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Iran Has Been Cheating the Whole Time

(New York Post) Richard Goldberg - Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was the founder of Iran's nuclear weapons program, known as the Amad Plan. In 2011, he went on to lead a secretive organization called the Organization for Defensive Innovation and Research, referred to by its Persian acronym of SPND. In 2014, the Obama administration declared SPND as "primarily responsible for research in the field of nuclear weapons development" and accused Fakhrizadeh's new organization of taking over "activities related to Iran's undeclared nuclear program." In 2019, the State Department revealed that SPND has employed as many as 1,500 individuals, including nuclear weapons scientists associated with the Amad Plan. The Trump administration imposed sanctions on 14 SPND employees and 17 SPND-linked front companies for their involvement with proliferation-sensitive activities. This September, the Commerce Department blacklisted another five Iranian nuclear scientists "for enabling or assisting Iran's nuclear development program." Fakhrizadeh and SPND continued to operate during the Iran nuclear deal. Taken together, SPND's existence, Iran's curation of a secret nuclear weapons archive, and its concealment of undeclared nuclear material present a simple truth. We can no longer pretend that the Iran deal prevented the Islamic Republic's nuclear advancement. It did not. The writer, a former National Security Council official, is a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
2020-12-03 00:00:00
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