Iran’s “covert efforts to weaponize nuclear work” cited in new IAEA report

Iran was avoiding meaningful responses to intelligence pointing to covert efforts to “weaponize” nuclear work by linking uranium processing, high explosives tests and design work on a missile warhead, the Vienna-based UN nuclear watchdog said Friday, Feb. 22, in a report on which a decision on a third round of UN Security Council sanctions depends.
According to Reuters, the agency said the (weaponization) studies are a matter of serious concern and critical to an assessment of a possible military dimension to Iran’s nuclear program. “Iran had shown new openness” about earlier nuclear advances, said the report, “but not enough to prove its program is not geared to making bombs.”
The report also confirmed Iran was testing technology that “could give it the means to enrich uranium much faster – in further defiance of demands to halt all sensitive nuclear activity or be hit with wider U.N. sanctions.
Without some clarity on the nature of the alleged (weaponization) studies, and without implementation of the Additional Protocol (wide-ranging, snap inspections)…” there could be “no confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of the program, the agency concludes.
Wednesday, Feb. 20, Mohammad Mohaddessin, of the exiled Iranian National Council of Resistance, warned that the Iranian regime had accelerated its nuclear weapons program, including the production of nuclear warheads. He told a news conference in Brussels that Tehran had established its first command and control center to work on a nuclear bomb and was setting up a center to produce warheads southeast of the capital.
debkafile: The council’s previous allegations of Iran’s covert nuclear activities, including the Natanz site, have been borne out.