India’s nuclear achievements expressing optimism that Iran could “import Indian expertise for developing her atomic research laboratories.” Etemad also made mention, in Madras, of Iran’s ongoing plans to “set up a chain of atomic research laboratories” that could “benefi t from India’s experience.” 2
These sentiments were more energetically reiterated by the AEOI director on the sidelines of the signing of a sweeping NCA in Mumbai between Etemad and Dr. H.N. Sethna, Chairman of the IAEC on February 25, 1976. In those remarks, Etemad indicated Iran’s interest to “get as much as it can from India, rather than rely too much on Western sources” in the nuclear fi eld. 3
Shortly following Etemad’s 1975 visit to India rumors ran rampant of a potential future strategic nuclear partnership between Tehran and New Delhi. These concerns found more credibility after Raju Nagarajan’s Kayhan International article where the Indian freelancer speculated, “India has already signed an agreement in May 1974 with Argentina for ‘utilization of atomic energy for peaceful purposes,’ and there is every indication that it is looking forward to associate with Iran, which has an ambitious nuclear program of its own, and mutually benefi t from the deal.” 4
It should be noted that shortly following the establishment of the AEOI, there emerged signs that Tehran was looking up to India as a source of inspiration and emulation for charting its own nuclear path going forward. India’s nuclear rise, viewed from Tehran’s vantage point and catalogued in the full-page Kayhan International article in late January 1976, was nothing short of meteoric. India went nuclear in 1956, a mere six years after winning independence from the
its humble beginnings in 1956 with the commissioning of research reactor Apsara in the Trombay suburb of Bombay to the 1974 underground explosion in the Rajasthan Desert. By 1976, India had become virtually self-suffi cient in nuclear technology and was already manufacturing about “85 percent of equipment” required for its nuclear power plants. BARC in Trombay, initially established as the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and Training (TIFR) in 1945, had rapidly morphed into a “multi-disciplinary organization for research and development in nuclear energy and was perhaps one of the largest and best in the world for training nuclear scientists.” 5
BARC was complete with four reactors that were all “designed and built by Indian scientists.” These included the swimming pool-type Apsara research reactor that had the distinction of being “the fi rst nuclear reactor to be commissioned in the whole of Asia outside the USSR.” In 1964, BARC passed yet another milestone by commissioning the plutonium plant at Trombay, “fully designed and built by its scientists and engineers” whose plutonium output was used in the 1974 test explosion. BARC had also ventured into the technologyintensive fi elds of manufacturing “fuel element fabrication plants, Van De Graaf accelerators, thorium plants and a large number of laboratories and workshops.” 6
Determined to stay ahead of the game, India had also embarked on building an “additional 100 MW reactor for research work and a plant for processing reactor waste.” The capstone of BARC’s stellar array of achievements, though, as far as the AEOI was concerned, was its training capability in annually churning out some 150 top-fl ight engineers and scientists “rated among the best in the world.” BARC’s sprawling liaisons and affi liates stretched throughout India from the “high altitude research laboratory at the Ski resort of Gulmarg in Kashmir” to a Seismic station at Gauribidanur, some 75 kilometers north of Bangalore to a Variable Energy Cyclotron (VEC) near Calcutta to the Kalpakkam Reactor Research Center near Madras conducting “pioneering work in fast breeder technology” where a test reactor was under construction. 7
New Delhi was also conducting research on the cutting-edge of nuclear technology by harnessing radioactive element thorium of which it possessed “the world’s largest known deposits” in its fast breeder reactors (FBR). Additionally, BARC established the Electronics Corporation of India Limited (ECIL) at Hyderabad in 1967 to indigenize the manufacturing of “various kinds of highly sophisticated electronic equipment needed in nuclear research.” ECIL’s Nuclear Fuel Complex was tasked, among other things, with “processing uranium dioxide and fabricating fuel elements used in Canada deuterium uranium (CANDU)-type reactors.” India had also made major strides in manufacturing the heavy water CANDU reactors used as moderator and coolant. 8
These milestones, running the gamut from the “front end” through the “service period” to the “tail end” of the nuclear fuel cycle made India the envy of the AEOI and Etemad. As Iran’s nuclear enterprise was moving along, the parallels between its nuclear development strategy and those of India were growing eerily visible. An area of acute concern for the United States was Tehran’s keen interest
of Iran’s nuclear R&D program was an ambitious plan to build the Esfahan Nuclear Technology Center (ENTEC) as the primary center for as diverse functions as nuclear reactor operator training, fuel fabrication, and uranium chemistry.
