On Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented what he said was secret Iranian documentation that proves Iran’s pre-2003 efforts to establish a nuclear weapons program. Netanyahu says this program was code-named by the Iranians as “Project Amad.”
Netanyahu claimed the “half a ton” of disks and paper documents were secured by Israel in a recent operation inside Iran. The prime minister said the U.S. government supports his claims, which would seem to suggest a high confidence U.S. intelligence assessment that Project Amad is indeed what Israel says it is.
But if those are the facts, what does this finding mean for the future of the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement?
Well, for one, it gives credibility to President Trump’s basis for withdrawing from the deal on or around May 12th. After all, the Israeli information does speak to an extensive Iranian effort to retain and conceal information that would provide the fundamental basis for a future nuclear weapons program. This material fundamentally undercuts consistent Iranian claims that their government never sought a nuclear weapons program.
Yet while Israel’s intelligence community, the Mossad in particular, deserves immense credit for successfully seizing and extricating this material from an Iranian stronghold, it is unlikely to persuade Europe’s big three (Britain, France and Germany) to join Trump in withdrawing from the deal.
To persuade those leaders to do so, Netanyahu would have needed to show evidence of continuing, covert Iranian efforts either to construct a nuclear weapon or to secretly enrich uranium beyond the low-level cap the current agreement allows for medical research. That was not on display today.
The operative influence on what happens next is thus unchanged.
The key to the Iran deal’s survival is whether Trump sanctions European multinational companies that continue to do business in Iran after the U.S. withdraws from the agreement. If Trump does not sanction those companies, the deal will likely remain relatively unhindered in its operation. But if Trump does sanction those companies, the Iranians will likely escalate in response.
