ABSTRACT

Upon assuming the reins of power in 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini and his inner circle doubled down on demonizing the Shah’s nuclear program as a wasteful and excessive project and summarily slammed the brakes on an enterprise whose institutionalization on a national scale was far from complete under the Shah. Shortly following the revolutionary nuclear shutdown, AEOI Chairman Ahmad Sotoodehnia was imprisoned in 1979 for about four years. This development coupled with Ayatollah Khomeini’s rather categorical repudiation of all matters nuclear deprived the Islamic Republic of much-needed normative fl exibility in reviving the Shah’s nuclear energy program once the revolutionary dust settled. The ideological and moral tone of Khomeini’s unqualifi ed anti-nuclear rhetoric found a curiously hurried implementation in the Interim Government of Mehdi Bazargan. The upshot was a massive exodus of nuclear scientists from Iran following the revolution.