New Evidence Iran is Working to Obtain Nuclear Weapons

As Vienna negotiations enter decisive phase, US-based think tank reveals new evidence that Iran has expanded its nuclear program

By Yochanan Visser, ISRAEL HAYOM  February 22, 2022

Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei believes he has duped the West, and he might be right. Photo: EPA-EFE

French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said during a session of parliament last week that Iran must make a decision now.

“We have reached a tipping point. It is now a matter of days, not weeks,” Le Drian said, adding that the six world powers negotiating a renewed nuclear deal with Iran in Vienna are now aligned on the contours of the new accord.

“Political decisions are now expected from Iran. Either they cause a serious political crisis in the coming days, or they accept the agreement that respects the interests of all parties,” said Le Drian.

However, earlier Iran made it clear that it does not want to rush into a new deal. According to Iran, it is the West that must make a political decision if it wants a new agreement with the Islamic Republic.

Ten days ago Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi reiterated that the regime has never pinned any hopes of reaching an agreement acceptable to the Islamic Republic.

According to Raisi, Iran places only “hope in the east, west, north, and south of the country and not in New York and Vienna.”

As Raisi spoke, the audience raised the well-known chants that wished death for the United States, England and Israel. This is the primary goal of the Islamic Revolution that was commemorated more than a week ago.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Thursday that his country’s nuclear program is only aimed at generating energy. “We will need nuclear energy sooner or later if we are not to end up in a situation where our independence is being threatened,” Khamenei said.

He added that Iran has never wanted to develop nuclear weapons. That was a false accusation from Iran’s enemies, according to Khamenei.

As usual, the leader of Iran – who acts on the so-called Taqiyya principle of Shia Islam – lied.

According to this principle, a Muslim may conceal and renounce his religious identity and duties when there is a threat of death, and Khamenei already in 1987 said that Iran feels threatened.

Officially, Iran says Khamenei once issued a so-called “fatwa” banning the production of nuclear weapons on religious grounds. In reality, Khamenei just wrote a letter to the International Atomic Energy Agency explaining that the production of nuclear weapons is prohibited in Islam.

However, in 1987, during a secret meeting with Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency, Khamenei ordered the people present to “work fast and hard” to give Iran the ability to “defend itself against its enemies.”

New evidence

One need only look at the latest reports from the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) to realize that Iran continues to deceive the global community.

In the middle of January, the American think tank published a report on new developments at the nuclear facility in Natanz.

Iran was excavating a mountain just south of the uranium reprocessing plant in Natanz, according to the ISIS report. This above-ground facility was reportedly the target of sabotage by Israel’s foreign intelligence agency Mossad in both 2020 and 2021.

After this sabotage, Iran decided to build a new reprocessing plant deep in the ground and this facility will almost certainly be immune to airstrikes. The facility is also much larger than the destroyed centrifuge plant in Natanz.

“Fordow (another underground-nuclear facility in Iran) is already seen as buried so deeply that it would be difficult to destroy by it by an airstrike. Natanz’s new site may be even harder to destroy,” ISIS researcher David Albright wrote in the report.

Albright is a nuclear expert who used to work for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna at the end of the last century.

His assessment is likely to affect Israel’s ability to destroy a significant part of Iran’s nuclear program through airstrikes.

Going underground

The Israeli Air Force (IAF) does not yet have so-called ‘bunker busters,’ huge bombs that can penetrate deep into the ground and destroy bunkers.

However, the IAF does have the so-called the ‘Rocks’ missile that is able to destroy bunkers deep in the ground.

The ‘Rocks’ is a converted ‘Spice’ ballistic missile that uses GPS to perform a precision attack on targets above and deep underground. But it remains unclear whether this bunker-buster missile will be able to destroy the new facility in Natanz.

The new facility at Natanz will be much larger than the underground nuclear facility at Fordow, Albright wrote.

The nuclear and Iran expert believes that eventually much of Iran’s nuclear program will be transferred to the mountain Kuh-e Kolang Gaz La (1,608 meters) in Natanz.

A Western intelligence expert told Albright, furthermore, that there are strong suspicions that Iran is building a major reprocessing plant under the mountain.

“A relatively small number of advanced IR-6 centrifuges, say 1,000, would be enough to create a more powerful enrichment plant. Such a plant would double the enrichment output compared to Fordow,” Albright wrote. IR-6 centrifuges can enrich uranium much faster than the old P-1 centrifuges Iran obtained through Pakistan.

Ramping up production

ISIS in Washington has now published a new report on Esfahan, another nuclear facility in Iran.

“On January 31, 2022, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that Iran has moved production capacity of advanced centrifuges from Karaj to an unspecified location in Esfahan,” the ISIS researchers wrote in their report.

Karaj was also the target of sabotage in 2021 by Mossad, that used a small unmanned aerial vehicle to destroy a part of the factory.

According to the new ISIS report, the new workshop for making rotor tubes and bellows for centrifuges has been operational from January 24, 2022.

The exact location of this new workshop has not yet been made public.

One possible candidate is the main site of Esfahan, a large nuclear complex. However, there are other locations near Esfahan, such as a large industrial complex south of the city called 7 Tir Industries, or Farayand Technique.

This latter company previously participated in Iran’s centrifuge production program.

It is now believed that the company today has the right expertise and possibly the right set of tools necessary to manufacture very strong components of the advanced centrifuges, such as the rotors.

A bad deal all around

There is currently uncertainty about the progress in the negotiations with Iran.

Some observers say it will be a matter of days before the new deal can be concluded. However, others directly involved in the negotiations continue to argue that there are still three major problems to be solved.

Israel’s Premier Naftali Bennett said at the weekly cabinet meeting that the new agreement will only run for two-and-a-half years. In exchange for signing the accord, Iran will receive billions of dollars. Bennett warned, most likely in vain, that this money will go to terrorism in the region.

“This terrorism endangers us, endangers other countries in the region – as we have seen recently – and it will also endanger American forces in the region.

In any case, we are organizing and preparing for the day after, in all dimensions, so that we can maintain the security of the citizens of Israel by ourselves!” Bennett warned.

See: Israel Wary as US, West Set to Sign ‘Weak’ Iran Nuke Deal

At the end of last year, the Israeli government decided to make an additional $1.5 billion available to the military. This money is earmarked for preparing for war with Iran and for destroying at least the crucial parts of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program.

Israel is anticipating a war on multiple fronts and is therefore putting in place additional security measures and structures, especially in the north of the country.