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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25892 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026

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They never had a nuclear weapons program. That is not a real thing. No expert has alleged that.

This is trivially false. From Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs:

The documents that the Belfer group were shown confirm that senior Iranian officials had decided in the late 1990s to actually manufacture nuclear weapons and carry out an underground nuclear test; that Iran’s program to do so made more technical progress than had previously been understood; and that Iran had help from quite a number of foreign scientists, and access to several foreign nuclear weapon designs. The archive also leaves open a wide range of questions, including what plan, if any, Iran has had with respect to nuclear weapons in the nearly 16 years since Iran’s government ordered a halt to most of the program in late 2003.

Or, if that's not neutral enough for you, from the IAEA:

Information available to the Agency prior to November 2011 indicated that Iran had arranged, via a number of different and evolving management structures, for activities to be undertaken in support of a possible military dimension to its nuclear programme. According to this information, the organisational structures covered most of the areas of activity relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device.

You can read the entire report full of details of exactly what actions Iran took in support of the nuclear program they denied having. It's honestly pretty cool James Bond stuff:

Information available to the Agency in 2011 also indicated that Iran could have benefitted from the aforementioned foreign expert, who had knowledge of both MPI technology and experimental diagnostics and had worked for much of his career in the nuclear weapon programme in his country of origin. The foreign expert’s presence in Iran in the period 1996-2001 has been confirmed by Iran, although it stated that his activities were related to the production of nanodiamonds.

And it is true that the IAEA very measuredly declines to say that Iran's program is ongoing, pointing to historical evidence rather than more recent evidence. But their report strongly suggests that Iran did, historically, have a nascent nuclear weapons program:

The Agency’s overall assessment is that a range of activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device were conducted in Iran prior to the end of 2003 as a coordinated effort, and some activities took place after 2003.

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