It’s shadowy, underground and back on the world’s radar. Could Tehran one day have nuclear weapons?
Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.Talk about timing. Just days after Israel sent troops into Lebanon in early October, there were suddenly rumours about a mysterious seismic event that had occurred deep beneath the vast desert plain in the northern Iranian district of Semnan.
But how close is Iran to developing nuclear warheads? Where did its nuclear program come from? And what would be the effect of an Israeli strike?How did Iran become a nuclear nation? Meanwhile, from the late 1980s, nuclear physicist Abdul Qadeer Khan, known as the father of Pakistan’s atomic weapons program, used a global web of scientists, front companies and factories to transfer European and Chinese nuclear technology to would-be nuclear states, including Iran, North Korea and Libya.
“Briefly,” says John Carlson, an international authority on nuclear non-proliferation, “Iran tried to hide nuclear activities before 2003 when its secret uranium enrichment program and other activities were discovered. Since then, while trying to hide aspects of the past, it has complied with basic safeguards obligations but has been evasive at the margins.”
The car that Iran’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was driving before he was assassinated, east of Tehran, in 2020.Then, in 2020, Iran’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was killed as he drove in a convoy with bodyguards from his vacation home on the Caspian Sea to his country house in Absard.
“Competence is not the overriding impression you get from dealing with Iranian officials,” Leslie tells us today. “Dealing with the Iranians was very, very odd … sometimes when you’re dealing with people, you realise you’re not dealing with the ‘A’ team from the organisation. Iran has produced some brilliant scientists but commonly, when dealing with the Iranian officials, you got the impression you were dealing with the C team, not even the B team. You were dealing with a C team or worse.
President Barack Obama, flanked by then vice-president Joe Biden, in the White House after an Iran nuclear deal was reached, in July 2015.“It was a breakthrough in that the Iranians, for the first time, had agreed to cap their ambitions,” says Trevor Findlay.
Iran’s heavy water nuclear facility near Arak. south-west of Tehran in 2011, before the Iran nuclear deal was signed.With Iran limiting inspectors’ access to much of its program, we are increasingly left in the dark about its abilities and the extent of its stockpiles of uranium. What we do know is Iran has a single commercial nuclear plant that makes electricity, at Bushehr, which uses fuel supplied by Russia.
Recent reports have focused on what experts call “nuclear breakout”, the amount of time needed to manufacture enough material to fuel a nuclear bomb. In August, the Institute for Science and International Security think tank in Washington claimed that Iran was at the point where it could “break out quickly, in days”. However, that’s just one part of the process of making a viable weapon.
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