Iran may be conducting nuclear weapons activities — yet Washington is doing nothing about it.
Stop Iran Now Via Andrea Stricker - Foundation For Defense of Democracies
An astonishing U.S. intelligence report just revealed a grim truth: The Islamic Republic of Iran may be conducting nuclear weapons activities — yet Washington is doing nothing about it.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) recently provided an overdue report to Congress, omitting from the unclassified version a key phrase ODNI has used in annual threat assessments since 2019: “Iran is not currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons-development activities necessary to produce a testable nuclear device.”
In other words: The U.S. intelligence community can no longer assert Tehran is not working on nuclear weapons. Iran has “undertaken activities that better position it to produce a nuclear device, if it chooses to do so,” the intelligence report concluded.
As Iran inches across the nuclear threshold, America is wasting precious time.
The United States, along with its European partners, must urgently mobilize the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), to conduct inspections to detect and end the regime’s illicit activities. Washington must also restore a maximum economic pressure campaign against the Islamic Republic and signal a credible military threat to deter and penalize further advances.
The unclassified ODNI report does not explain the basis for its recent, glaring omission, but media reporting provides clues. According to Axios, the United States and Israel collected intelligence last spring indicating that eager Iranian scientists were carrying out nuclear weaponization work: computer modeling and metallurgy experiments that could hasten Iran’s production of atomic weapons, should the regime order it. “U.S. intelligence agencies are re-examining their criteria for assessing Iran’s nuclear activities in light of what it is learning about the program,” explained a Wall Street Journal story on the ODNI report.
After significant delays, a U.S.-Israel Strategic Consultative Group met in Washington in July to consider the new Iran intelligence and strategize what to do. While the two countries reportedly enlisted the IAEA for consultations, Washington’s main solution was to demand private clarifications from Tehran via diplomatic back channels and ask the regime to halt the activities. Iranian officials reportedly explained and denied the nuclear weapons-work, and the United States was satisfied and dropped the matter.
What could go wrong in trusting partners like these?
With world powers focused on multiple, competing regional crises, Tehran may be not only continuing weaponization work, but progressing far faster than the West realizes.
Iran, Nuclear Threshold State
Today, Tehran is a stone’s throw from being nuclear weapons-capable, having accomplished the largest feat in nuclear weapons development — producing the fuel.
The regime’s breakout time — the time required to make enough weapons-grade uranium for a single nuclear device — currently stands at seven days. Iran could produce enough material for up to 13 nuclear weapons in four months. Tehran has thousands of advanced uranium-enrichment centrifuge machines spinning across at least three sites and may be stockpiling untold quantities at secret facilities, including at a new nuclear facility buried deep under a mountain.
The remaining step for Iran, “weaponization,” involves complicated engineering and physics to create the nuclear weapon itself, marrying specialized triggering mechanisms, explosives, and components with fuel to trigger an atomic blast. According to nuclear expert David Albright, the regime can reliably test a nuclear weapon’s components without conducting a full-scale test, also accomplishing some weaponization work at the same time that it enriches fuel to weapons-grade.
Due to the Tehran’s past, known work on nuclear weapons, the United States and Israel estimate Iran’s weaponization timeline to be about a year, if not longer. Yet independent non-governmental experts such as Albright believe the timeline may be less than six months. The obvious problem: no one knows for sure.
Once Tehran makes weapons-grade uranium —potentially at a covert underground site — there could be little warning, time, and ability for foreign powers to act before Tehran could emerge with a crude, yet perfectly functional, nuclear weapon. Iran needs only to conduct a demonstration test to establish nuclear deterrence, creating a protective shield around its atomic sites and military assets across the Middle East.
Past Weaponization Work
ODNI’s recent report to Congress expressed another key concern: “There has been a notable increase this year in Iranian public statements about nuclear weapons, suggesting the topic is becoming less taboo,” the agency wrote.
The former head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, Ali Akbar Salehi, publicly boasted in February that Iran had crossed “all thresholds of nuclear science and technology” and possesses all it needs to make nuclear weapons in a disassembled fashion. The alarmed head of the IAEA, Rafael Grossi, urged Iran, “Let me know what you have.”
In 2003, after non-governmental groups and the media first exposed Tehran’s covert nuclear activities and facilities, the Iran regime opted to downsize and split a robust weaponization program into covert and overt parts: Covert activities with no plausible civilian justification would continue at military sites, while less obvious nuclear weapons-work would continue at research institutions.
Holdups remained in several weaponization processes for Iran to create functional nuclear weapons. Tehran also needed more time to integrate a nuclear device on a ballistic missile delivery system.
The IAEA confirmed there were indications of ongoing Iranian weaponization work until 2009. Today, all weaponization activities are likely overseen by the Organization of Defense Innovation and Research, or SPND, its Persian acronym. The United States sanctioned SPND in 2014, calling it a “Tehran-based entity that is primarily responsible for research in the field of nuclear weapons development.”
Since 2019, however, ODNI’s reports assessed every year that Tehran “is not currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons-development activities necessary to produce a testable nuclear device.” The basis for that categorical assessment has been unclear, since Iran is undertaking a variety of activities relevant to nuclear weaponization — from the IAEA catching the regime producing near 90-percent weapons-grade fuel and making uranium metal — a material used in the core of a nuclear weapon — to laying groundwork for a rapid breakout, removing IAEA surveillance cameras, ejecting inspectors, and limiting the inspectors’ reach.
Iran also refuses to fully cooperate with a more than five-year IAEA investigation into the regime’s nuclear weapons-work at former nuclear weapon sites. Despite this, the IAEA was able to conclude that Iran carried out undeclared nuclear weapons-related work at two sites. The regime is likely concerned that the IAEA would uncover remaining nuclear weapons activities if Tehran obliges.
Do Not Trust, Verify
U.S. and Israeli intelligence observed the recent weaponization work at Iranian research institutions, raising concern about what they cannot ascertain at military sites. Absent truly remarkable human and other key intelligence, it is unlikely the West can find out more without IAEA inspections. World powers must empower the IAEA to inspect for weaponization activities before the Islamic Republic exploits world powers’ distraction and crosses the nuclear threshold.
The IAEA should start inspections with entities involved in the alleged weaponization activities. While Iran would no doubt initially deny an IAEA request to inspect for weaponization work — Tehran’s safeguards agreement with the agency specifically covers inspections at facilities that are suspected to produce or house nuclear material — unified Western pressure and the threat of sanctions have succeeded in changing Iran’s calculus before. Moreover, in 2018, while Iran was allowing more comprehensive IAEA inspections, the IAEA visited two Iranian universities previously suspected of carrying out weaponization work, providing modern precedent for such access.
If needed, the IAEA can also trigger so-called “special inspections” in Iran. According to the standard IAEA safeguards agreement, the IAEA can ask to visit any site “if the Agency considers that information made available by the State and information obtained from routine inspections is not adequate for the Agency to fulfil its responsibilities under the Agreement.” The agency has asked for a special inspection twice before, in Romania in 1992 and when North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1993. The IAEA was successful in only the former case.
To be sure, Iran may move or hide evidence of nefarious activities, as it has numerous times in the past. However, the IAEA can follow a trail of evidence and continue requesting access, interviews, and documentation until satisfied. It has successfully done so in previous proliferation cases in Libya, Iraq, and South Africa to ensure those weapons programs ended.
IAEA inspections may have an effect of chilling further Iranian weaponization work, allowing time for world powers to revive a campaign of pressure and restore a credible military threat against Iran’s nuclear program. Inspections may also pave the way for IAEA member states to authorize an in-depth IAEA investigation of Tehran’s past and possibly ongoing weaponization work and verifiably ensure those activities have ended.
Surely, IAEA requests for access and investigations are likely to succeed only if Tehran faces major economic and financial penalties for its lack of transparency and threatening nuclear advances — meaning the United States must enforce key oil sanctions that previously curtailed Iran’s revenue and brought its economy to the brink. The regime is currently exporting record quantities of oil to China and other countries because of a U.S. failure to enforce existing penalties.
To stop the regime from breaking out of its nonproliferation commitments at an opportune moment, the United States, alongside Israel, must also continue to prepare and showcase military options and signal a credible willingness to use force to destroy or substantially set back Tehran’s program.
The Islamic Republic’s nuclear cat-and-mouse game has finally caught the attention of a cautious U.S. intelligence community. Now is the time for Washington and its partners to force Tehran to provide a full accounting of its atomic activities, past and present.
Andrea Stricker is deputy director of the Nonproliferation and Biodefense Program and a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). Follow her on Twitter @StrickerNonpro. FDD is a nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
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