Report – IDF destroyed Iran’s nuclear archive

This historical knowledge is now lost, said Channel 12’s Amit Segal, seemingly dealing a heavy blow to any future nuclear endeavors.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The IDF has destroyed Iran’s backup nuclear archive, Amit Segal of Israel’s Channel 12 TV reported on Monday night.

“One of the targets struck in recent days was the backup of Iran’s nuclear archive, which contained the Islamic Republic’s accumulated organizational knowledge on developing nuclear weapons,” the reporter stated, without mentioning the source for his exclusive report.

“This is a significant move,” he commented, “because after Israel eliminated all the scientists who had acquired knowledge about weapons systems and enrichment through decades of trial and error, Israel is now destroying what is considered the final backup documenting that knowledge.”

Seven years ago, Israel stunned the world when it revealed that the Mossad intelligence agency had managed to physically steal a warehouse’s worth of intelligence data on Iran’s nuclear program right out of Tehran, including evidence on paper and in computer files.

According to Segal, that accumulated knowledge is now permanently lost.

While the reporter framed this as dealing a heavy blow to any future nuclear endeavors, what may be even more vital to stopping Iranian ambitions in this sphere is the fact that the IDF has killed 14 of the country’s top nuclear scientists since its surprise air invasion of the Islamic Republic began on Friday.

The list includes many of Iran’s biggest experts in nuclear engineering, nuclear physics, reactor physics, and chemical and materials engineering, all vital to building nuclear weapons and the ballistic missiles to carry them.

In a 2018 Times of Israel website interview, Ronen Bergman, author of a history of Israel’s assassinations of its enemies, said that when he asked a former CIA chief, Michael Hayden, what was the most effective tool or weapon activated worldwide against the Iranian nuclear project, Hayden had immediately replied, “The one thing that was most effective was that someone was starting to kill the scientists.”

Not only did this “take out the main people with experience and knowledge,” Bergman said of Hayden’s thinking, but it “forced the whole of the Iranian system into a huge effort trying to locate Mossad moles, and screening all their equipment looking for viruses, and putting bodyguards and police guards on the remaining scientists. So that by itself, without the Mossad doing anything, delayed them by years.”

Perhaps most importantly, he explained, it caused scientists who liked “getting a lot of money [and] being part of a national project” to say “it’s not worth it” and quit.