Today’s Wall Street Journal editorial “Iran’s nuclear breakout” was written before the events of yesterday evening, but it sheds light on them. This is the substance of the editorial on the resolution passed yesterday by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in the editorial’s concluding paragraphs (link in original):
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The IAEA finds that Iran has been hiding nuclear material. Accordingly, “the Agency is not able to verify that there has been no diversion of nuclear material required to be safeguarded under the Agreement to nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices,” it writes.
Then there are Iran’s attempts to cover all of this up. Consider its Marivan site. The IAEA assesses that Iran conducted four tests there in 2003 of “full-scale hemispherical implosion systems” for nuclear weapons. It was also preparing for a cold test that would have contained nuclear material and planned to make neutron initiators there. When the IAEA asked to inspect Marivan in 2019, Iran promptly razed the site’s support area. It didn’t allow inspectors to visit the control bunker, which it also subsequently demolished.
The IAEA concludes that Marivan and at least two other sites were “part of an undeclared structured nuclear programme,” and that Iran kept nuclear material or equipment from this program at another location, Turquzabad, from 2009 to 2018, with current whereabouts unknown.
The IAEA’s May 31 report includes a devastating table of Iran’s efforts to sanitize illicit nuclear sites. Over and over, once a site had been revealed or the IAEA had made a request, Iran would destroy the buildings, move containers and sometimes even scrape the ground.
When asked to explain, Iran provided false explanations that weren’t technically credible. Iran also took retribution by banning experienced inspectors, as nuclear monitors David Albright, Sarah Burkhard and Andrea Stricker explain in one of their authoritative reports. They say Iran even acquired in advance the surprise questions to be asked at inspections from what the IAEA calls “highly confidential documents.”
Its deceit exposed, Iran now says it is activating a secret enrichment site in a “secure location”—likely the mountains of Natanz—while upgrading its centrifuges at Fordow to make them 10 times as powerful. This means faster enrichment of more bombs’ worth of uranium in possibly two sites, not one, that would be difficult to destroy in a military strike.
These aren’t the actions of a state ready to pursue civil energy and give up on domestic enrichment, the Trump Administration’s red line. They are the actions of a “death to America” regime that is shredding the NPT and thinks it can frighten the world all the way to a bomb.
