Israel exposing: Military shadow of Iran’s nuclear program Expert opinions on Caliber.Az

Iran has not abandoned plans to develop a nuclear bomb, which the Israeli intelligence has known for nearly 20 years, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told The Wall Street Journal.

“There are more than signs of this. I sent Mossad [intelligence officers] into the heart of Tehran, with them they brought Iran's secret archive [on the development of] nuclear weapons. And the first document of this archive said that Iran's goal… in 2003 was to create bombs with a yield of 5 kilotons. …It was 21 years ago, so you can understand that they have not given up on this goal,” the prime minister said.

In response to the journalist's clarifying question - does Israel have evidence that Tehran is making any efforts in the field of nuclear development, Netanyahu said that Iran "has revived this project".

“They are moving forward on [uranium] enrichment all the time. It is a critical ingredient for building a nuclear bomb. Not the only component: they are also working on the creation of weapons and the delivery vehicles,” the prime minister added.

So how right is Netanyahu over the "nuclear" intentions of the Islamic Republic? After all, if everything is the way it is, as the Israeli prime minister claims, then the world, and especially the countries neighbouring Iran, run the risk of being face to face with an extremely dangerous threat emanating, of course, from the radical Tehran regime. Can anything be done (at the regional or international level) to prevent Iran from realizing its intention to acquire a terrible weapon?

Prominent foreign experts answered these questions of Caliber.Az.

What the Israeli prime minister said in this interview is true, says Dr. Vladimir Mesamed of the Institute of Asia and Africa at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

“Moreover, in Israel, there is no doubt about this. Since 1995, when the construction of the nuclear power plant in Bushehr began with Russian assistance, everyone in Israel was sure that it would have access to dual technologies and that it was about the implementation of a nuclear project. This is not just talked about, there is a lot of evidence. Throughout all these years, Israel has been observing that the Iranian nuclear program in its military content is being implemented.

Back in the early 1990s, Iran began to look for a country that could help it implement the project in Bushehr (in general, it was started back in 1974, under the last Shah of Pahlavi), and even then, it became clear what it would be. And when Russia agreed to help, Moscow immediately started talking about the fact that the Iranian peaceful nuclear project is some kind of external entourage, and we are talking about creating a nuclear bomb. Moreover, such ideas have long been floating in Iran - the country's spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, first spoke in this spirit back in the early 1980s, during the Iran-Iraq war. And he spoke about the "Islamic nuclear bomb".

Then such talks stopped because pragmatists in the person of President Hashemi Rafsanjani came to power in Iran. But the implementation of the program began, and everyone understood where it was leading. All these years, Europe liked to repeat that the Iranian nuclear program (INP) has only a peaceful component, that is, it is being implemented only for the sake of generating electricity. Although there is a lot of oil and gas, and even in the XXI century, they found new deposits in the country. That is, the issue of electricity shortage is removed,” the pundit notes.

However, since 2003, when the Iranians announced that they were halting uranium enrichment and thereby removing suspicions that the INP had military content, Tehran has been caught red-handed quite a few times, Mesamed notes. The Iranians only increased the volume of uranium enrichment and continued to build nuclear infrastructure, which today has at least 20 different facilities. These are enrichment plants, and enterprises for the production of centrifuges, etc.

“In 2018, Mossad agents obtained and brought back a whole INP archive, from which it followed that the program really had military content. And even after the well-known nuclear agreement was signed in 2015, which, in principle, recognized that Iran does not create a nuclear bomb, and the IAEA signed this (which pursues a rather two-faced policy towards INP), Israel still insisted that this convention does not work as it should.

That is, it was assumed that this document would interrupt Iran's movement toward joining the "nuclear club", but this did not happen. Israel's efforts to engage the world community in combating this have come to nothing. After that, it had to get Iran’s entire nuclear archive and demonstrate it to the whole world. Impressed by this, in the same 2018, America withdrew from the nuclear agreement to show that this document does not work for the goal that the six international mediators set for themselves, and does not block Tehran's path to mastering nuclear weapons.

It was believed that the American withdrawal would have a sobering effect on Iran and that it would be possible to force it to sign a new agreement, which would stipulate tougher conditions. However, this led to the fact that Tehran did not only stop but accumulated a lot of what was not in the 2015 agreement. It developed, for example, its centrifuge fleet, although under the contract it was not allowed to design and manufacture new-generation centrifuges.

However, Iran has already six generations of centrifuges, which enrich uranium at a different rate than in 2015. Now Iran is enriching uranium not by 3.67 per cent, as stipulated in the agreement, but recently they even found traces of enrichment up to 83.4 per cent. Moreover, the world community does not react very much to this, nor does the IAEA, which in December 2015 signed a document stating that Iran does not have a military nuclear program.

Israel understands that if Iran becomes a member of the "nuclear club", it will become a threat both for it and for many countries in the Middle East that are not friends of Tehran.

According to the latest information, Iran is currently negotiating with only one of the six mediators - the United States. With these separate contacts, Tehran is trying to achieve a re-signing of the nuclear deal. Israel has always said that it cannot live in conditions when Iran becomes the owner of nuclear weapons. US President Joe Biden said the same. But lately, the American president has once again been leaning toward the need to choose a negotiating path. However, this will lead nowhere.

Tough measures are needed and in principle, as a result, it is possible to achieve the deprivation of Iran's nuclear infrastructure. That is, bombing is possible, but not the country itself. Israel insists on this, the USA seems to support it. Israel has recently even said that if it comes to the security of the Jewish state, then it alone can go on an operation to deprive Iran of such infrastructure, and make sure that Tehran's movement toward the atomic bomb is stopped once and for all.

In Israel, opposition to the INP is the main component of the country's foreign policy. Since 2009, the state has declared several times the “year of the fight against INP”, and a couple of years ago, a special unit of the General Staff was created, which is entirely focused on this. We have a million proofs that the INP is a military program aimed at building a nuclear bomb. The Iranians apparently believe that without this, they will not be able to take the leading position in the Middle East, which they so much strive for,” Dr. Mesamed concluded.

Israeli military expert David Gendelman also notes that Iran's nuclear project is not a new problem, it is just another round of confrontation.

“Accordingly, there is no new opposition here: economic sanctions, negotiations to lift sanctions in exchange for stopping the nuclear project, as well as the preparation of a military option on the part of Israel and the United States,” he recalls.