[ad_1]
Benjamin Netanyahu seized the documents to launch new attacks against the nuclear deal. (File)
New details of a stockpile of Iranian nuclear documents stolen by Israeli spies earlier this year show that Tehran has obtained explicit information about the design of Weapons from a foreign source and was about to be mastered
Iran's ambitious and highly secretive efforts to fabricate nuclear weapons included extensive research on the fabrication of uranium metal as well as advanced tests on equipment used to generate neutrons to launch a nuclear chain. reaction, the documents show.
While Iranian officials arrested much of the work in 2003, internal memos show experienced scientists making extensive plans to continue several projects in secret, hidden in existing military research programs. divided into two: secret (secret structure and objectives) and open, "writes an Iranian scientist in a memo, part of an archive of 100,000 documents seized during a bold raid on a stolen documents contain no revelation about recent nuclear activity and no evidence that Iran has violated the 2015 nuclear agreement with the United States and five other world powers. US authorities have long been aware of Iran's nuclear research from before 2004, which the Obama administration has explicitly cited to urge Iran to accept the historic agreement limiting its ability to manufacture oil and gas. 39 enriched uranium and to place its nuclear facilities under intensive international surveillance.
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has seized these documents in recent weeks to launch new attacks against the nuclear deal, which according to Israeli authorities is inadequate to contain Iran's long-term nuclear ambitions . The deal has been on the support of life since the Trump administration unilaterally withdrew the pact in May. Iran says it respects the terms of the agreement and does not intend to build nuclear weapons.
A large team of Israeli experts continued to extract the document for further revelations while sharing the material with US and European intelligence agencies. as well as with the International Atomic Energy Agency, or the IAEA, the UN monitoring body charged with monitoring the nuclear activity of the United Nations. l & # 39; Iran. The authorities shared recent findings with a small group of Western media last week, claiming that evidence of advanced nuclear weapons research from Tehran – as well as its efforts to conceal activity while preserving the knowledge make technique for future use – We can not trust Iran. Iran has challenged the authenticity of the documents obtained by Israel, calling them false. Officials from the Iranian mission in New York did not respond to a request for comment.
"This archive explains why we have doubts," a senior Israeli official told US journalists at the Tel Aviv briefing. The official, like the other participants, insisted on anonymity by discussing highly sensitive documents and intelligence operations.
"This explains why the (nuclear) agreement is worse than nothing, because it leaves key parts of the nuclear program unanswered." the official said. "This does not block Iran 's way to bomb, it paves the way for the bomb of Iran".
Many US weapons experts and former US officials say that Israeli critics of the deal do not understand. They say the new revelations show precisely why the nuclear deal was needed.
"We were at the (negotiating) table precisely because we knew that Iran had ambitions to build a nuclear bomb and we wanted a verifiable agreement to block these ambitions," said Jake Sullivan, a former State Department official involved in preliminary discussions with Iran on what will become later the Joint Action Plan Joint, or JCPOA, as the agreement on nuclear power is commonly known. "In my opinion, recent revelations do the opposite of undermining the case – they reinforce the need for it."
Stolen documents shown to reporters are part of the same batch as Netanyahu announced on April 30 in a televised drama presentation to make the case that "Iran lied", as the Prime Minister proclaimed several times tonight. The way they were obtained from a hidden storage facility in the middle of Tehran is just beginning to appear.
Israeli authorities learned early in 2017 that Iran had begun systematically gathering information on its nuclear weapons research. at a single depot in the district of Shorabad, in the south of Tehran. The building, in a row of industrial warehouses, had no visible security presence or other features that could have indicated to an observer that it contained something unusual . Only a small number of Iranians have apparently been aware of its existence, said an Israeli intelligence officer informed on the details.
"We wanted to know: what are they hiding, and for what?" the officer said. "Once we learned where the documents were, we prepared an operational team to acquire them."
Mossad agents were able to learn the internal layout of the building, including the location and general contents 32 boxes containing paper documents. and the "Project Amad" computer storage files, the code name of the Iranian nuclear project. The spies studied the security features of the building and tracked the movements and schedules of the workers who maintained the archives. Eventually, they agreed on a date – January 31 – and a time window of exactly six hours and 29 minutes, in which they believed they could violate the facility, open the chests and remove half a ton of documents without being detected. As some of the equipment was too bulky to carry, the agents only opened the safes which, in their opinion, contained the most valuable material, and then removed only the most important files. The techniques of the procedure were vaguely described as unusual, and in the vein of "Ocean's Eleven," the Hollywood movie about a burglary at a Las Vegas casino. The way the vast stock of paper binders and computer disks has been expelled from the country is not publicly known.
To counter Iran's claims that the documents are fake, Israeli officials allowed journalists to see and touch a few pages of the original files, including the handwritten notes signed by Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the Iranian physicist who, according to Western intelligence agencies, was in charge of the Amad project. Journalists received copies of some documents, many of which were not published before. Others were shown only briefly or not at all, on the grounds that they contained explicit technical details that could be used to fabricate nuclear weapons.
Among the documents the Israelis said that "no one was able to make nuclear weapons. they could not share were documents containing design information for a nuclear bomb. Israeli officials said the documents had been provided to Iranians by a foreign source, but they would not say whether the original supplier was a government or foreign national operating independently. Iran is known to have acquired information on the construction of centrifuges for uranium enrichment by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, a peddler recognized from sensitive nuclear information, to the In the late 1980s, US intelligence officials believe that Khan has spent partial plans for a Chinese nuclear device on at least one of his international customers. The IAEA also estimated that Iran had obtained information on the design of weapons, but the evidence was elusive and the Iranian authorities rejected the request.
The Israeli authorities refused to say whether the weapons plans obtained by the Iranians could have produced a functional nuclear bomb. "We see explicit material related to nuclear weapons from different sources, some of which are not of Iranian origin," said an Israeli intelligence official.
Overall, newly published documents reinforce a publicly known line More than a decade ago: Iran launched a secret program in the late 1980s to build nuclear weapons but has halted his efforts in 2003 following the US invasion of neighboring Iraq and revelations about a secret uranium enrichment plant near the town of Natanz. . IAEA inspectors knew the main lines of Iranian research. What is new is the sometimes staggering details of the sophistication of Iran's nuclear efforts and the advance of Iranian scientists before the project is frozen. the recordings are previously unknown photos of a large cylindrical test chamber in which Iran would have performed tests of an implosion device of the type used to trigger a nuclear detonation . In other recently published documents, Iranians measured the radiation of a neutron explosion test in the same enclosure in 2002. In the modern design of nuclear weapons, a neutron generator releases radioactive particles to support a powerful nuclear chain reaction. Iranian experiments to manufacture a form of uranium metal that can serve as a neutron initiator, and still others describe problems of contamination to uranium on the outside. of the test chamber, located at the Parchin military base, outside Tehran. Years later, when United Nations nuclear inspectors asked to inspect the Parchin experiment site, the Iranian authorities allowed the visit only after completely dismantling the test chamber, scuffed several tons of top soil and covered all the fresh asphalt area.
Other documents describe how Project Amad was directed and organized. One of the tables lists the current Iranian President, Hbadan Rouhani, as part of an "Advanced Technology Council" which approved the initiative. Other documents suggest a supporting role of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps as well as the Qods Force, the elite military unit that the US government describes as a major support for terrorist groups International. Previously published documents by Israel, including a draft contract putting the Iranian military in charge of converting low-enriched uranium to military-grade fuel adapted to nuclear bombs.
The documents support the opinion – long held by US intelligence agencies – that Iran has kept intact the intellectual core of its nuclear program. The documents describe a series of meetings at the end of 2003 during which Project Amad managers discuss ways to keep program scientists engaged in nuclear research after the end of the initiative. The Iranian Organization for Defensive Innovation and Research, known by its Farsi acronym SPND, would continue to serve as a platform for research in nuclear-related fields, such as neutron generation, and in training new scientists. "Do not be fooled: the amount of staff in the visible and secret parts will not diminish," writes an Iranian official in a note dated September 3. 2003. "The structure will not become smaller and each sub-project will oversee both its visible and secret parts."
Such statements are at the basis of Israeli opinion that Iran has never really abandoned its intention to manufacture nuclear weapons. In a few years, when some of the JCPOA's restrictions expire, Iran will be able to resume work on a nuclear device that Israel sees as a threat to its existence, said the senior official
. but they have an impact on the future, "said the manager." This is not a history lesson, they have capabilities that they can use in the future. "
Yet the unanswered question is whether Iran's nuclear ambitions – to the extent that Iran still possesses them – would be better content by maintaining the nuclear deal Under the current PAGC, Iran has no short-term means of obtaining the fissile material it would need to build a single nuclear bomb While some major limitations of the Iranian program Civil nuclear energy will expire in just six years, supporters say the pact contains permanent provisions that will quickly alert detectives and spying agencies if Iran starts working on a Israeli documents seem to confirm that The IAEA – and presumably the intelligence agencies – do have a remarkably good understanding of the Iranian program despite imperfect access, "said James Acton, nuclear physicist and co-chairman of Nuclear Policy. Despite the faults of the JCPOA, Acton said the nuclear deal "represented the least risky option to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons", with a greater chance of success than any other option. Removing the pact "could – in fact, probably will – have the effect of advancing these problems for many years," said Acton.
But others knowing about the Israeli revelations said that they showed, at a minimum, that Iran has a lot to report. The 2015 nuclear agreement did not oblige Iran to recognize all of its past activities, and some experts believe that this gap allowed Tehran to retain nuclear secrets and a scientific infrastructure that would allow it to acquire weapons quickly in the future, if she chooses to
"Why did Iran store such information?" asked Olli Heinonen, a Finnish nuclear expert who led the IAEA inspection teams in Iran in the mid-2000s. Heinonen noted that other countries, such Iraq and Libya, were required by the IAEA to destroy the technical and equipment databases related to their past nuclear research. At a minimum, he said, Israeli disclosures should require a modification of the PAGC so that none of the ceilings of uranium production will be lifted until the inspectors have verified that all Iranian weapons research has been closed. credible badurances that nuclear weapons work has been completed – and that all weapons-only disposable capabilities have been dismantled and that documentation has been verifiably destroyed – Iran should refrain to increase its uranium enrichment capabilities. ] (Except for the title, this story was not published by the NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
[ad_2]
Source link
