Israel urges Europe to exit nuclear deal
Israel raised the pressure on Britain and its European partners yesterday to tear up the nuclear deal with Iran by sharing secret files showing Tehran’s determination to build a bomb.
One of the key documents, seen by
The Times, is a memorandum that formally hands responsibility for the production of weapons-grade enriched uranium to the Iranian defence ministry.
This and other written orders are part of a cache of 100,000 files snatched from a Tehran warehouse by agents of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, in January.
Some of the haul is being made available to the security services of Britain, France and Germany before this week’s trip to Europe by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister.
At a cabinet session yesterday the Israeli leader made plain that the aim of his diplomatic drive was to persuade the three countries to join President Donald Trump in withdrawing from the 2015 Iranian deal.
In doing so he is stepping into a diplomatic rift between the US and Europe.
Netanyahu will use the latest analytical findings from the captured archives to make the case to British Prime Minister Theresa May that the multi-national accord was essentially invalid since it was based on a falsehood: Iran’s contention that it had never pursued a nuclear weapons programme and that it needed to enrich uranium purely for peaceful purposes. ‘‘What Iran told the International Atomic Energy Agency about its capacities was almost comical compared to what we have here,’’ said a senior Israeli intelligence officer involved in the analysis of the seized documents.
He added: ‘‘Iran said there had only been feasibility and scientific studies but what we see is that Iran ran a fully fledged nuclear weapons programme and that it followed directions from the political levels.’’
The retrieved material includes photographs of a generator used to power a flash X-ray machine used to examine simulated explosions at the military site of Parchin.
David Albright, a former nuclear inspector in Iraq, told The Times that the Israelis were right to criticise the failings of Tehran to acknowledge its past nuclear weapons work and to permit inspectors to monitor facilities.
‘‘The IAEA has done that in both South Africa and Taiwan, after they ended their nuclear weapons programmes,’’ he said. Commenting on the documents taken by the Israelis, Albright said: ‘‘[They] would parallel my understanding of the decision to build the Fordow underground enrichment plant that I have assessed a few years ago was likely designed to make weapon-grade uranium, based in part on inspector findings when they first visited the plant.’’
Mark Fitzpatrick, a nonproliferation expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said that the findings emerging from the archives indicate that ‘‘Iran had a robust nuclear hedging strategy’’.
The correct conclusion, he said, was not to destroy the Iran deal but rather to use the Israeli cache ‘‘to assist the verification efforts with clues on where to look’’. –