White House: Israel’s claims about Iran’s nuclear weapons programme are ‘compelling’

The difference between the White House’s use of past and present tense in reference to Iran’s nuclear program could have serious implications for the future of the Iran nuclear deal.

MISSILE strikes at two Iran-linked bases in Syria caused huge explosions and killed dozens of pro-government fighters, a monitoring group said on Monday, in an attack seen as Israel’s latest blow in a shadow war to contain Iranian influence. Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi called Netanyahu’s speech “a childish and ridiculous show,”an Iranian news agency reported“.

Just last week, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told Congress that, after reading the entire text of the nuclear agreement three times, he was impressed that “the verification, what is in there, is actually pretty robust”. Netanyahu concluded that the whole nuclear deal, hailed by former U.S. President Barack Obama as the high point of his presidency, was based on Iranian lies and deception.

However, contrary to Netanyahu’s description of the obtained intelligence as “new and conclusive”, there was little new – Netanyahu has repeatedly accused Iran of developing nuclear weapons for years – and, according to global experts, proved nothing conclusively. He said Israeli intelligence had obtained thousands of files of Iran’s atomic archives from what looked like “a dilapidated warehouse” in Tehran.

Mr Netanyahu said in an elaborate televised presentation on Monday that he had new “proof” of an Iranian nuclear weapons plan that could be activated at any time.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned on Thursday against scrapping an global deal on Iran’s nuclear programme unless there was a good alternative in place.

The use of atomic bombs by the USA against Japan at the end of World War II in 1945 marked “the first and last time that nuclear weapons have been used in warfare”.

USA officials told NBC that Israeli F-15s hit Hama after Iran delivered weapons to a base that houses Iran’s 47th Brigade, including surface-to-air missiles.

Keenly aware of the Trump administration’s position on the deal, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chose to chime in with his two cents.

In response, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif slammed the U-turn in his American counterpart’s position on Iran’s nuclear activities, highlighting Pompeo’s previous remarks in which he affirmed that Tehran had never tried to develop nuclear weapons.

Technically, Trump must decide by May 12 whether to renew “waivers” suspending some of the USA sanctions on Iran. The next deadline is May 12.

The documents released by Israel on Monday were “authentic”, according to U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, until last week director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

“Absent a substantial fix, absent overcoming the shortcomings, the flaws of the deal, he is unlikely to stay in that deal past this May”, Pompeo said.

An International Atomic Energy Agency inspector, in blue, working in Iran in 2005.

“It was clear over the course of the address that it really wasn’t meant to make any new charges”, Suzanne Maloney, deputy director of the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution, said of Netanyahu’s speech.

So much, then, for all the palaver about the deal providing an unprecedented level of transparency for monitoring Iranian compliance. “The IAEA has to go back to see how far they really got in this program and was it really stopped”.

In a Twitter thread, Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies pointed out that numerous things shown in Netanyahu’s report had also been detailed in the 2015 report. And Russia and China, whose involvement was key during the years of diplomacy that led to the 2015 accord, have shown no interest in renegotiating it.