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The Iran Nuclear Archive: Impressions and Implications
(Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs-Harvard Kennedy School) Aaron Arnold et al. - The Iran nuclear archive documents make it clear that Iran's nuclear weapons program - known as Project AMAD - was unambiguously aimed at producing nuclear weapons. It had an approved and budgeted plan for manufacturing five nuclear weapons and carrying out an underground nuclear test. At least one document indicates that the decision to manufacture nuclear weapons was approved by a committee that at the time included then-President Mohammad Khatami, then-Secretary of the Security Council Hassan Rouhani (now Iran's President), and then-Minister of Defense Ali Shamkhani (now Secretary of the Security Council), among others. This was a substantial, purposeful, sophisticated undertaking that operated with the approval of the political leadership in Iran. The archive also reveals that the "stop work" order in 2003 did not stop all the work. Rather, when the decision was taken to stop work on large identifiable facilities, the program's leaders decided to continue research to fill in some technical gaps they still believed needed work. The evidence reveals that Iran's nuclear weapons program made substantially more progress than described in the IAEA's "Final Assessment."