Swept under the rug, how the US is responsible for a nuclear (peaceful or not) Iran

Lost in Bush’s current obsession with Iran’s nuclear intentions is the fact that the United States—from the Eisenhower administration through the Carter years—played a major role in the development of Iran’s nuclear program. In 1957, Washington and Teheran signed their first civil nuclear cooperation agreement. Over the next two decades, the United States provided Iran not only with technical assistance but with its first experimental nuclear reactor, complete with enriched uranium and plutonium with fissile isotopes. Despite the refusal of the shah to rule out the possibility of Iran developing nuclear weapons, the Ford administration approved the sale to Iran of up to eight nuclear reactors (with fuel) and later cleared the sale of lasers believed to be capable of enriching uranium. Surpassing any danger from the mullahs now in power, the shah's megalomania led arms control advocates to fear a diversion of the technology for military purposes.

The Washington Post reported that an initially hesitant President Ford was assured by his advisers that Iran was only interested in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy despite the country’s enormous reserves of oil and natural gas. Ironically, Ford’s secretary of defense was Donald Rumsfeld, his chief of staff was Dick Cheney, and his head of nonproliferation efforts at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency was Paul Wolfowitz, all of whom—as officials in the current administration—have insisted that Iran’s nuclear program must be assumed to have military applications.

Having already successfully fooled most of Congress and the American public into believing that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program, the Bush administration and congressional leaders of both parties are now claiming that it is Iran that has an active nuclear weapons program. As with Iraq, the administration does not look too kindly on those who question its assumptions.… When the IAEA published a detailed report in November 2004 concluding that its extensive inspections had revealed no evidence of Iran pursuing a nuclear weapons program, the Bush administration responded by attempting to oust the IAEA director.

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1/31/2006 AP article: U.N. Says Iran Holds Illicit Nuke Document

1/5/2006 The Guardian: The book, State of War by James Risen, the New York Times reporter who exposed the Bush administration's controversial domestic spying operation, claims the CIA give the Iranians blueprints to build a bomb, but the plans contained fatal flaws designed to derail Tehran's nuclear drive.

These are the same documents...both stories are out of Vienna, and they both refer to either hemispherical forms or firing sets...all parts of a nuclear weapon's core.

The CIA claims that all nuclear technology that Iran has acquired came from A.Q. Khan. This is not true in any material fashion. Unidentified "foreign intermediaries" suppled Iran with centrifuge components in the mid-1980s. [see pg. 6]