Evin prison Families fear for detainees as bombs fall on Tehran

When Mehraveh Khandan heard about Israel's evacuation order in Tehran last week, the first thing she thought of was her father.

- William Christou

tangles with European firms over the incomplete nuclear programme the shah. By 1990, Iran's atomic energy authority declared that by 2005 20% of Iran's energy could be produced by nuclear electric power and 10 power vaults would be built over the next decade.

Hashemi Rafsanjani, Iran's parliamentary speaker during the 1980-88 war and then president from 1989 to 1997, made numerous appeals to Iran's nuclear scientists to return home to build the programme. "If you do not serve Iran, whom will you serve?" he said in 1988. Suddenly Iran's nuclear programme shifted from a symbol of western imperialism to a source of patriotic pride.

By the turn of the century the Iranian nuclear programme was erroneously thought to consist primarily of several small research reactors and the light-water reactor being constructed by Iran and now Russia at Bushehr.

In mid 2022 a leak from a dissident group, possibly via the Mossad, revealed that Iran had two secret nuclear installations designed for enriching uranium at Natanz near Isfahan and Kashan in central Iran. Iran said it was under no obligation to notify the existence of the plants to the IAEA-backed nuclear inspectorate, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), because they were not operational.

Iran added that the NPT declares it is the "inalienable right" of states to develop nuclear programmes for peaceful purposes under IAEA safeguards. In itself uranium enrichment is not a sign of seeking to make a nuclear weapon. Yet critics said it was hard to explain why Iran needed to make nuclear fuel at a stage in which it had no functioning nuclear reactor.

From then on the diplomatic dance started - and it has continued with varying intensity ever since.