Iran’s main nuclear scientist was leading his wife with his wife on an autumn day four years ago. While the speed for a speed bact decreased, a remote controlled machine gun mounted on a nearby truck fired a bullet volley, killing it instantly, Iranian authorities said.
The murder of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the architect of an inactive nuclear weapons project known as Amad Project, brutally illustrated how deeply Israel had penetrated Iran. This vulnerability has only been exposed even more in recent weeks, with Israeli air attacks that kill several other scientists who believe they are involved in Iran’s nuclear work.
Iran’s political leaders now face a dilemma. After the heavy American bombardment of their nuclear sites and aerial defenses, they can achieve a painful commitment to Washington and leave their uranium enrichment program, or relive the master weapons project by Fakhrizadeh.
Unlike other countries that could develop nuclear weapons secret, Iran cannot assume that they can maintain their hidden work. Israel has repeatedly demonstrated that Iran’s security can evade, discover its clandestine nuclear activities and look for senior figures in the army, former intelligence officials and experts said.
“Iran’s main challenge to follow a covert route will be to keep it hidden from the detection of the USA and Israeli,” said Eric Brewer, a former intelligence official now with the nuclear threat initiative, a non -profit organization that focuses on global safety.
“That is the key challenge, because both countries, particularly Israel, have demonstrated the ability to penetrate Iran’s nuclear program,” he added. “And Israel has demonstrated the ability to use kinetic force to eliminate it.”
The Israeli Air Force has effectively eliminated Iran’s aerial defenses. At the moment, Iran cannot protect any objective in its territory, especially alleged nuclear sites, from an American or Israeli bombing raid, former intelligence officials said.
“The Israelis have a complete intelligence domain over Iran,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, former career officer and now the main member of the Atlantic Council.
“If you see something that emanates as a threat, they will take it out … that could mean military attacks. It could be a covert action.”
Iran has already tried once building an atomic bomb under the veil of secret. He had a undercover nuclear weapons project more than two decades, according to Western intelligence agencies.
But its coverage was exploited in December 2002, when satellite photos arose that show an enrichment site in the city of Natanz and a heavy water plant about 200 miles in Arak.
Iran has denied that he has ever had a weapons program. The stolen file documents in 2018 by the Mossad Esrael Espías Agency, which according to the United States are authentic, showed detailed plans to build five nuclear weapons.
According to American intelligence agencies, Iran left their nuclear weapons project in 2003. At that time, the secret around the project had been violated and Iran had reasons to be anxious following an American invasion in neighboring Iraq.
Since then, Iran maintained what he said it was a civil nuclear program. The enrichment of Uranium of Iran and other nuclear works gave Tehran the potential option to pursue an eventual weapon if you chose to follow that route: what experts in weapons control call a “threshold” nuclear capacity.
Stolen planes
If the regime chooses to run to a bomb, it will calculate that nuclear weapons will discourage any adversary of trying to organize an attack or knock down their leadership. And it would follow a family path taken by other countries that successfully chased secret bomb projects, including North Korea, Pakistan, India and Israel.
The Israeli government kept Americans in the dark on their nuclear weapons project for years.
In the 1950s, French engineers helped Israel build a nuclear reactor and a secret reprocessing plant to separate the plutonium from the fuel from the spent reactor. The Israel government until today does not officially confirm or denies its nuclear arsenal, saying that it will not be the first to “introduce” nuclear weapons in the Middle East.
The nuclear program of India also began in the 1950s, with the United States and Canada providing nuclear reactors and nuclear fuel for purely peaceful purposes. India agreed safeguards designed to prevent reactors and fuel from being used for weapons.
But India secretly reprocess the fuel spent on plutonium in the 1960s, building physable material for a nuclear weapon. By 1974, India carried out her first nuclear test, with the name of smiling Buddha.
Pakistan built his bomb with the help of the nuclear scientist AQ Khan, a metallurgical that stole planes and other information about advanced centrifugers while working in a nuclear engineering company in Amsterdam. Later, Khan was linked to the distribution of nuclear weapons technology to Iran and North Korea, among others.
Khan’s assistance in the 1990s was crucial for the North Korean program. The Pyongyang regime also bought technology and hardware abroad through frontal companies or in the black market, according to UN monitors.
It was the United States that helped Ivan launch its nuclear program, before the 1979 revolution that knocked down the monarchy. During the Shah rule, through the “Atoms for Peace” program of the United States, the United States provided nuclear technology, fuel, training and equipment to Iran in the 1960s, including a research reactor.
Now that Iran is likely to have no need to resort to external partners to know technical knowledge, experts say. Even so, the regime will have a discouraging task reconstituting what is left of its nuclear program.
Each nuclear site known in Iran was attacked in Israel’s air campaign earlier this month. And then, last week, the United States launched an attack on three enrichment sites with 14 bombs of 30,000 pounds “Bunker Buster” and more than a dozen Tomahawk missiles. The CIA says that the key facilities were destroyed and that the nuclear program was “severely damaged” in the strikes.
Despite the unprecedented damage, which is still being evaluated, they may have the technical means to relaunch a weapons program, which includes enriched uranium, centrifuging and access to tunnels or other underground sites, say some experts in arms control.
The entire highly enriched uranium reserve of Iran has not been counted, and has an unknown number of storage centrifugers that were not located in the sites bombarded by Israel, NBC News reported.
However, the most significant technical obstacle of Iran could be to produce uranium metal. Iran only had a known place where uranium could turn into a solid metal state, and Israeli air attacks destroyed it in Isfahan.
Iran could not produce a nuclear weapon without such installation, and it is not clear if the regime has a secret plant of uranium metal products in other places.
Leaving aside technical obstacles, the decision to build a nuclear bomb will ultimately be formed by political considerations instead of technology or logistics, according to Jeffrey Lewis, an expert in weapons control at the Institute of International Studies of Middlebury.
“It’s really a political decision, not technical,” Lewis said. “They still have a lot of capacity.”
After being under a fulminant aerial assault that demonstrated the aerial superiority of Israel, Iran can see nuclear weapons as the only way to defend and preserve the survival of the regime, according to Marvin Weinbaum, senior member of the group of experts of the Middle East Institute and professor at the University of Illinois.
“Iran has all the reasons now, based on what has just happened, to say that we have to have a bomb, [and] We will be treated differently if we do, ”said Weinbaum.
The officials in the Iran regime have been discussed for a long time if they will develop nuclear weapons, and their policy in the last two decades seemed to achieve a commitment, giving Tehran the option to become nuclear if circumstances are required. The question for Iranian officials is whether nuclear weapons will help guarantee the survival of the regime or endanger their control over power, regional analysts said.
It is coming about Iran’s decision is the threat of Israeli espionage and aerial power, potentially catching Tehran in the act of hurrying to produce a bomb.
“It will be interesting to see if the regime bends and takes seriously about it, or if its operational safety remains as terrible as ever,” Lewis said. “They have been so careless.”
President Donald Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, must make conversations about a possible agreement with Iran in the next few days to try to stop his enrichment of uranium in exchange for relief of sanctions.
Meanwhile, American and Israeli espionage agencies “will focus on the laser on trying to see what Iran is doing behind the scene,” Polymeropoulos said.
