Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu revealed a cache of documents he says proves Iran lied to the world about its nuclear program for years, even after the 2015 nuclear deal with the world. “Iran did not come clean about its nuclear program,” Netanyahu said in a prime time address in English. Iran, for its part, blased the speech as “propaganda.”
Presenting 55,000 pages of documents and 183 CDs, Netanyahu said Iran hid an “atomic archive” of documents on its nuclear program.
“This is an original Iranian presentation from these files,” Netanyahu said, stressing that “the mission statement is to design, produce and test five warheads with 10 kiloton of TNT yield for integration on missiles.”
Intelligence experts and diplomats said he did not seem to have presented a “smoking gun” showing that Iran had violated the terms of the agreement, although he may have helped make a case on behalf of skeptics in the U.S. who want to scrap it.
Iran is “blatantly lying” when it says it doesn’t have a nuclear program, Netanyahu claimed, laying out what he claimed was proof Iran had developed and continued to develop its nuclear program.
At the press conference, Netanyahu exposed a secret Iranian nuclear project, codenamed “Amad,” which he said had been shelved in 2003, though he said work in the field had continued.
“After signing the nuclear deal in 2015, Iran intensified its efforts to hide its secret files,” Netanyahu said. “In 2017 Iran moved its nuclear weapons files to a highly secret location in Tehran.”
The documents show that Iran’s Fordow nuclear plant was “designed from the get go for nuclear weapons for project Amad,” claimed Netanyahu.
