Abstract: Iran under Shah Mohammad-Reza Pahlavi undertook one of the most ambitious nuclear programs of any non-weapon Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) member in the mid-1970s. Despite the Shah’s Cold War alliance the United States, the emerging global nonproliferation order became a zone of contestation as well as cooperation in U.S.-Iran relations. This paper explores Iran’s ultimately unsuccessful nuclear negotiations with the United States, and to a lesser extent West Germany and France, during 1974-1978, the Shah’s struggle to obtain Western nuclear technology, and the West’s efforts to maintain control over how the technology would be used.

About the Speaker: Farzan Sabet is Nuclear Security Predoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and holds a Swiss National Science Foundation Doctoral Mobility Fellowship for the 2015-2016 academic year. He is a doctoral candidate in international history at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, researching the Iranian nuclear program under Mohammad-Reza Shah Pahlavi and its evolving relationship with the global nonproliferation regime during the 1970s. His dissertation is based on multi-archival research in the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Canada and combines diplomatic history with nonproliferation studies. He is affiliated with the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Nuclear Proliferation International History Project (NPIHP)