adjacent to the larger structure at the Parchin military base that UN nuclear inspectors most want to check out.
A great deal of earth around the suspect structure has also been disrupted, prompting Western diplomats to accuse Iran of conducting “ground-scraping activities” to hide traces of a possible nuclear weapons development.
The satellite images were released last week by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS).
One of the images, taken May 25, showed a bulldozer at the site and appeared to indicate some sanitizing of the site with dirt disrupted and distributed elsewhere.
Compared to several images of the site taken in November 2011, the May images showed that two small buildings had been razed by bulldozers. They are adjacent to a much larger building that inspectors believed contains an explosive detonation chamber. It is suspected that Iran tested some components of a detonator for a nuclear weapon in the chamber beginning in 2003.
Until the last several weeks, satellite imagery has shown no activity at the large building for a number of years.
Iran’s envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Ali-Asghar Soltanieh, said that “this kind of noise and allegations are baseless.”
IAEA Deputy Director General Herman Nackaerts did not elaborate on what the Agency believed was happening at the site, but he underscored the need for his agency to visit the site to clarify its status, according to diplomats who attended a closed-door briefing he gave.
ISIS said the images “raise concerns that Iran is attempting to raze the site prior to allowing an IAEA visit.”
ISIS analysts David Albright and Robert Avagyan said that the images spark concerns about Iranian efforts to “destroy evidence of alleged past nuclear weaponization activities.”
The IAEA has repeatedly asked Iran to give it permission to visit Parchin. The IAEA said in a report last November that Iran had built a containment vessel in 2000 at the site. The IAEA sees this as a “strong indicator of possible [nuclear] weapon development” because the structure of the building indicates Iran may have used it to study the detonation of up to 70 kilograms of high explosives.
Iran has refused to allow IAEA inspectors anywhere near the suspected containment building and has said the Agency has failed to offer Iran a convincing reason to visit Parchin, which Iran says is just a conventional military installation.
“The reasons and documents have still not been presented by the agency to convince us to give permission for the visit,” Fereydun Abbasi-Davani, head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, was quoted as saying by Fars.
Soltanieh has said Iran would only allow IAEA access to Parchin once an agreement is reached on how to address the agency’s long-standing questions about possible military aspects to Iran’s nuclear programs. The IAEA has been seeking answers to those questions for years.
Some former UN nuclear non-proliferation officials are debating whether the IAEA’s focus on Parchin to the exclusion of other places is a mistake.
Olli Heinonen, the IAEA’s former chief inspector in Iran, believes IAEA inspectors should actually focus on Iran’s Physics Research Center in Tehran instead of Parchin. Heinonen co-authored a report with former IAEA colleague David Albright titled “The Parchin Trap” in which they laid out their arguments.
Former IAEA inspector for Iraq Robert Kelly also remains unconvinced that the IAEA’s intelligence about Parchin is credible.
The IAEA’s 35-member board of governors is meeting this week in Austria, where the IAEA chief Yukio Amano has been briefing diplomats about the latest developments.