Even by curtailing its "big" nuclear program, Iran emerged from economic isolation as a completely competitive nuclear power.
Iran worked for so long and waited so long for the lifting of Western sanctions that the very fact of their lifting in the fall of 2015 was no longer perceived in the country as a holiday. And the main thing was not at all that Iran could return to the oil market and freely purchase consumer goods abroad, as well as equipment and technologies. Yes, Iran returned without nuclear weapons, which, incidentally, is even beneficial for the national economy in many respects. On the other hand, it has an operating energy sector, a fully capable industrial complex and good opportunities for the development of modern nuclear technologies. And the main role in the fact that the economic blockade of Iran ended this way was actually played by Russia.
Many are inclined to believe that it was just an accident, more precisely, the Islamic revolution, that helped Russia to "straddle" the Iranian atomic project. Although, in reality, the Soviet Union, under the regime of the last Iranian Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, had much more chances for this. And yet it must be admitted that without a certain set of circumstances, the Iranian project would hardly have gone to Russia.
Shahinshah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi highly appreciated cooperation with the USSR
The long-standing traditions of economic cooperation between Persia-Iran, first with imperial Russia, and then with the USSR, were continued after the collapse of the Union, although this did not happen immediately. Economic, as well as political opposition to this partnership was realized not only from outside, primarily from the United States and Israel, but also inside Russia and Iran.
It is believed (and this is even recorded in Internet encyclopedias) that the Iranian atomic project was started by the German concern Kraftwerk Union AG (Siemens / KWU). Indeed, it was the Germans who began the exploration work on the shores of the Persian Gulf. But few people now remember that Soviet specialists from several "mailboxes" actually prepared the ground for them. It was they who carried out geological exploration and prepared pre-project documentation for negotiations at the highest level at the very beginning of the seventies.
At that time, the shahinshah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who was eager to build the first nuclear power plant in the Middle East, had no doubts about who to start a nuclear program with. Ever since the Second World War, when the young thirty-fifth Shah of Iran had just succeeded his abdicated father on the throne, he was imbued with respect for the Soviet Union. And not at all because Soviet troops were stationed in Tehran in 1943, which ensured the safety of the members of the "big three" who arrived in the Iranian capital to discuss the conditions of the post-war peace.
One of the diplomats who worked in Tehran in those years said: “The whole point was that, unlike Churchill and Roosevelt, who ignored the Shah's requests for a meeting, the Soviet leader Stalin, following the Eastern tradition, himself turned to the Iranian leader, to the young shah, with a proposal to conduct short negotiations."
The head of Iran never forgot this sign of respect on the part of Stalin, he did not forget about the economic assistance from the USSR, and about how the Russian soldiers behaved in Iran. They entered Iran in the fall of 1941, but unlike the British, they could not be considered occupiers or colonialists. For many years, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi maintained economic and cultural ties with Moscow.
On the Soviet side, none other than the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, Alexei Nikolaevich Kosygin, took part in the preliminary negotiations on plans to build a nuclear power plant. Together with him, Iranian representatives even managed to visit the Novovoronezh nuclear power plant. However, at that time the achievements of the Soviet atomic scientists still did not fully meet the Shah's ambitions. We were able to demonstrate only power units with VVER-440 reactors. The more advanced and powerful VVER-1000 was put into operation much later.
VVER-440 reactors are installed at many Russian nuclear power plants, but not in Bushehr
The operating Soviet reactors did not meet another requirement of the Iranian side: it was impossible to desalinate sea water with their help. For the southeastern regions of Iran, this was a very urgent task. But this was not the main thing either. Another factor played against the Soviet option: the Russians did not want to hear anything about Iran having even the slightest opportunity to conduct research and development in the defense sphere. The USSR strictly adhered to the provisions of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which was signed in 1968.
In Tehran, in parallel with the Soviet proposal, of course, others were considered: French, German, even Japanese. But only the Germans had enough cynicism to somehow make it clear to the Iranian negotiators that "anything is possible" in the future. Or almost everything. They presented a KWU project based on the existing Biblis NPP with a pressurized pressurized water reactor.
The main advantage of the 1000 MW power unit was the ability to use it as a giant desalination plant capable of producing up to 100 thousand cubic meters of water per day. The craftsmen from Kraftwerk were even able to demonstrate the operation of the future desalination plant on a model.
Of course, for the province of Bushehr, where fresh water is in great shortage, this option seemed very tempting. However, the late Academician Nikolai Dollezhal, the chief designer of nuclear reactors, admitted in one of our conversations with him: it seems that the Soviet negotiators themselves had tuned in in favor of the Shah's German project.
Legendary Nikolai Dollezhal, one of the founders of the Soviet atomic project
They categorically refused to believe that a "Russian" reactor of the required parameters, such as the VVER-1000, would be fully ready by the time work began on the plant's construction project. None of the scientists was able to convince the diplomats and foreign trade that by the beginning of concrete construction, the entire complex structure, of course, not loaded with fuel elements, will already stand still. Almost the only one who believed in this was just Alexei Nikolaevich Kosygin, but for some reason his word then did not become decisive.
So, the German partner of Tehran began work in 1975, when the seaside Bushehr was “appointed” as the site for the construction of the nuclear power plant by a special decree of the Shah. A previously quiet provincial town on the shores of the Persian Gulf will immediately turn into a place of pilgrimage for nuclear scientists from all over the world. But that was not the case: the site was fenced off as a concentration camp, there were very few construction professionals even from Germany in Bushehr, and the powerful structures of the reactor compartment were erected mainly by guest workers from Turkey and Yugoslavia.
The main thing for the customer was that the Germans promised to do it cheaply, although this is not necessarily a bad thing. As it turned out later, the German controllers from Kraftwerk worked really scrupulously: it is no coincidence that the Soviet builders then practically did not have to demolish or radically rebuild anything.
However, an Islamic revolution took place in Iran. As a result, the German concern managed to complete only the zero cycle at a large-scale construction site. The allegations that 5 of the 7 billion German marks allocated for the project were mastered are still questioned by experts, and of the equipment that was allegedly already delivered to the site in Bushehr, almost nothing was useful to Soviet engineers. Everything was plundered, and what was left was completely unusable by the time of the resumption of work at the nuclear power plant.
The consequence of the revolution was the severance of relations with the United States and American sanctions, which, albeit with a creak, but joined the German Siemens with all its divisions, including Kraftwerk. And after the new Iranian leadership was practically forced to get involved in a war with neighboring Iraq, it seemed that the project of the Bushehr nuclear power plant could be given up at all.
Moreover, the Iraqi Air Force launched a series of missile and bomb strikes against the nuclear power plant under construction. The protective shells, reinforced concrete and steel, received several holes, a number of buildings and structures were destroyed, building structures were damaged, cables were torn in many places and engineering networks were damaged. There was almost no protection left on the site, and then nature did not spare the "object" either.
Meanwhile, the new leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini and his associates turned out to be no less ambitious leaders than Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Moreover, from an economic point of view, the leadership's line of ensuring almost complete independence from the West (as a matter of course) assumed that sooner or later Iran should return to the nuclear project.
And so it happened. Already when the "Sacred Defense" (military confrontation with Iraq) began to turn for the country into a kind of chronic disease, Tehran tried to restore contacts with the German developers of the nuclear power plant project. However, having received an categorical refusal, first from Siemens, and then from the headquarters of the German nuclear concern EnBW in Karlsruhe, Iran almost immediately remembered about Russian partners. As bitter as it may sound, in a sense, even the Chernobyl tragedy played into Moscow's hands: Tehran decided that Soviet nuclear scientists would then become more accommodating and at the same time be more responsible in their decisions.
The first Minister of Medium Machine Building of Russia after the collapse of the USSR, and after the change of the “secret signboard”, the head of the Ministry of Atomic Energy Viktor Nikitovich Mikhailov complained about this: “The shadow of the“Chernobyl compromising evidence”still hung on the nuclear scientists, and the NPP builders were going through critical times of inaction. The ability to build nuclear power plants was not in demand at that time, it caused rejection in society. But the professionals understood that it was necessary to save the brilliant cohort of the atomic elite, specialists who were left out of work in the process of the harsh domestic break-up, and the Kremlin also understood this.”
Viktor Mikhailov, the first Russian "atomic" minister
It seems that those who say that the Iranian order saved the Russian nuclear industry are largely right. The efforts of Minister Viktor Mikhailov and his team turned out to be almost a decisive factor for Moscow to say yes to Tehran. And this despite all the ambiguity of the then relations between Russia and Iran. Despite the fact that Russia continued to demonstrate its utmost loyalty to Iraq and personally to Saddam Hussein. As you can see, it was not in vain that opponents called Minister Mikhailov an "atomic hawk" …
The development of the VVER-1000 reactor in the USSR was successfully completed very on time - by the time negotiations with Iran almost reached an impasse. Interestingly, at the same time, China did not hide the fact that negotiations with the Russians on the construction of the Tianwan nuclear power plant were in full swing.
One of the author's colleagues recalled more than once how he was told in Cuba about how Fidel Castro himself had been approached from Iran with requests for atomic consultations. The fact is that the commander personally oversaw the construction of a nuclear center on Liberty Island on the basis of the still unfinished Juragua nuclear power plant. However, alas, I have no documentary evidence of this fact …
But the author of these lines had the opportunity to see for himself that in those same years none other than the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi managed to visit Bushehr. And it was not just about politics. By that time, the Iranian side was considering several options for developing its own nuclear energy at once, and the project of the Tazhura nuclear center implemented in Libya could well become an analogue of what was planned to be built in Bushehr after the start of the nuclear power plant.
In the second half of the 1980s, Russian specialists literally threw themselves into the Bushehr NPP site. Moreover, most of such business trips were carefully disguised as trips to Central Asia or the Transcaucasus. In the context of the oil embargo, the Iranian authorities made every effort to follow the path of "nuclear independence".
