This paper aims at exploring the nuclear cooperation between Iran and the West in the pre-revolutionary era. The study will focus on one of the less investigated aspects of the Iranian foreign policy, namely the evolution and the political implications of Tehran’s nuclear cooperation with France and the Federal Republic of Germany. After the 1973 oil crisis and the surge in oil prices, the Shah decided to invest huge sums of petrodollars into his nuclear program. The paper will analyze the responses of Paris and Bonn to the Shah’s nuclear ambitions, and the roles played by France and the Federal Republic of Germany both in the expansion of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and the raising of a cadre of Iranian professionals and scientists. Close attention will be paid to the November 1974 agreements to purchase two 1200MWe pressurized water reactors from the German firm Kraftwerk Union and two 900 MWe reactors from the French firm Framatome, as well as the Iranian participation in the French-organized multinational consortium Eurodif (European Gaseous Diffusion Uranium Enrichment Consortium). Needless to say, the study cannot overlook the relations between Iran and the United States, and the role of Washington in shaping the relations between Western Europe and Iran as well as in regulating the global nuclear market after the shocking Indian nuclear weapon test of May 1974. This study will adopt the historical method as it will draw on American and Western European diplomatic sources, as well as personal inteviews and oral history. It will, also, make use of the analytic tools offered by other disciplines such as nuclear studies and geo-politics in order to locate the appraisal of the Iranian nuclear program in a broader analysis of the role of nuclear power in Iranian foreign policy.