This week, the U.N. nuclear watchdog reported that Iran is accelerating its production of enriched uranium amid rising tensions over the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. The growing stockpile potentially gives Tehran a crucial ingredient for a future bomb — fissile uranium. And the long-hidden papers, stolen from Iran two years ago by Israeli spies, are offering new insight into how far Iran had already come in acquiring other critical components needed to build a nuclear weapon.
Newly released records from the document trove are testaments to the depth and scale of Iran’s past nuclear research, showing the country’s scientists racing to master key technical challenges. Summary reports provided to The Washington Post show that Iranian officials were conducting scores of complex experiments across a network of secret laboratories, while also seeking to answer practical questions such as where in the country they could sink an underground shaft for a future nuclear test.
The results of that work are still available to Iran, giving it a head start in the event its leaders decide to make a dash toward becoming a nuclear-weapons state, say U.S. and Middle Eastern weapons experts.
“In 2003, Iran had a nuclear weapon design and it was building things — doing the whole gamut of activities,” said David Albright, a nuclear-weapons analyst who has reviewed hundreds of pages of the documents while researching a book. “But are they truly ready to start producing a weapon? We still don’t know, but we may soon have to figure it out.”
