According to a paper published on Tuesday by the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS),the documents recovered by Israeli intelligence from Iran’s hidden nuclear archive and revealed by premier Netanyahu in April of 2018 show Iran conducted significantly more high explosive tests at the Parchin nuclear site than previously understood.” This leads to the fact that Iran has already overcome some of the obstacles to building a bomb which experts thought it had not yet mastered. Based on this new paper we learn Iran was a lot closer to a nuclear weapon than we thought and the work at Parchin may still be going on.

The report, authored by the think tank’s director David Albright, by former IAEA Deputy Director General Olli Heinonen and other top experts, said, “The additional evidence specifically mentions explosions and radioactivity at the Parchin site, and this information far more vividly establishes Iran’s nuclear weapons-related activities there.

Parchin is a crucial part of Iran’s nuclear program whose operations remained relatively secret despite the JCPOA nuclear deal and assurances made to this country by the previous administration. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has long sought access to Parchin which has long been suspected of being the location where Iran was developing it’s detonation systems for nuclear weapons. In October 2014 Iran admitted to using Parchin to test exploding bridge wires used as nuclear detonators, but they claimed the test explosions were not for weapons development.