Contributor(s): David Patrikarakos | Drawing on years of research and access to unique sources, David Patrikarakos will tell the history of Iran’s nuclear programme, from its beginnings under the Shah until the present day. He will argue that the nuclear programme is the exegesis of modern Iran, evolving alongside the modern state itself. Its history is a kind of tabula rasa (a blank slate) onto which modern Iran’s evolution has been and continues to be written; or, more simply, it is the story of Iran’s attempt to deal with modernity: ordered, detailed, configured.