The Iran nuclear threat has not gone anywhere, Netanyahu has played a central role in bringing Iran to the brink of becoming a threshold nuclear state
Remarkably, since the surprise Hamas attack and the war in Gaza which has continued for over 50 days, the Iranian nuclear threat has disappeared from the Israeli agenda, precisely at the time of the expansion and acceleration of the Iranian nuclear program. And we have heard nothing from Prime Minister Netanyahu who had turned “the Iranians are rushing towards the bomb” into a central motif of his speeches over the past decade. Just as he holds responsibility for the October 7 surprise attack, Netanyahu holds responsibility and a central role in the strategic failure that brought Iran to the brink of becoming a threshold nuclear state.
The Iranian issue itself has not disappeared during the Gaza war. From the first day of the war, President Biden declared that deterring Iran from escalating the war is a goal of the highest priority, and sent a naval and air armada to the eastern Mediterranean basin and to the entrance of the Persian Gulf to give military validity to his declaration. Iran understood the US deterrence message. In an article quoted in the Financial Times, the Iranian minister of foreign affairs confirmed the existence of a diplomatic back channel between Iran and the US, via the Swiss Embassy in Teheran, since the first days of the war. In this way, Iran transmitted a message to President Biden that it had no intention of exploiting the war in Gaza or to expand the war to its arena. Iran did not want to present the US (or Israel) with an excuse to attack its nuclear sites. The US sent an indirect acknowledgment of the message. Secretary of State Blinken and senior officials in the Biden administration estimated that there was no intelligence evidence that Iran was behind the October 7 Hamas attack. The Iranian self-restraint does not apply to the actions of its proxies Hizballah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.
So where did the Iranian nuclear issue disappear to? Are nuclear related messages being transmitted via the back channel which apparently still exists? The latest chapter in the Iranian saga last summer (just a few months before the Gaza war broke out) ended with the unwritten “understandings agreement” between Iran and the US to freeze the current nuclear situation. In the framework of these “understandings” billions of Iran’s dollars that had been held in South Korean banks were unfrozen in exchange for a limited nuclear agreement on its part in the field of 60% uranium enrichment. This was the maximum that the Biden administration could achieve after the collapse of the latest superpower initiative in September 2022 to renew the original JCPOA. The grave implications of the death of the JCPOA will be discussed below.
The IAEA Board of Governors Meeting (22 November 2023) and monitoring reports that were leaked to news agencies brought the Iranian nuclear issue back to the table. This gave us a window through which we can assess the current situation. From the IAEA reports, we learn that Iran has recently accelerated and increased its enriched uranium stockpile by 691 kilograms to a total of 4,486 kilograms. The quantitative piece of data in the report on which we should focus is the stock of 128 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60%. This is an increase of 7 kilograms compared to the previous report.
This means that Iran interprets its “understandings” agreement with the US in its narrowest sense: the high speed centrifuges will continue to enrich uranium to a level of 60%. Thus, we are not talking about the beginning of a roll back process and a reduction of 60% enriched uranium from which it would be possible to easily pass to the military level of 90%, but about continuing to accumulate while slowing down the monthly increase. Iran is a cause for concern as the only country in the world that is not a nuclear weapons state that enriches uranium to a high level and in such quantities.
No less concerning is a multitude of problems that have remained pending from previous reports. Iran stopped implementing the additional protocol that was intended to enable surprise monitoring visits to suspect sites. Iran did not wholly fulfil its part in the temporary agreement with the IAEA director to return part of the monitoring equipment and cameras to the uranium enrichment sites in order to reduce the harm that had been caused to the IAEA monitoring capability. Iran places obstacles to the entry of experienced monitors from western countries. It continues to refuse to apply “modified code 3.1.” that obligates it to inform ahead of time on each new nuclear site from the moment that it is envisioned.
The continued damage to the monitors’ capability described in the IAEA reports has grave implications. These are perhaps even more serious than the quantitative data on the expansion and acceleration of uranium enrichment. The set of monitoring obstacles creates a problem for IAEA and US ability to ensure the continuity of knowledge and tracking of the Iranian nuclear program, particularly regarding the stockpile and production of advanced centrifuges. This is a danger that could lead to the realization of the worst case scenario of a quick breakout time towards developing nuclear weapons in an unknown site. Even if we take an optimistic view of the future in which both sides would reach an agreement to enter into new negotiations on limiting Iran’s nuclear program, the damage to the IAEA’s monitoring capability would make it very difficult, if not impossible, to draw a factual baseline.
How did we reach such a dangerous situation in which Iran is almost a nuclear weapons threshold state? If Iran crosses the threshold, it will be the only existential threat facing Israel. This happened because of the continuous erosion of the existing nuclear deal and of Iran’s defiance which eventually brought about the final collapse of the nuclear deal in spite of last minute attempts on the part of the US and the superpowers to achieve the renewal of the JCPOA in the fall of 2022. This was when, according to the latest IAEA reports, Iran did not transmit satisfactory answers and credible explanations for the presence of traces of uranium particles in two undeclared sites. In the jargon of Israeli nuclear experts, this is the issue of the “open files” regarding the violation of the Safeguards Agreement under the NPT. According to the IAEA’s mandate, this is a cardinal issue of the highest order, it is the Agency’s raison d'être and its ability to confirm that a nuclear program is for peaceful purposes. The US and the superpowers could not allow this to pass. This is a critical issue that has not allowed the Biden administration, in spite of its efforts to renew the JCPOA, to sign a new agreement as long as Iran is suspected of serious violations of the IAEA monitoring rules and does not provide credible technical explanations regarding undeclared suspect sites.
Because of the “open files” issue the curtain fell on the original nuclear agreement that had blocked the Iranian nuclear weapons route (both uranium and plutonium). The nuclear agreement had imposed on Iran’s nuclear facilities the deepest intrusive monitoring known in nuclear history. The “Netanyahu factor” was a substantial contribution to the dangerous situation we have reached with the collapse of the nuclear agreement. We saw this in his defiant and divisive speech to the US Congress in the spring of 2015 against President Obama, in his call to tear to shreds the outline agreement that was intended to limit Iran’s nuclear weapons route, and even more intensely since the JCPOA was signed in Vienna in July 2015. In the last decade, the Prime Minister of Israel has invested a great deal of energy in his attempts to dismantle the Agreement. The mantra "the bad nuclear deal" that must be destroyed has appeared in every Netanyahu speech in the world media and in Israel, and in every international forum.
President Trump’s entry into the White House, accompanied by a team of opponents to the nuclear agreement headed by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, was a gift from heaven for Netanyahu. The mechanism for crushing the nuclear agreement was laid through the Iranian nuclear archive that the Mossad smuggled out of Tehran in the spring of 2018. Netanyahu turned the archive into his "personal file" and managed to convince Trump that the documents and materials in it are the ultimate proof of the existence of an actual and active Iranian nuclear weapons program. He presented this as the "smoking gun" that everyone was looking for. This was enough for Trump to withdraw from the JCPOA in May 2018, and to work intensively together with Pompeo with Netanyahu's active cooperation in order to bring about its final dissolution.
He achieved this in spite of the fact that according to the dates of the documents, the Iranian nuclear archive - which by its very name indicates that it is from the past - did not present evidence of the existence of an organized nuclear weapons program. This program ended and closed down at the end of 2003. The archive does not constitute proof of the existence of a current nuclear weapons program existing today. For several years in a row, the US intelligence agencies’ estimates are that Iran is not developing a nuclear weapons program today. According to the estimates of the US National Intelligence which bind the President, the Iranian nuclear weapons program was closed in 2003 and has not been renewed. In the latest US intelligence report (June 2023) a dangerous acceleration and expansion in uranium enrichment is indeed described, but already in the first line it is emphasized that "Iran is not currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons activity that would be necessary to produce a testable nuclear device”.
The ”open files” issue of undeclared nuclear sites in the IAEA reports that according to my analysis torpedoed the renewal of the JCPOA – is the result of Netanyahu’s version of the Iranian nuclear archive. Prime Minister Netanyahu ignored the positive contribution of the JCPOA in blocking the route to nuclear weapons and pushed with all his strength for the dissolution of the Agreement. It is possible that there were some weak point in some of the Agreement’s clauses, but they could have been corrected by 2031. Netanyahu took advantage of the fact that according to the Israeli legal system the Prime Minister is the Head of the Atomic Energy Commission, and the Mossad, the foreign intelligence service, is directly subordinate to him. This enabled him to successfully flood the international discourse, the IAEA, and international forums with reports of undeclared sites in Iran for the development of nuclear weapons that were found in the nuclear archive.
The impasse noted in the IAEA reports on the monitoring issues, the leg dragging by Iran vis a vis the IAEA, together with the inability of the US and the superpowers to find a creative solution to the past undeclared sites exacerbated the problem. At the last IAEA Board of Governors meeting, the US, Great Britain, France and Germany condemned Iran’s grave violations on the monitoring issue and non cooperation issues, but refrained from proposing a binding decision against Iran.
Shemuel Meir is an independent Israeli strategic analyst
This is incredibly helpful. Thank you.