Iran's nuclear programme: Possible military dimensions

LONDON. For more than two decades Iran has insisted that its nuclear programme is strictly peaceful, a hedge against energy insecurity rather than a pathway to the bomb.

- FROM SHYAM BHATIA

Yet, according to observers here, one site continues to stand as the most awkward counterpoint to that narrative: the Parchin military complex, southeast of Tehran. Almost every serious conversation about Iran’s “possible military dimensions” circles back to Parchin. The reason is simple: it embodies the unresolved questions about whether Iran ever engaged in nuclear weaponization research — and if so, how much of that legacy still endures today.

On paper, Parchin is a conventional military facility. It sprawls across a wide desert plain, producing missiles and testing high explosives. But satellite images, Western intelligence reports, and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) all have identified a cluster of buildings that seemed to have little to do with conventional arms. At the centre was a structure large enough to house a steel chamber, designed for experiments involving high explosives and mock-ups of nuclear cores.

These “hydrodynamic” experiments are critical in the design of a nuclear weapon. They allow scientists to test the symmetrical implosion needed to detonate a plutonium or highly enriched uranium device — without using actual fissile material. No peaceful application exists for such work.

The IAEA first asked to visit Parchin in 2004. Iran allowed limited access the following year but steered inspectors to peripheral workshops, never to the building at the heart of suspicion.

Years later, satellite imagery showed something more worrying: the suspect area had been scraped clean.

Buildings were razed, soil removed, new asphalt laid. In diplomatic language, the IAEA noted that the site had undergone “extensive sanitisation”. In plainer English: someone was covering tracks.