NUCELLAR WARIDS | The murders of Mohammad Reza Kia, Ali Fouladvand, Jabal Amelian show how far Israel and the US are willing to go. “Every link in the nuclear production chain is a target – from the knowledge base to production. The goal is to cut off all the roots”
US and Israel want to eliminate Iran’s nuclear knowledge before the war ends
by Mostafa Salem e Tal ShalevCNN
As rain fell over Iran’s northern provinces in late March, mourning crowds snaked through the mountains of Asara, carrying Mohammad Reza Kia’s coffin. The city, with just a few thousand inhabitants, was covered in banners that now praised the young nuclear scientist as a “martyr of the imposed war”.
Reconstructing information about Kia and the circumstances of his murky death is difficult, but two weeks ago his mother said, in a brief video, that he was killed in an attack.
Apart from some scientific articles attributed to Mohammad Reza Kia and an inactive social media page bearing his name, the only information available is that he was a PhD candidate at the Department of Nuclear Engineering at Amirkabir University of Technology between 2010 and 2017.
The death of Kia and countless Iranian scientists across the country demonstrates the lengths Israel and the United States are willing to go to ensure that Tehran’s ability to militarize its nuclear program is significantly reduced after the war ends.
Last week, US President Donald Trump said the United States was on track to achieve its goals in the war with Iran – including stopping Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon – and suggested the conflict could last another two to three weeks. However, Iran still holds hundreds of kilograms of the essential component to build a bomb, as well as decades of accumulated knowledge. As the US and Israel seek to end the war, they are determined to achieve this knowledge to weaken the nuclear program.
Target list
Over the past few decades, Iran has built a vast knowledge ecosystem around its nuclear program — university departments, specialized machinery, and a robust system that includes domestic uranium mining, processing, enrichment with advanced centrifuges, and reserve storage. Experts say that even if the Iranian program is peaceful, Tehran has the necessary structure to transform it into a military one if it so chooses.
An Israeli security source said all of this is on the hit list.
Just days after Kia’s funeral, another attack hit a building about 300 miles away, killing nine people — including Ali Fouladvand, a scientist responsible for research at a leading organization long accused by Western powers and Israel of serving as a front to acquire knowledge needed to militarize Iran’s nuclear program.
The founder of the organization, known by the Persian acronym SPND, was Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a prominent nuclear scientist widely believed to have been assassinated by Israel six years ago. The organization’s current president, Jabal Amelian, was killed in the initial wave of Israeli and American attacks in late February, while other senior figures have been systematically targeted by Israel since last year.
“Every link in the nuclear production chain is a target – from the knowledge base to production. The goal is to cut off all the roots,” an Israeli security source told CNN. “From the people who work in the labs to the factories that produce components for those labs.”
When the United States and Israel launched war against Iran last month, the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and his top military and intelligence officials were killed in a targeted operation aimed at eliminating the regime’s key figures.
Israel appears to have taken the lead in assassinating even lower-level figures linked to Iran’s nuclear program, while systematically degrading centers of knowledge that could be useful in the future.
Israel’s strategy expanded in June 2025. It eliminated the key players in the Revolutionary Guards’ aerospace force — the commanders responsible for Iran’s missile capabilities, which could aid in the development of a nuclear warhead — while also targeting more than a dozen of the country’s top professors and nuclear scholars, including Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi, one of Iran’s most notable physicists.
“Israel is reaching all phases of the production process – including iron and steel factories that are not directly part of the military industry, but which could contribute to rebuilding the production process,” revealed the source.
It is also targeting specific departments at universities while attempting to significantly degrade the complex supply chain needed to maintain Iran’s nuclear program.
“In terms of knowledge – scientists, libraries, archives, chemical laboratories, the people who work in all these places – and also the cadres who could replace them” are all targets, the source added to CNN.
Potential militarization
Even as Iran insists that its nuclear program is entirely peaceful, Western nations have long suspected that Tehran uses shell companies to bypass international monitoring and develop dual-use technologies that could be quickly adapted for military purposes if that decision were made.
Nicole Grajewski, assistant professor at Sciences Po’s Center for International Studies in Paris, notes that nuclear experts believe Iran carried out diagnostic tests, modeling of nuclear effects and detonation simulations, all signs that Tehran was acquiring the knowledge necessary to militarize its program when it so desired.
Assessments by United States intelligence services indicate that there is no evidence that Iran was trying to militarize its nuclear program, but experts say that the country used its status as a nuclear threshold state — capable of building a bomb — as a form of pressure in negotiations with the West.
Iranian officials at the highly sanctioned SPND have created a subsidiary aimed at developing skills and acquiring technologies that, according to the United States, aim to obtain the knowledge necessary for nuclear militarization.
“Iran is the only country in the world without nuclear weapons that is producing uranium enriched to 60% and continues to use shell companies and intermediaries to hide its efforts to acquire dual-use items from foreign suppliers,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement when announcing sanctions against SPND last year.
A key component for a nuclear bomb
After Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the nuclear deal with Iran reached by the Obama administration in 2015, Tehran began installing advanced centrifuges to accelerate uranium enrichment. It managed to accumulate a significant reserve of highly enriched uranium — enough to build a nuclear weapon.
More than 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium have been accumulated in Iran, raising serious concerns among international agencies, who have questioned why the Islamic Republic would need such an amount if its program was truly peaceful. The level of enrichment required for nuclear energy production is less than 4%, but Iran began enriching uranium up to 60% after the US withdrawal from the agreement in 2018.
When Israel and the United States attacked Iran’s heavily guarded nuclear facilities last year, the fate of this highly enriched uranium became increasingly uncertain. The director of the United Nations nuclear agency, Rafael Grossi, said in an interview with PBS published on Friday that the material is believed to be in Isfahan and could eventually be moved.
“The nuclear sites we destroyed… were hit with such intensity that it would take months to even approach nuclear dust,” Trump said in a speech last week. In an interview with Reuters on April 1, he added that the enriched material is “so deeply buried that it doesn’t worry me.”
Before these statements, he cited US officials who indicated that Trump was considering a military operation to extract uranium, although no decision had been made.
Iran has been deliberately vague about access to this material, but offered to dilute it during negotiations with the United States before the war began in February.
“This was a big offer, a big concession to prove that Iran never wanted nuclear weapons and never will,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told CBS last month.
Although Israel has targeted key infrastructure to degrade Iran’s nuclear program, Grajewski said its uranium reserves and years of accumulated technical knowledge would be sufficient to build a simplified “cannon” bomb if the country decided to change its stance.
“Iran can still create a nuclear weapon, it’s just a question of political will,” assured Grajewski. “If the war ends, Iran could theoretically move quickly toward militarization within one to two years.”
