CIA Director claims Iran 'never resumed' nuclear weapons programme since 2004

Director of US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), William Burns on July 20, made explosive claims, stating that Iran never resumed its abandoned nuclear weapons program since 2004, contrary to the four years of claims levelled by officials in Washington. The spy agency claimed that the United States "does not have evidence" that Iran has been weaponizing its nuclear program. CIA “doesn’t see any evidence that Iran’s Supreme Leader [Ali Khamenei] has made a decision to move to weaponize nuclear program,” Burns said at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado.

"Our best intelligence judgment is that the Iranians have not resumed the weaponization effort that they had underway up until 2004 and then suspended, so that's something, obviously we at CIA and across the US intelligence community keep a very, very sharp focus on," CIA's Burns said at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado.

Natanz's advanced centrifuge assembly. Credit: Atomic Energy Organization of Iran via AP

Iranians 'not taking negotiation seriously'

The CIA director's statement comes at a time when Iran has been planning to restart the stalled dialogue in Vienna aimed at reviving the 2015 multilateral Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA accord which the former US President Donald Trump had pulled out of, unilaterally. "We are prepared to resume talks in the coming days. What is important for Iran is to fully receive the economic benefits of the 2015 accord," Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian had told the reporters in Tehran, adding that he had a "long but positive meeting" with EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell.

Some progress was already made last month in June as delegations from the United States, Europe and Tehran met in the Qatari capital of Doha. 

“We are prepared to immediately conclude and implement the deal we negotiated in Vienna for mutual return to full implementation of the JCPOA. But for that, Iran needs to decide to drop their additional demands that go beyond the JCPOA,” the a US spokesperson part of the delegation involved in the talks, had said.

International Atomic Energy Organization, IAEA, Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi, left, and Iran's Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian shake hands prior to their meeting in Tehran. Credit: Associated Press

CIA's Burns, although, noted that “Iranians have not been taking the negotiation seriously at this point, but we’ll see soon enough about how serious they are.” He had also separately made similar claims at the Wall Street Journal's annual CEO Council last December as US President Joe Biden's administration warned that Iran has been headed to a "breakout" point and that it would be capable of making a nuclear bomb within weeks.

Israeli military intelligence refuted these claims as Major General Tamir Hayman told Israel's Walla, "To the best of our knowledge, the directive has not changed and they are not heading toward a breakout. They are not heading toward a bomb right now: It may be in the distant future."

"There is an enriched amount [of uranium] in volumes that we have not seen before and it is disturbing," Hayman furthermore iterated. "At the same time, in all other aspects of the Iranian nuclear project, we see no progress - not in the weapons project, in the financial area, not in any other sector."

Earlier last week, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) warned that Iran has been installing "advanced centrifuges" to accelerate its production scale at the underground Fordo uranium-enrichment plant. The Islamic Republic completed the installation of 180 advanced centrifuges at the Natanz facility to produce uranium enriched to 3.5% earlier and as per IAEA, was now using IR-6 centrifuges with "modified subheaders" for uranium enrichment.

“We have more than 210 kilograms [463 pounds] of uranium enriched to 20 percent, and we’ve produced 25 kilos [55 pounds] at 60%, a level that no country apart from those with nuclear arms are able to produce,” Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) spokesman Behrouz Kamalvandi had said in a statement.