ABSTRACT
As Washington was painting a fuller picture of the scope and scale of Iran’s nuclear enterprise, the White House’s concerns over the Shah’s long-term nuclear intentions grew more acute and pronounced in 1975. Now, the U.S. Government’s secret documents were explicitly questioning the Iranian economy’s absorptive capacity and maturity for the 23,000 MW of nuclear electricity over a matter of two decades that the AEOI was pushing to build. Further undercutting the exclusively electricity rationale for the existence of a massive nuclear infrastructure, in U.S. judgment, was the fact that Iran’s Ministry of Energy, the presumed consumer of atomic energy, was not institutionally in the decisionmaking loop of the AEOI. This bureaucratic anomaly lent credence to and further amplifi ed proliferation concerns.
