What, if anything, is to prevent a rogue state such as Iran from concealing its nuclear program?
Sarah N. Stern | April 25, 2025
President Hassan Rouhani gives a speech at the Motahari stadium of Sabzevar on May 6, 2018 (Photo by Fars Media Corporation, CC BY 4.0)
About two-dozen Mossad agents broke into a clandestine warehouse in the middle of an industrial section of Tehran on Jan. 30, 2018, making away with more than 100,000 documents outlining the Islamic regime’s nuclear-weapons work. This collection covered years of Iran’s nuclear archive, including the AMAD Project’s production plans, enrichment projections and warhead designs.
Flash-forward seven years. According to an article that came out this week in Iran International, Rafael Grossi, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said: “Iran is not far from having a nuclear problem. They don’t have it, we know it. But the material for it, it’s already there. To make a few warheads.”
Grossi added that “it would be a matter of months, not years” and that the level of visibility is “insufficient.”
This is certainly verified by Andrea Stricker of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who recently wrote about a small building being destroyed by the Israelis in airstrikes last September, as part of the Parchin military project. The building was not on the list of what the IAEA had planned to visit, nor was it in the AMAD documents.
A 2018 Mossad document revealed that this building was used to test the explosive capability of a nuclear bomb’s core, known as a “hydrodynamic chain reaction.” Yet the IAEA could not enter it, and Grossi did not appear to even be aware of what was going on there.
This brings up one of the great flaws of the former nuclear deal—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA—made in 2015 under the Obama administration: The IAEA does not have immediate access to monitor and verify areas of Iranian nuclear weaponization. According to Section T of the JCPOA, Iran must “describe in writing its activity,” and the IAEA would simply engage in verification, post facto.
What, if anything, is to prevent a rogue state such as Iran from concealing its nuclear program?
The JCPOA also says that Iran must collect its own soil samples for inspection of nuclear particles (tantamount to saying that a serial drug user must conduct his own drug tests).
Yet about one month ago, speaking before a Senate Intelligence Committee, Tulsi Gabbard, the U.S. director of national intelligence, declared that “the international community continues to access that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon, and Supreme Leader [Ali] Khomeini has not authorized its nuclear-weapon program that it suspended in 2003.”
She added that “in the past decade, we have seen a taboo within Iran against discussing Iran’s nuclear operations in public, likely emboldening nuclear-weapons advocates in its decision making public” She also added that “Iran’s nuclear stockpiles are at its highest levels, and it is unprecedented for state without nuclear weapons.”
Iran now possesses enough highly enriched uranium at the 60% level for at least six nuclear bombs. Israel is a one-bomb state.
Iran has just reported that after three years, they are turning on the cameras in their nuclear sites (at least the ones that are known).
After Israel decimated several of Iranian defensive nuclear sites in September 2024—with Hezbollah and Hamas in a tattered state, and President Donald Trump attempting to obliterate the Houthis from the Bad al-Mandeb Strait—and with the Iranian rial worth 0.000024 of a dollar, a majority of the country’s 90 million people are reportedly disgusted with the theocracy.
Most people have been born after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, and a slim majority (50.1%) classify themselves as atheists. Many mosques (approximately 75,000) have been recently shuttered in Tehran.
I remain highly concerned that the regime wants to play out the clock and use the time as a smokescreen to conceal its weaponization program.
Remember, it is the Iranians who first invented the Persian Bazaar.
Iran nukes, a Damoclesian’s sword on the neck of humanity!