Addressing the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that Iran has “another secret facility in Tehran — a secret atomic warehouse for storing massive amounts of equipment and materiel from Iran’s secret nuclear weapons program.”
Netanyahu says this facility is distinct from the facility that Israeli intelligence officers raided earlier this year. Netanyahu said his government had provided its findings to the International Atomic Energy Agency and partner nations. He also pointed out that the facility is now in the process of being emptied by Iranian interests. But most compelling of all, Netanyahu alleged that the Iranians removed 15 kilograms of undeclared radioactive material from the site and spread it throughout Tehran to avoid concentrations that would allow for external intelligence service identification.
Netanyahu called on the IAEA to investigate the site in short order. Based on the high competence of the Israeli intelligence services, the reluctance of those services to be used for unwarranted political means, and the ability of other intelligence services such as the French DGSE and U.S services to corroborate these allegations, we should judge Netanyahu’s claims as credible.
So why is Netanyahu making these claims now?
First, because President Trump is struggling to move the international community into alignment with his effort to impose major economic and diplomatic pressure on Iran. The Israeli government supports Trump’s policy here in that it believes Tehran has a vested interests in destroying the state of Israel and that Trump’s pressure would lessen that threat. By publishing this information that indicates Iranian deception, Netanyahu hopes to weaken those actors who present Iran as a problematic but not necessarily threatening actor. Germany is the prime example here.
Yet Netanyahu also wants to remind the world of Iranian ambition — namely, its ambition to develop nuclear weapons for malfeasant purposes. That’s why Netanyahu called on the IAEA to immediately search the site he identified and to find out whether Iran is indeed lying about its compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal. That compliance requires Iran to identify all its nuclear activities past or present and to provide information on retained capabilities. The undisclosed materials as alleged here would represent a primary breach of the deal. But the fact that the IAEA has not yet searched the site speaks to Israel’s sustaining concern about that deal: that it defers too much to Iran.
Ultimately, however, Netanyahu’s most important message on Thursday was the one he repeated most: that he will never allow Iran to possess the means of destroying a major Israeli city with one single strike.
