On a terraced hillside in north Tehran, four white canvas marquees contain a disturbing sight: ordinary-looking cars damaged by bombs or riddled with bullets. Each is a macabre memorial to the scientists who died in them – victims of the shadowy war on Iran’s nuclear programme.

In a week that has seen another deadline for international negotiations on the issue come and go, Iranians have been paying their respects to these “nuclear martyrs” at the Museum of Holy Defence and the Promotion of Resistance Culture, a spacious modern structure surrounded by beautifully tended gardens and an artificial lake teeming with visiting families on hot Ramadan nights.

Fathers and excited children peer at tanks, fighter jets, and even missiles – relics of the bloody eight-year war launched by Saddam Hussein in 1980, a year after the Iranian revolution. But the exhibits of the unconventional, clandestine conflict over the Islamic Republic’s nuclear programme are portrayed as part of a wider – and continuing - struggle between implacable enemies.

Ranged along a walkway, four green Peugeot-type saloons have been preserved under a sort of bloodstained shroud, carefully gashed to reveal pockmarked bodywork and a black-and-white photograph of a man inside. Each is flanked by a tear-shaped metal plaque with details of the victim. Red tulips, symbols of love and mourning, are strewn over the vehicles.

Like other Iranian memorials, this one tends to the grandiloquent, a sign praising the “great historic confrontation of faith and heresy, and the historical movement emanating from the will and determination against the cruelty of global arrogance headed by the US and Zionism”. The scientists were all killed by agents of Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, it states.

“I feel very sad,” said Fateme, a young Azeri woman sitting on a bench in front of the cars. “These were fathers who went to work and never came home. I saw a programme on TV about them. And actually I went to one of their funerals. It says they were killed by the Zionist regime, but I don’t know.”

The last to die was Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, a chemist and a director of the Natanz uranium enrichment plant. He was killed in January 2012 when two men on a motorbike attached magnetic bombs to his car. Just a day earlier, the then Israeli army chief of staff, Lt Gen Benny Gantz, said that “2012 would be a critical year for Iran”, in part because of “things that happen to it unnaturally”.

The first to die was Massoud Ali-Mohammadi, killed by a booby-trapped motorbike parked outside his Tehran home in January 2010. Majid Shahriari was killed and another nuclear scientist injured in a similar attack that November.

The problem is not the nuclear agreement. The problem is inside Iran. Unless people want change here, it won’t come A museum security guard

Darioush Rezaeinejad, a student, was shot dead while driving home with his wife after picking up their daughter from kindergarten in July 2011. Iran tried and hanged an Iranian man who was said to have confessed to assassinating Ali-Mohammadi on behalf of the Mossad.

All four names appear in the museum’s hologram display titled Victims of Terror, mostly listing those who were targeted before and after the 1979 revolution, many by armed opposition groups supported by Iraq.

“We went through eight years of the imposed war with 188,000 martyrs,” said Seyed Salman Sober, a guide employed by Tehran municipality. “But we are displaying the names of the martyred scientists along with the martyrs of the revolution and the war to show that we still have enemies. The way they killed them in front of their houses on their way to work shows that they were not safe – even in their own country.”

Fateme, like millions of her compatriots, is hoping to see a nuclear agreement emerge from the Vienna talks, despite the legacy of deep mistrust of the US. But she has begun to worry that it may not happen after this week’s warning by Barack Obama not to try to change the framework agreement reached in Lausanne in April. “Really we are suffering,” she said. Her husband lost his job in a cotton factory as the rial plummeted against the dollar two years ago.

Official reverence is matched by a determination to resist too many concessions in the nuclear negotiations. Iranian officials have repeatedly claimed the scientists were assassinated after being interviewed by officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s nuclear watchdog, arguing that it cannot be trusted to carry out inspections of sensitive sites. There was no immediate comment from the IAEA on the claim that it had interviewed the targeted scientists, and the agency does not customarily reveal the names of people it talks to as part of its inspections.

For Sadegh Zibakalam, a Tehran university professor and a rare public critic of the nuclear programme, the scientists’ memorial fits seamlessly into a broader Iranian narrative of resistance. “The state wants to glorify those heroic strugglers against the western powers to show that we have been through much trouble and misery and we did not give in,” he said.

Still, as in any society, there are limits to respect for the dead. “Not that many people come to see these cars,” said a security guard at the museum. “In the evenings, most people go to the gardens and to the lake where there are Iranian shows. People want entertainment, and this is sad. Youth in this country are under pressure. They want to enjoy themselves. The problem is not the nuclear agreement. The problem is inside Iran. Unless people want change here, it won’t come.”