The Iranians have not yet resumed enrichment or violated its terms, according to international inspectors. Trump’s decision to exit the deal with Iran, it remains in place. The archive captures the program at a moment in time - a moment 15 years ago, before tensions accelerated, before the United States and Israel attacked Iran’s nuclear centrifuges with a cyberweapon, before an additional underground enrichment center was built and discovered. Tehran would never have agreed to a permanent ban, they said. That was why they negotiated the accord, which forced Iran to ship 97 percent of its nuclear fuel out of the country. The deal deprived the Iranians of the nuclear fuel they would need to turn the designs into reality.įormer members of the Obama administration, who negotiated the deal, say the archive proves what they had suspected all along: that Iran had advanced fuel capability, warhead designs and a plan to build them rapidly. The fact that the Iranians went to such lengths to preserve what they had learned, and hid the archive’s contents from international inspectors in an undeclared site despite an agreement to reveal past research, is evidence of their future intent, he has said.īut the same material could also be interpreted as a strong argument for maintaining and extending the nuclear accord as long as possible. Netanyahu argues that the trove proves that the 2015 agreement, with its sunset clauses allowing the Iranians to produce nuclear fuel again after 2030, was naïve. Neutron activities are sensitive, and we have no explanation for them.” That caution, the documents show, came from Masoud Ali Mohammadi, an Iranian nuclear physicist at the University of Tehran, who was assassinated in January 2010. “We cannot excuse such activities as defensive. “‘Neutrons’ research could not be considered ‘overt’ and needs to be concealed,” his notes read. One of the scientists warned that work on neutrons that create the chain reaction for a nuclear explosion must be hidden. But American and British intelligence officials, after their own review, which included comparing the documents to some they had previously obtained from spies and defectors, said they believed it was genuine. The Iranians have maintained that the entire trove is fraudulent - another elaborate scheme by the Israelis to get sanctions reimposed on the country. They said some material had been withheld to avoid providing intelligence to others seeking to make weapons. The Israelis handpicked the documents shown to the reporters, meaning that exculpatory material could have been left out. There is no way to independently confirm the authenticity of the documents, most of which were at least 15 years old, dating from the time when an effort called Project Amad was ordered halted and some of the nuclear work moved deeper under cover. “The papers show these guys were working on nuclear bombs.” “It’s quite good,” Robert Kelley, a nuclear engineer and former inspector for the agency, said in Vienna, after being shown some of the fruits of the document theft. Many confirmed what inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, in report after report, had suspected: Despite Iranian insistence that its program was for peaceful purposes, the country had worked in the past to systematically assemble everything it needed to produce atomic weapons. Last week, at the invitation of the Israeli government, three reporters, including one from The New York Times, were shown key documents from the trove. When time was up, they fled for the border, hauling some 50,000 pages and 163 compact discs of memos, videos and plans. But they left many untouched, going first for the ones containing the black binders, which contained the most critical designs. 31, with torches that burned at least 3,600 degrees, hot enough, as they knew from intelligence collected during the planning of the operation, to cut through the 32 Iranian-made safes. Once the Iranian custodians arrived, it would be instantly clear that someone had stolen much of the country’s clandestine nuclear archive, documenting years of work on atomic weapons, warhead designs and production plans. The morning shift of Iranian guards would arrive around 7 a.m., a year of surveillance of the warehouse by the Israeli spy agency had revealed, and the agents were under orders to leave before 5 a.m. TEL AVIV - The Mossad agents moving in on a warehouse in a drab commercial district of Tehran knew exactly how much time they had to disable the alarms, break through two doors, cut through dozens of giant safes and get out of the city with a half-ton of secret materials: six hours and 29 minutes.