Israel claims Iran is lying
Isreali prime minister says thousands of docs show secret missile work
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday said Israel is in possession of tens of thousands of documents and discs that prove that Iran lied about the history of its nuclear weapons program when it signed the 2015 nuclear deal.
In a televised speech from Tel Aviv, Netanyahu dramatically pulled a curtain away from a shelf of files that he said were copies of some of the 55,000 documents that Israel had obtained from Iran’s secret nuclear archive. Most of the documents, as described, dated from 2003 and before, when Iran had a clandestine weapons development program dubbed “Project Amad.”
The allegation comes at a critical time for the nuclear deal, just ahead of a May 12 deadline for President Donald Trump to decide whether to continue to waive statutory sanctions that were lifted as part of the agreement. Netanyahu has waged a fierce campaign for the deal to be changed or scrapped, often repeating the mantra “fix it or nix it” — concerned that it will enable its archrival to come closer to developing a nuclear weapon.
Trump, speaking at a Washington news conference with the president of Nigeria, said that Netanyahu’s revelations “showed that I’ve been 100 per cent right” in describing the nuclear agreement as the “worst deal” ever signed. “We’ll see what happens,” he said of the upcoming deadline.
“What he is revealing with all this detail is not news,” said Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association.
“The fact that Iran has experimented with nuclear warhead designs, and had at one point an active weapons program, makes it all the more essential that the JCPOA remains in place to prevent Iran from quickly amassing enough fissile material for even one bomb.”
“It is ludicrous to recommend … that the deal should be dismantled, which would open a pathway for Iran to pursue” a nuclear weapon, Kimball said.
Iranian officials have said that if the deal is cancelled, they would quickly increase both the quantity and quality of centrifuges, now restricted under the deal, which would allow them theoretically to produce weapons-grade uranium.
“These files conclusively prove that Iran is brazenly lying when it says it never has a nuclear weapons program,” Netanyahu said. “We’ve shared this material with the United States and the United States can vouch for its authenticity.”