ABSTRACT
The nuclear issue was picked up at the top level in some marathon talks in Tehran between Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and the Shah in May 1977. This meeting was during the ambassadorial interregnum of December 1976 through June 1977. In that meeting the Shah brought up the stalled nuclear negotiations within the context of dealing with the world’s “long-term energy needs.” The Shah also signaled his intention to ramp up Iran’s imports from the United States to $110 billion annually and an “ultimate plan” to purchase a whopping 18 nuclear reactors from the U.S. beyond the four under contract with Germany and France as long as Washington was prepared to sell. The Shah also indicated, “Iran has no desire to obtain reprocessing facilities or a nuclear weapons capability” since “a few silly bombs” would not make any strategic sense provided that Tehran had a guaranteed uranium fuel supply for 23-25 1-MW reactors. 1
A few days after Vance’s Tehran visit, Helms’s replacement, William Sullivan, presented his credentials as the U.S. Ambassador to Iran. Sullivan couldn’t have been a worse candidate to bridge the gap between Tehran and Washington’s nuclear negotiating positions. A career diplomat and captious critic of the Shah, the new Ambassador tended to view with fatalistic resignation the gathering storm unleashed by the clerics on a seemingly doomed monarchical regime. To make matters worse, the new Ambassador also lacked the kind of authority and audacity of judgment on the nuclear issue that his predecessor had brought to the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. During Sullivan’s ambassadorship there are essentially no visible signs of Helms-style efforts to smooth over nuclear matters between Iran and the U.S.
