Iran’s nuclear retrenchment, 1977–1980: the unravelling of US-Iran nuclear cooperation

In August 1978, as protests swept Iran, a quieter crisis unfolded within Prime Minister Jamshid Amuzegar’s government. A high-level commission recommended suspending Iran’s nuclear programme, then among the most ambitious in the developing world. This article argues that Iran’s nuclear retrenchment began not with the 1979 revolution but months earlier, driven by fiscal crisis, the erosion of institutional autonomy at the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, and the withdrawal of Western suppliers during the final years of the Pahlavi monarchy. Drawing on newly declassified US government documents and Iranian primary sources, the article identifies the Amuzegar commission as the starting point of this process and reconstructs its progression through successive phases, from the 1978 reappraisal to suspension after the US-Iran hostage crisis. Revolutionary upheaval transformed the meaning of retrenchment, reframing nuclear technology from a symbol of modernisation into evidence of imperialist dependence. As Iran’s domestic nuclear enterprise unravelled, so too did the bilateral cooperation framework that had underpinned it since 1957, exposing the fragility of non-proliferation arrangements built on close US partnership with non-Western states.