on how to detonate a nuclear weapon and worked on designs to miniaturize a nuclear weapon so it would fit atop a missile.
The 12-page IAEA report made clear, however, that the agency does not have courtroom evidence that Iran is trying to build a bomb. It stated clearly and up front that some of the work Iran was doing had non-military applications. Its core argument was that Iran has failed for years to cooperate with the IAEA to dispel fears that the work is for military purposes, as one would expect it to do if its work was innocent.
“Many of the answers given by Iran to questions posed by the agency in connection with efforts to resolve the agency’s concerns have been imprecise and/or incomplete, and the information has been slow in coming and sometimes contradictory,” the IAEA report said.
The report was written largely in technical jargon. For the most part, it simply set out on the public record concerns that have been leaked to the media over the years and reported on a “sources said” basis before. As such, there was little there that should be unfamiliar to readers of publications like the Iran Times.
In fact, more information was leaked to some news outlets this week than appeared in the published report.
For example, the IAEA report said a “foreign expert” admitted to the IAEA that he worked in Iran from about 1996 to 2002 lecturing Iranian scientists on “explosion physics.” The Washington Post reported even before the report was released that the foreign expert was Vyacheslav Danilenko, a former Soviet nuclear scientist.
The Post said there was no evidence that the Russian government knew what Danilenko was doing. Other news stories over the years have told of Iranian scientists contacting many Russian nuclear scientists directly by email and inviting them to come and lecture in Tehran.
The IAEA report describes Iranian efforts to form explosives in a circle, focus their explosive energy at a central core, and fire them within microseconds. That is the key to how to detonate a nuclear device using conventional explosives as the trigger.
It also describes efforts to fit the trigger and other components into the top of a missile cone.
Even before the report was released, President Ahmadi-nejad launched a highly personal attack on Yukiya Amano, the director general of the IAEA. Amano, he said, “delivers the papers that American officials hand to him. I am sorry that a person is heading this agency who has no power of his own and violates the agency’s own rules, too.”