The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) reportedly destroyed a top-secret nuclear weapons research facility late last month where Iran was actively conducting research for its illicit and undeclared nuclear weapons program.
Israel hit the facility in Parchin during retaliatory strikes against the Islamic regime after it launched more than 180 ballistic missiles into Israel early last month.
Multiple U.S. and Israeli officials told Axios that the strike against the facility “significantly damaged Iran’s effort over the past year to resume nuclear weapons research,” the report said.
The site where the nuclear weapons research was happening was the Taleghan 2 facility in the Parchin military complex, the report said.
The strike destroyed advanced equipment that is needed to design sophisticated explosive materials that are required to detonate a nuclear device.
Satellite imagery shows that the facility, which was a previously declared nuclear weapons facility decades ago, was completely destroyed in the strike.
U.S. and Israeli officials said that Iran was trying to conceal its nuclear weapons research at the facility by presenting it as research for civilian purposes.
The report said only a small number of officials in Iran’s Islamic government knew about what was going on at the facility.
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A U.S. official told Axios that the strike was “a not so subtle message that the Israelis have significant insight into the Iranian system even when it comes to things that were kept top secret and known to a very small group of people in the Iranian government.”
Andrea Stricker, deputy director of the Nonproliferation and Biodefense Program and a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said in an interview this week that she does not expect Iran to retaliate against Israel for destroying the facility because that would be an acknowledgment that it was conducting illicit nuclear weapons research.
“Israel stayed under [President Biden’s] red line of not targeting the major nuclear sites because in order to protest, Iran would have had to admit that it was violating its nuclear non-proliferation treaty obligation not to work on nuclear weapons,” she said. “Israel really did the world a service here by creating a potential bottle neck in the program.”
