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IAEA Still Needs to Investigate Military Dimension of Iran's Nuclear Program
(Foundation for Defense of Democracies) Olli Heinonen - The discovery of an atomic archive in Tehran raised new concerns about whether Iran had declared all of its nuclear-related activities to the IAEA. The IAEA has not yet resolved all of the 12 areas of possible military dimensions (PMD) of the Iranian nuclear program that it had previously identified. Therefore, the IAEA secretariat remains obliged to continue its investigation and report its findings. There remains a need to resolve the PMD issue, especially in light of the large archive of documents, blueprints, and CDs related to nuclear weapons design work that were found and whose existence was disclosed by Israel. Maintaining such an extensive cache related to the design and manufacturing of nuclear weapons calls into question Iran's compliance with provisions of both the Nonproliferation Treaty and the JCPOA, in which Iran committed never to "seek, develop, or acquire any nuclear weapons." The writer is the former deputy director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and head of its Department of Safeguards.