Obama administration officials admitted that two uranium particles discovered at Iran’s Parchin military facility last year are likely evidence of the country’s nuclear weapons past, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday. The findings contradict Iran’s repeated claims that it was not secretly developing a nuclear bomb and that Parchin was used for conventional weapons.
Despite the evidence, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has been blocked from understanding the scope of the Islamic Republic’s past nuclear activities by the Iran nuclear deal.
The Obama administration gave up on obtaining a complete picture of Iran’s past weapons work last summer. After months of insisting that Iran must “come clean” about its nuclear activities, the administration said in July that it was “unlikely Iran would admit to having pursued a covert nuclear weapons program,” and that “such an acknowledgment wasn’t critical to verifying Iranian commitments in the future.”
After the deal was reached, the IAEA began investigating Iran’s nuclear past—but its probe hit a couple of obstacles. Tehran did not allow the IAEA access to Iranian nuclear scientists. That August, the AP revealed that Iran was also allowed to “self-inspect” its facilities and hand over soil samples to the IAEA. When September samples from Parchin revealed the presence of uranium particles, the evidence was so scant that IAEA officials could not determine “for certain” whether the base had been used for nuclear activity.
Despite the presence of uranium, inspectors cannot obtain more samples because the nuclear agreement required Iran to grant only one Parchin check-up. And while the deal allows the IAEA to check all of Iran’s “suspected nuclear sites,” Iran has claimed that Parchin is a military site.
Officials told the WSJ that the administration was “already” aware of what the Iranians “did” at Parchin and underscored that Iran “suspended its bomb-making efforts in 2003.”
“What’s important now is that they can’t do it again,” one official said.
However, critics of the nuclear deal argue that without knowledge of Iran’s past nuclear activity, it is impossible to establish a baseline for nuclear inspection. It is also difficult to stop Iran from engaging in forbidden activity, they argue, because officials do not know what they are looking for.
