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<\/p>\n\n As rain poured on the northern provinces of Iran in late March, a somber crowd snaked through the mountain ranges of Asara carrying the coffin of Mohammad Reza Kia. The city of just a few thousand people was draped in banners now hailing the young nuclear scientist as a \u201cmartyr of the imposed war.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n Piecing together information on Kia and the circumstance of his obscure death is difficult, but two weeks ago his mother said in a short clip that he was killed in an attack.\n <\/p>\n
\n Beyond a few research papers attributed to him and an inactive social media page bearing his name, the only information available is that he was a doctoral candidate in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at Amirkabir University of Technology from 2010 to 2017.\n <\/p>\n
\n Kia\u2019s killing, and those of countless Iranian scientists in all parts of the country, demonstrates the lengths to which Israel and the United States are willing to go to ensure that Tehran\u2019s ability to weaponize its nuclear program is significantly curtailed after the war ends.\n <\/p>\n
\n Last week, US President Donald Trump said the US was on track to achieve its objectives in the Iran war \u2013 including preventing Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon \u2013 and suggested the conflict could last two to three more weeks. But Iran still retains hundreds of kilograms of the core component needed to build a bomb, as well as decades of expertise. As the US and Israel look to wind down the war, they are determined to target that expertise in a bid to cripple the nuclear program.\n <\/p>\n
\n Over the past decades, Iran built an extensive knowledge ecosystem around its nuclear program – university departments, specialized machinery, and a robust system that included domestic uranium mining, processing, enrichment using advanced centrifuges, and storage in stockpiles. Experts say that even if Iran\u2019s program is peaceful, Tehran has the architecture to weaponize it should it choose to.\n <\/p>\n
\n An Israeli security source said all of those are on its hit list.\n <\/p>\n
\n A few days after Kia\u2019s funeral, another strike hit a building 300 miles away, killing nine people – including Ali Fouladvand, a scientist in charge of research at a leading organization long accused by Western powers and Israel of serving as a front for acquiring the knowledge needed to weaponize Iran\u2019s nuclear program.\n <\/p>\n
\n The founder of the organization, known by its Persian acronym SPND, was Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a leading nuclear scientist widely believed to have been assassinated by Israel six years ago. The organization\u2019s current chairman, Jabal Amelian, was killed in the initial wave of Israeli-US strikes in late February, while other leading figures have been systematically targeted by Israel since last year.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cEvery link in the nuclear production chain is a target \u2013 from the knowledge base to the production floor. The goal is to cut off all the roots,\u201d an Israeli security source told CNN. \u201cFrom the people working in laboratories to the factories that produce components for those labs.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n When the United States and Israel launched a war on Iran last month, the Islamic Republic\u2019s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his top military and intelligence officials were killed in a targeted operation designed to eliminate the regime\u2019s leading figures.\n <\/p>\n
\n Israel appears to have taken the lead on assassinating even low-level figures linked to Iran\u2019s nuclear program while systematically degrading the knowledge centers that could prove useful in the future.\n <\/p>\n
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\n Israel\u2019s strategy expanded in June 2025. It killed the top figures in the Revolutionary Guards\u2019 aerospace force \u2013 the commanders responsible for Iran\u2019s missile capabilities, which could aid in developing a nuclear warhead \u2013 while also targeting more than a dozen of the country\u2019s top nuclear professors and scholars, including Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi, one of Iran\u2019s most notable physicists.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cIsrael is striking every stage of the production process \u2013 including iron and steel plants that are not directly part of the military industry but could eventually contribute to rebuilding the production process,\u201d the source said.\n <\/p>\n
\n It is also hitting specific departments at universities while also attempting to significantly degrade the complex supply chain needed to maintain Iran\u2019s nuclear program.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cIn terms of knowledge \u2013 scientists, libraries, archives, chemical labs, the people working in all these places – and also the ranks that could replace them\u201d are all targets, the source told CNN.\n <\/p>\n
\n Even as Iran insisted that its nuclear program was entirely peaceful, Western nations have long suspected it of using front companies to circumvent international monitoring and develop dual-use technologies that could be rapidly repurposed to weaponize the program if the decision were made.\n <\/p>\n
\n Nicole Grajewski, an assistant professor at the Center for International Studies at Sciences Po in Paris, noted that nuclear experts believe Iran had conducted diagnostic tests, nuclear effects modeling, and detonation simulations, all signs that Tehran was acquiring the knowledge needed to weaponize its program when desired.\n <\/p>\n
\n US intelligence assessments have said there is no evidence Iran was trying to weaponize its nuclear program, but experts say Iran used its status as a nuclear threshold state \u2013 one that retains the ability to build a bomb \u2013 as a source of leverage in talks with the West.\n <\/p>\n
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\n Iranian officials at the heavily sanctioned SPND had built a network<\/a> of subordinate organizations designed to develop expertise and acquire dual-use<\/a> technologies that the United States says are intended to gather the knowledge needed for nuclear weaponization.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cIran is the only country in the world without nuclear weapons that is producing uranium enriched to 60 percent and it continues to use front companies and procurement agents to obscure its efforts to acquire dual-use items from foreign suppliers,\u201d US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement announcing the sanctioning of SPND last year.\n <\/p>\n \n After Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal struck by the Obama administration in 2015, Tehran began installing advanced centrifuges to accelerate its uranium enrichment. It succeeded in amassing a significant stockpile of highly enriched uranium \u2013 enough to build a nuclear weapon.\n <\/p>\n \n More than 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium had been stockpiled in Iran, raising serious concerns among international agencies, which questioned why the Islamic Republic would need such a large quantity if its nuclear program was truly peaceful. The level of enrichment needed for nuclear power is under 4%, but Iran began enriching uranium as much as 60% after Trump pulled out of the nuclear deal in 2018.\n <\/p>\n \n When Israel and the United States struck Iran\u2019s heavily fortified nuclear facilities last year, the fate of the highly enriched uranium became increasingly unclear. The head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog, Rafael Grossi, told PBS in an interview published Friday that the material is believed to be in Isfahan and could possibly be moved.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThe nuclear sites that we obliterated\u2026 have been hit so hard that it would take months to get near the nuclear dust,\u201d Trump said in an address last week. In a Reuters interview on April 1, he added that the enriched material is \u201cso far underground, I don\u2019t care about that.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
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