Iran Missiles

Iranian officials are very clear on the value of their growing arsenal. Europe, with strong backing from the U.S., needs to finally turn its words into deeds.

For Washington, publicizing Iranian involvement in the Middle East through displays of captured weaponry is part of a larger strategy. The more Iran’s hand is exposed in the region, the theory goes, the harder it will be for foreign governments to remain indifferent to Iran’s ongoing malign activity.

The United States should resolve these discrepancies by sanctioning all 11 companies that so far have escaped designation. In so doing, the Trump administration can ensure that its maximum pressure campaign targets the full spectrum of actors responsible for facilitating Iran’s malign conduct.

GOV/2015/68, December 2, 2015.

The archive provides the public its first look inside the Parchin nuclear weapons development facility and at the type of nuclear weapons related activities that took place at the site.  This report, in particular, for the first time publicly correlates photos from inside the main building, called Taleghan 1 by Iran, to satellite imagery, updates previous discussion of the purpose of the second major building at the site, called Taleghan 2, and touches upon the operation of the facilities, including confirmation that Iran was testing in Taleghan 1 a specialized, difficult to develop, neutron initiator to start the chain reaction in a nuclear explosion.  The new information about Parchin, aka Taleghan, shows that Iran conducted far more high explosive tests at the site than previously understood.  It may have maintained some of the equipment for later use, and did in fact resume (elsewhere) some of those activities related to nuclear weapons development under a new organizational structure controlled by the Iranian military.  Most recently, this organization was known by the acronym SPND, mentioned in the December 2015 IAEA report, or by its English name, the Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research.