December 21, 2018
A committee chaired by then-President Mohammad Khatami approved the building of five nuclear weapons to be deliverable by ballistic missiles and to be ready by Now Ruz 2003.
Each weapon was to have the explosive power of 10 kilotons of TNT or about half the size of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
The Islamic Republic has consistently and repeatedly denied for a quarter of a century that it has ever had any nuclear military program and insisted its nuclear program has always been purely for peaceful purposes, such as power generation and medical uses.
The approved weapons plan was cited in a trove of documents stolen from a warehouse in Tehran last January by Israel. The document was revealed by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), which has been allowed by Israel to review much of the massive stock of files that Israel spirted out of Iran.
A report on the findings was written by David Albright, head of ISIS, and Olli Heinonen, a former deputy director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) who is now working with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
Their report says the decision to build the weapons was taken in 1999 or early 2000, based on dates in one of the documents. The document says the decision to build the bombs was made by the Supreme Council for Advanced Technologies, which at the time was chaired by President Khatami. Other members of the committee included Hassan Rohani, then secretary of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) and now president, Ali Shamkhani, then minister of defense and now secretary of the SNSC, and Gholam-Reza Aghazadeh, then chief of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran.
That the weapons construction was approved by President Khatami was a surprise, given that he was considered the president least interested in a nuclear weapons program and most concerned about Iran’s confrontational foreign policy. It is likely, however, that he saw the nuclear program as a safety measure that would deter any American or Israeli attack on Iran.
A table included in the documents says that the manufacturing of five “explosive systems” and four “warhead systems” was to be completed by Now Ruz 2003. The ISIS report says the term “warhead system” appears to refer to deliverable nuclear weapons that could be carried atop a missile and that “explosive system” appears to mean a basic nuclear device. The one explosive system that was not a warhead system could have been intended for a test.
Obviously, that Now Ruz 2003 deadline was not met and Iran did not have even a single bomb by that date. Ironically, the US military invaded Iraq one day before that deadline. The Islamic Republic immediately feared that it might be on a US agenda for invasion. US intelligence later concluded that the Islamic Republic quickly decided to put its nuclear weapons program in the deep freeze so as not to encourage any US invasion.
The ISIS report says the Iranian timetable “was overly ambitious” and could not have been achieved. “Nonetheless, later documents and photos show that by 2003 Iran had made considerable progress in putting together a complex to design, develop, test and manufacture deliverable nuclear weapons, when the program stalled in mid-2003 following the US invasion of Iraq and intrusive IAEA inspections uncovering a wide range of Iran’s deception and violations related to undeclared [nuclear] fuel cycle activities.”
The ISIS report says the stated goal of producing five nuclear weapons “should be viewed as an initial one,” since the infrastructure laid out in the plans would have allowed the production of many more nuclear weapons.
The plan specified that each of the five nuclear weapons should have a yield or explosive power equivalent to 10 kilotons of TNT. To put that into perspective, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was rated at 13 to 18 kilotons and the one dropped on Nagasaki was estimated at 20 to 22 kilotons.
The largest weapon in the US arsenal today is the B83 aerial bomb with explosive power of 1,200 kilotons. America’s Trident submarines carry missiles with a warhead of 475 kilotons. Each missile carries 8 to 14 such warheads. Each sub carries 24 such missiles and there are 14 such submarines, so each sub carries about 100,000 kilotons of explosive power or 10,000 times the explosive power of one of Iran’s planned bombs.