[Exclusive to Citizens Commission on National Security]
Introduction
This Iranian regime’s nuclear weapons program has been abundantly documented in the Open Source literature for decades. But in response to questions about why Israel and the United States (U.S.) decided in June 2025 that they could wait no longer to, at a minimum, severely set back Iran’s accelerating progress towards achieving a deliverable nuclear weapon, here is an overview of that progress whose pace towards completion triggered Israel’s ‘Operation Rising Lion’ and the U.S.’s ‘Operation Midnight Hammer’ in June 2025 and then ‘Operation Roaring Lion’ and ‘Operation Epic Fury’ in 2026.
As the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), David Albright’s ‘good ISIS’ (Institute for Science and International Security), and the regular open press briefings provided by the Iranian opposition group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), all attested to over the years and especially in the months leading up to the combined Israeli-U.S. strikes in June 2025, Tehran clearly and observably was driving determinedly towards development of nuclear warheads adapted and fitted to the nosecones of delivery system ballistic missiles. Then, despite the significant damage inflicted on Iran’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs in June 2025, the regime’s efforts to recover from that damage and return to development of both capabilities led Israel and the U.S. to the conclusion that renewed air strikes against nuclear weapons sites at Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan as well as ballistic missile production, launch, and storage sites were necessary in 2026.
Open Sources
The primary sources cited here are the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) – https://www.iaea.org/ ; the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) – https://isis-online.org/ ; and the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) – https://www.ncr-iran.org/en/. Additionally, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), the Hudson Institute, and the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) also regularly provide valuable analysis and information about Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
Pakistani Assistance Was Key to Jump-Starting Iran’s Nuclear Weapons Program
According to the NCRI, this Iranian regime’s decision to develop a deliverable nuclear weapon began in 1983 but did not make much progress until Pakistan stepped up to provide assistance no later than the early 1990s, following the 1989 death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and under the direction of his successor Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei (himself eliminated in an opening strike the night of 28 February 2026). The Jerusalem Post reported how Abdul Qadeer Khan, the so-called “father of the Pakistani bomb” who died in 2021, played a key role in selling ‘both designs and actual centrifuges’ to enrich uranium to Iran, whose own efforts to manufacture them reportedly “were dismal failures.” Iran eventually admitted that it had paid AQ Khan millions of dollars for help in establishing its own nuclear weapons program.
August 2002 Revelations from the NCRI
Despite nearly two decades (1983-2002) during which Iran acquired centrifuges from Pakistan and then began trying to produce its own centrifuges modeled on the Pakistani blueprints and parts, it wasn’t until 14 August 2002 that specific details about that nuclear weapons program were revealed publicly at simultaneous press conferences held by the NCRI in Washington, DC and Paris, France. At these press conferences, the NCRI presented for the first time Google satellite images to identify the Natanz uranium enrichment site and the Arak heavy water facility, where a parallel plutonium pathway to a nuclear bomb was underway. A site called Lavizan Shian, on the outskirts of Tehran, also was revealed, although Israeli Mossad had previously identified Lavizan as the headquarters for the Iranian regime’s nuclear weapons program. That Iran completely razed the Lavizan site to the ground shortly after the NCRI revelations attests to the accuracy of those reports. Two years later, in 2004, IAEA inspectors were denied access to devices at Lavizan that might have revealed radiation traces. More revelations about Iran’s nuclear weapons program and its nuclear sites that had remained publicly secret for over a dozen years followed in regular succession and were shared with the IAEA, the Israeli and U.S. governments, and the media.
Nov 2011 – IAEA Board of Governors Quarterly Report
The November 2011 Quarterly IAEA Board of Governors Report, “Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement and relevant provisions of Security Council resolutions in the Islamic Republic of Iran” is one of the most revealing reports IAEA has ever published about the Iranian nuclear weapons program. This report documents “significant failures on the part of Iran to meet its obligations under its Safeguards Agreement with respect to the reporting of nuclear material, the processing and use of undeclared nuclear material and the failure to declare facilities where the nuclear material had been received, stored and processed. Specifically, it was discovered that, as early as the late 1970s and early 1980s, and continuing into the 1990s and 2000s, Iran had used undeclared nuclear material for testing and experimentation in several uranium conversion, enrichment, fabrication and irradiation activities, including the separation of plutonium, at undeclared locations and facilities.”
The November 2011 report details how, under the AMAD plan, Iran not only developed and was utilizing centrifuge enrichment technology but also had moved to the next step in warhead development, which is “conversion of the enriched uranium compounds into uranium metal” and even “production of hemispherical uranium metallic components” – meaning nuclear warheads.
Additionally, the report goes on to describe “detonator development” – specifically, exploding bridgewire detonators or “EBWs”, which are the point source components that initiate an implosion type nuclear device. More recent work on EBWs is described below, but Iran actually admitted to the IAEA in 2008 that it had developed EBWs “for civil and conventional military applications” and even provided the IAEA “with a copy of a paper relating to EBW development work presented by two Iranian researchers at a 2005 conference.” Apparently, the Iranian regime expected the IAEA to accept its supposed “need or application for such detonators.” There is much more in this 2011 IAEA report, but worth mentioning is that Iran was also conducting “hydrodynamic experiments” in a “large explosives containment vessel” at Parchin, using substitute materials for actual nuclear components which, according to IAEA conclusions, “are strong indicators of possible weapon development.”
Again, this IAEA report was published in November 2011.
2016 – Mossad Heist of ‘AMAD Plan’ documents from Tehran warehouse
Skipping ahead to 2016, Israeli Mossad had discovered that the Iranian Defense Ministry was collecting sensitive documents related to the Iranian nuclear weapons program. The documents were being taken for storage to an ostensibly civilian warehouse in southern Tehran. In January 2018, Mossad operatives, likely assisted by internal Iranian resistance forces, broke into that warehouse and found the archives of the Iranian nuclear weapons program. Somehow, they were able to load up all of them and get them out of Iran before authorities even knew they were there.
Among the information revealed in those documents were details of how Tehran concealed its illicit activities from the IAEA, including production of “yellow cake” (an intermediate step in uranium enrichment) and its eventual “conversion to uranium compounds needed to produce fissile material for nuclear weapons.” Details about the Natanz centrifuge enrichment site also revealed its deep underground centrifuge halls. The Fordow enrichment site revealed in 2009 by the NCRI likewise had tunnels dug deep into mountainous terrain that were never reported to the IAEA. The Iranian intention seems to have been to “continue enriching uranium to a low level at Natanz…” but “to secretly enrich uranium to a high level at Fordow…more than 90%”, which is Weapons Grade Uranium (WGU). All of this information was shared with the IAEA, as well as the U.S. and Israeli governments, and the media.
David Albright’s “Institute for Science and International Security” provides invaluable reporting and analysis on Iran’s nuclear weapons program. In its September 10, 2024 report, “Iran’s Likely Violations of Section T: Computer Modeling Relevant to Nuclear Weapons Development,” the so-called “good ISIS” focused on Iran’s computer modeling work that could simulate nuclear explosive devices, which was banned in Section T of the JCPOA. Iran’s own scientific publications in fact demonstrated that it was using just such computer modeling to advance its nuclear weaponization capabilities.
The role of the NCRI and its in-country Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) forces in exposing Iran’s nuclear weapons program have been key to uncovering the Iranian organizations and agencies responsible for building a nuclear bomb. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard (IRGC)-controlled entity known as the Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research (SPND is its Persian acronym) was and remains tasked with directing Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
Armed with all of this information, the IAEA was able to put additional pressure on the Iranian regime to come clean about its nuclear program. Iran, of course, refused to do anything of the sort, leading to a series of disputes between Iran and the IAEA. By October 2017, President Donald Trump declared that the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the JCPOA was no longer in America’s national interest.
In May 2018, President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the JCPOA on the grounds that Iran was violating its conditions. By June 2025, “the IAEA’s 35-member Board of Governors declared Iran to be in violation of its non-proliferation commitments” in particular with regard to “undeclared nuclear material and activities at multiple undeclared locations in Iran.”
Iranian Regime Declarations
In 2003, Iran’s then-Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei issued his first declaration that the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons was forbidden. Then, some seven years later, he issued the much-cited April 2010 declaration opposing nuclear weapons which, erroneously, has been called a “fatwa.” His statement reads in part: “We consider the use of such weapons as haram [forbidden] and believe that everyone must make efforts to secure humanity against this great disaster.” Such a personal opinion, however, is not a legally binding fatwa, which rather, within Shi’ite jurisprudence, is an advisory opinion on a question about Islamic Law offered by a senior Shi’ite cleric with the theological authority and scholarship to do so. Further, a fatwa may be countered or withdrawn at any time by the issuing cleric or another and is not permanent.
Comments made by senior foreign policy figures in Iran would seem to imply, truthfully or not, that Iran might already have a nuclear capability. In a May 2024 statement by Iranian parliament (Majles) member Ahmad Bakhshayesh Ardestani, he is reported to have said that “[Iran had] achieved nuclear weapons, but we do not announce it. It means our policy is to possess nuclear bombs, but our declared policy is currently within the framework of the JCPOA.” As this author commented for the cited article here, it doesn’t seem likely that Ardestani would have been permitted to make such statements without approval of the Iranian regime.
In another example, Iranian Majles member Ali Motaheri admitted that “when we [Iran] began our nuclear activity, our goal was indeed to build a bomb…”
Dropping the mask even further in October 2025, an official statement from the Iranian Foreign Ministry made clear that the Iranian regime would no longer be bound by restrictions on its nuclear program, stating that: “all of the provisions (of the deal, referring to the 2015 JCPOA), including the restrictions on the Iranian nuclear program and the related mechanisms, are considered terminated.”
2024-2025 NCRI Press Briefings
In this 26 December 2024 Newsmax blog site piece, “Tehran Accelerating Nuclear Weapons Efforts”, this author reported on an important December 19, 2024 NCRI press briefing. The key information provided by the NCRI’s Deputy Director at the WDC office, Alireza Jafarzadeh, amplified what the original November 2011 IAEA report cited above had revealed: namely that Iran then recently had accelerated its development of Exploding Bridgewire (EBW) nuclear detonators. Again, it is the SPND organization that was conducting work on EBWs at Sanjarian, located inside the Parchin site, a military site in east Tehran.
On 31 January 2025, NCRI US Deputy Director Alireza Jafarzadeh provided new and alarming information about the Iranian regime’s accelerated work on nuclear warheads. In a 3 February 2026 Newsmax piece, this author reported on Jafarzadeh’s briefing about two SPND weapons development sites, at Shahrud (located about 400 kilometers northeast of Tehran) and a Semnan Province site some 220 kilometers east of Tehran. Notably, this nuclear warhead work was being conducted at Iranian ballistic missile development and launch sites. At Shahrud, SPND experts were developing warheads specifically designed to fit on the nosecones of the North Korean model Ghaem-100 missiles. At the Semnan site, SPND was working on the Simorgh missile which, likewise, is based on original North Korean missile designs.
On 3 March 2025, ISIS published an important analysis of the IAEA’s February 2025 quarterly report on the Iranian nuclear program. The IAEA report highlighted Iran’s “multiple violations of the JCPOA and the NPT and its increased capabilities to make weapon-grade uranium,” but the ISIS analysis zeroed in on the fact that Iran’s “nuclear weaponization program is steadily making progress, out of sight of the inspectors and the world.” It noted Iran’s possession of a stockpile of 60% enriched Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) that could be rapidly enriched “in three weeks” at Fordow to WGU, which at that time was “enough to make 7 nuclear weapons.”
At another NCRI press briefing on 8 May 2025 at its Washington, DC office, the NCRI revealed details about yet another Iranian nuclear weapons site, then just newly-confirmed. This one was located in a mountainous area near Ivanaki in Semnan Province, southeast of Tehran. This site revelation added to what clearly was a network of sites under front company cover that was expanded after the 2018 AMAD Plan revelations but in fact had been initiated in 2009 by then-Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. At this May 2025 briefing, though, a detail that should be alarming was the information that tritium and deuterium (hydrogen isotopes) were being developed in ways that can boost the fissile explosive power of a nuclear bomb. Overall, that network of weapons sites was called the Kavir Plan (The Desert Plan), which picked up Iran’s nuclear weapons development following the revelations of the AMAD Plan. NCRI’s full report on the Kavir Plan was published at its website on June 10, 2025.
June 2025 – Israel “Operation Rising Lion” – US “Operation Midnight Hammer”
By June 2025, both Israel and the U.S. were sufficiently alarmed to launch Operation Rising Lion and Operation Midnight Hammer, respectively. The Kavir network came under intense aerial bombardment by the Israeli Air Force (IAF) that began 12-13 June 2025. In addition, Operation Rising Lion targeted the Arak plutonium enrichment plant, the Isfahan conversion facility, the Natanz centrifuge enrichment site, and ballistic missile sites all over Iran. Senior Iranian military and IRGC commanders also were targeted. In statements about those strikes, Israeli Defense Force (IDF) spokesmen noted that the Iranian regime had been “advancing a secret plan for the technological advancement of all parts of the development of a nuclear weapons…” The IDF added that in recent months, that “program had accelerated significantly” and had “advanced towards obtaining a nuclear weapon…” with “three critical components of the threat” converging: the nuclear explosive materials, the core of enriched uranium and a neutron source at the core of a nuclear weapon that “releases a burst of neutrons to initiate the rapid nuclear chain reaction required for an explosion”. The regime’s rapid production of ballistic missiles, the intended delivery system for its nuclear warheads (as well as an existential threat to Israel in any case) and an ongoing effort to distribute “weapons and arms to regional proxies” by June 2025 were deemed an “immediate and imminent existential threat” to Israel.
The U.S. initiated Operation Midnight Hammer the night of 21 June 2025, with the objective to “destroy or severely degrade Iran’s nuclear program” and compel Iran to reach a negotiated settlement with the United States”, according to a June 23, 2025 report by the Congressional Research Service. B-2 Spirit bombers carrying GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs) hit the nuclear facilities at Natanz and Fordow, while Tomahawk missiles struck at Isfahan. Although President Trump asserted that “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated,” subsequent Battle Damage Assessments (BDA’s) indicated that Iran had possibly moved some of its HEU stockpiles to known/unknown locations. Additionally, satellite-observed efforts to dig out bombed nuclear site entrances and underground bunkers holding perhaps thousands of ballistic missiles and launchers raised concern that Iran’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs had not been sufficiently degraded to eliminate imminent threat to U.S. bases and sites, as well as to Israel and other regional partners.
28 Feb/1 Mar 2026 – Israel “Operation Roaring Lion” – US “Operation Epic Fury”
In view of updated BDAs regarding both damage inflicted by Israel and the U.S. in June 2025 and the Iranian regime’s efforts to rebuild and reconstitute its nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities subsequently, on 28 February 2026, the U.S. launched Operation Epic Fury to target the Iranian regime’s military/IRGC forces and also its industrial base capability and in particular its entire ballistic missile production capability. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth stated that “We’re shooting down and destroying what missiles [the enemy] still have in stock; but more importantly, we’re ensuring that they have no ability to make more. Their production lines, their military plants [and] their defense innovation centers [are] defeated.”
In conclusion, as of this writing, a fragile ceasefire remains in effect between the U.S. and the Iranian regime even as negotiations to end the conflict and open the Strait of Hormuz are ongoing. U.S. conditions remain firm that Iran will not have nuclear weapons nor the capability to develop them. This means that former nuclear sites at Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz as well perhaps others such as Pickaxe Mountain, must be dismantled and verified to be so by IAEA inspectors. Iranian stockpiles of enriched uranium, including all its HEU, must be either destroyed on site or removed entirely from Iran, also all under supervision of IAEA inspectors. The Strait of Hormuz must be open to free and unfettered international shipping traffic and Iranian regime support to its terror proxies must be ended.
Although President Trump repeatedly has stated that U.S. objectives do not include regime change in Tehran, national security experts have suggested that the June 2025 and 2026 military Operations can have the effect of setting conditions under which armed internal Iranian resistance forces themselves can complete regime change for the people of Iran…because as long as any of this Iranian regime remains in command, they will attempt to rebuild a deliverable nuclear weapons capability and the ballistic missiles to deliver them.
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