Key Advance in Iran’s Nuclear Program Led Israel to Attack

Israel recently learned from its agents inside Iran — presumably native informants working with Mossad — that Iran’s nuclear scientists had successfully completed tests of their design of a nuclear weapon. This meant that Iran was potentially only weeks away from being able to produce such a weapon, and that intolerable threat had to be dealt with without delay. More on Israel’s discovery that prompted the attack, can be found here: “Israel found Iran carried out key tests for nuke design ahead of strikes — report,” Times of Israel, June 15, 2025:

Ahead of its strikes on Iran, Israel discovered that the Islamic Republic’s scientists had conducted successful experiments in the design process of a nuclear weapon, bringing it weeks away from being able to produce a bomb if it chose to do so, according to a Hebrew media report Sunday.

This “golden information” was presented by intelligence officials to the political leadership before the decision was made to carry out preemptive strikes Friday, along with the concern that Israel didn’t know everything and that Tehran could be at an even more advanced stage in building a nuclear bomb than the available information showed, Army Radio reported, citing unnamed security officials.

According to the report, Iran gathered scientists and split them into several working groups to labor in secret on components of the process of weaponizing nuclear material into an actual explosive device, beginning around the end of 2023 or the start of 2024 — shortly after Hamas’s October 7 onslaught, which sparked the ongoing war in Gaza.

This aspect of designing a nuclear device ran in parallel to Iran’s enrichment of uranium to levels that have no use for civilian purposes, but are required to build a nuclear bomb. According to an International Atomic Energy Agency report at the end of May, Iran’s stockpile of uranium, if enriched further, was enough to build nine nuclear weapons.

The Israel Defense Forces managed to monitor the secret weapons process, which left Jerusalem with no doubt that Iran had decided to build a nuclear weapon after the massacre in southern Israel, Army Radio said.

A senior Israeli military official said Saturday that “all the scientists eliminated in the opening strikes had, over the years, been involved in developing the nuclear detonation device.”

The IDF named nine Iranian nuclear scientists it assassinated in the opening strikes, and detailed its efforts to kill them.

They were named as: Fereydoon Abbasi, expert in nuclear engineering; Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi, expert in physics; Akbar Motalebi Zadeh, expert in chemical engineering; Saeed Barji, expert in materials engineering; Amir Hassan Fakhahi, expert in physics; Abd al-Hamid Minoushehr, expert in reactor physics; Mansour Asgari, expert in physics; Ahmad Reza Zolfaghari Daryani, expert in nuclear engineering; and Ali Bakhouei Katirimi, expert in mechanics.

“All the scientists and experts who were eliminated were significant sources of knowledge in the Iranian nuclear project, and had decades of cumulative experience in the development of nuclear weapons,” the IDF said….

Think of the extraordinary level of planning by the IDF to know exactly where each of those nine scientists lived in Tehran, a city of 9.5 million people, and exactly, too, where each of them would be on a particular day at a particular time.

It likely will take not days, but weeks, to completely end Iran’s nuclear threat, and to destroy as well its vast arsenal of ballistic missiles and its ballistic missile factories. In order to sufficiently damage or destroy the uranium enrichment facilities built underground at Natanz, and those built inside a mountain at Fordow. These sites will have to be repeatedly hit so as to smash through their thick cement walls; should the Americans decide to provide Israel with their largest — 30,000 pound — bunker-buster bombs, and the bombers able to deliver them, this could hasten that destruction.

Meanwhile, Iranian physicists and engineers trained in nuclear physics are likely to be rethinking their career choices. Perhaps teaching high school science classes would be, in every respect, a better choice.

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