An aerial map from 2004 showing Iran’s clandestine nuclear activities at the Parchin military complex near Tehran. Image: isis-online.org.

An intelligence trove concerning Iran’s clandestine nuclear activities released by the Israeli government earlier this year revealed that the Tehran regime was carrying out high-explosive weapons research at its military facility at Parchin, near the Iranian capital, a new report said on Wednesday.

The report — by the Washington, DC-based Institute for Science and International Security — noted that the nuclear archive unveiled by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on April 30 “shows that in 2003 Iran was operating a nuclear weapons program, codenamed AMAD Plan, which aimed to build five nuclear weapons and prepare an underground nuclear test site, if a political decision was made to test.”

“The Parchin site was a key part of that nuclear weapons research and development effort,” the report said.

Iran had failed to provide inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) with accurate information about Parchin, leading the global nuclear weapons body to conclude in 2015 that the work at the military site did not go beyond “feasibility and scientific studies, and the acquisition of certain relevant technical competences and capabilities.”

According to the institute’s report, “Iran did not provide all the answers requested by the IAEA. In addition, IAEA access, inter alia, at Parchin was limited to one building only, and the IAEA detected some uranium particles in samples taken (where the sampling was actually conducted by Iranian technicians outside of normal IAEA environmental sampling protocols).”

The report also charged that “the 2015 IAEA assessment is at odds with information in the archives revealed by Prime Minister Netanyahu, and potentially with new discoveries revealed by the Prime Minister on September 27, 2018 about equipment and material being present in a Tehran warehouse is related to Iran’s nuclear weapons effort.”