Perhaps only by accident, Bibi Netanyahu did place some fascinating new bits of information on the public record. Showing images of documents without visible dates, he described the AMAD Plan’s vision for a nuclear arsenal. It was to have consisted of five nuclear devices suitable for ballistic missile delivery. Each was to have a yield of 10 kilotons, small by nuclear standards.
This is a remarkably miniscule, unambitious arsenal. It would make Kim Jong Un giggle. Only one country is known to have created anything like it: South Africa, which built a handful of very basic nuclear weapons in the 1980s, and then decided to dismantle them. Only later, after the end of Apartheid, did the new government reveal the story. According to a South African nuclear official,
Waldo Stumpf, the idea was to keep the bombs secret; only if the country were threatened with invasion would it hint at its capability, or conduct a nuclear test to reveal it.
Did a similar idea motivate Iran’s AMAD Plan? We don’t know. Not enough information has entered the public record. But it is worth asking whether this project amounted to a crash program to create a secret, fairly rudimentary nuclear capability, only to be revealed in an emergency.
According to the 2011 IAEA report, the AMAD Plan was not organized until some point in the late 1990s or early 2000s; most of its work appears to have been conducted “during 2002 and 2003.”
It was also in January 2002 that President George W. Bush’s delivered his famous “
Axis of Evil” speech, lumping Iran in with Iraq and North Korea as mortal threats to the “peace of the world.” It would be a twist worthy of O. Henry if that speech, pointing to the threat of weapons of mass destruction, convinced the Iranian regime to reach for nuclear weapons as quickly as it could. If an appropriately sanitized version of the “atomic archive” ever becomes public, perhaps it will be possible to reach firmer conclusions
