(Hudson Institute) Jonathan Schachter - The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has confirmed that its inspectors in Iran had discovered uranium particles enriched to 84% purity. This is just shy of the 90% considered to be "weapons grade." Uranium enriched to 80% fueled the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. Iran has no civilian need to enrich uranium in the first place. Uranium enrichment remains part and parcel of the regime's effort to develop and maintain the ability to produce and deliver nuclear weapons on demand. Rather than dismantling Iran's illegally-built military enrichment program, the 2015 Iran deal decriminalized it. The materials Israeli intelligence spirited out of a Tehran warehouse (the "Atomic Archive") in 2018, which Israel shared with the U.S., showed that the regime did not stop or suspend its weaponization program in 2003, but, in the Iranians' own words, modified it from a sprint to a marathon, though both have a nuclear weapons finish line. More broadly, the archive showed that the Iranian nuclear weapons program was more advanced and comprehensive than previously understood. The writer, a former advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, served on the team tasked with exposing materials from Iran's nuclear archive in 2018. He is a senior fellow with the Hudson Institute's Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East.
2023-03-27 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive