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The Israeli prime minister’s speech on Iranian nuclear activities wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
On Monday afternoon, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu disclosed a seemingly staggering intelligence coup: Israeli operatives had penetrated a secret Iranian military facility in Tehran and spirited away tens of thousands of detailed files on the Iranian nuclear program.
The stolen documents revealed a series of details about Iran’s nuclear weapons research in the early 2000s, granular proof that Iran had been — contrary to its public statements — actively pursuing a bomb. Netanyahu argued that the new files constituted proof that Iran cannot be trusted, and that President Trump should scrap the nuclear deal with Iran on May 12, when he is facing a deadline imposed by US law to decide whether to keep lifting sanctions on Iran as the deal requires.
“Iran lied about never having a nuclear weapons program,” Netanyahu said. “This is a terrible deal.”
Israel shared this information with the United States before the public presentation, and has called the leaders of several major countries (France, Germany, and Russia) to brief them on the findings. There’s been little in the way of official reaction from the United States; in a press conference, Trump said he’s interested in seeing what Netanyahu presented.
This all sounds significant. The problem, experts say, is that most of what Netanyahu said was already well-known. The nuclear weapons research program he was discussing ended about 15 years ago. The prime minister presented no information that Iran was currently producing nuclear weapons, or was otherwise in violation of the deal’s restrictions on nuclear activities.
Dina Esfandiary, a fellow at King’s College London, told me that Netanyahu’s speech was “frankly underwhelming.” Suzanne Maloney, an Iran scholar at the Brookings Institution, said she heard “nothing new.” And Kingston Reif, a nuclear proliferation expe
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