U.S. To Pressure UN Atomic Agency Over Iran Nuclear Files Stolen By Israel

The Trump administration reportedly will begin pressuring the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to examine over 100,000 files detailing Iran’s efforts to build nuclear weapons. The move comes after Israeli officials purportedly expressed outrage over the IAEA’s “dragging [of] its feet” and of not taking seriously the substance of documents stolen earlier this year from Tehran by Israel’s Mossad spy agency. Israeli operatives are believed to have discovered the existence of the atomic archive in February 2016; kept the warehouse in which it was being stored under surveillance for two years; and then devised an operation to break into the structure and smuggle back to Israel half a ton of material in less than 24 hours. “Iran lied big time” Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu asserted in a nationally-televised press conference in which he exposed that, despite its repeated denials, Tehran had created a program—”Project Amad”—geared towards developing atomic weapons. Specifically, the plan was to “design, produce and test five warheads, each with [a] 10-kiloton TNT yield for integration on a missile,” according to text uncovered in one of the records. The revelation is widely believed to have influenced President Donald Trump’s subsequent decision to withdraw from the 2015 nuclear accord and re-impose sanctions on the Islamic Republic.