After more than a year of stonewalling, the United Nations nuclear agency announces that the investigation into Tehran’s nuclear program comes to “a dead end.” Up ahead is a ‘vote on a resolution criticizing Iran for failing to disclose a uranium enrichment plant.’

Mohamed ElBaradei is said to be ‘disappointed in Iran’s rejection of a UN-brokered deal to send most of its nuclear fuel for processing abroad, which the US and European countries hoped would at least delay Tehran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons—an effort that has heightened tensions with Israel.’ ElBaradei is, in effect, acknowledging that ‘his behind-the-scenes effort to broker a deal had collapsed.’ On the other hand, ElBaradei is also ‘frustrated with the US for refusing to share its intelligence on Iran’s nuclear program.’

The UN’s nuclear agency has been working on the suspicions that Iran has worked on nuclear weapons designs through ‘queries about drawings, computer simulations and other evidence of work that could not plausibly be involved in civilian nuclear power programs.’

The evidence is undeniable: ‘documents obtained by the agency — some provided by Western intelligence services, which say they were slipped out of Iran by scientists — that appear to show that Iran worked on how to shape uranium for nuclear cores, on conventional explosions needed to detonate a nuclear chain reaction, and on simulations of a warhead detonation at about 2,000 feet, about the height at which the bomb was set off over Hiroshima in 1945.’

Iran has bluntly claimed the evidence as ‘fabrications.’ Documentary evidence, though, concretely prove that Iran conducted some level of research on weapons, that a Russian scientist had helped Iran conduct complex experiments on how to detonate a nuclear weapon, that ‘Iran had obtained from the global black market a document “related to the fabrication of nuclear weapon components,” and that there is ‘an Iranian laptop computer that held studies for crucial features of a nuclear warhead, including a telltale sphere of detonators to trigger an atomic explosion. The documents specified a blast roughly 2,000 feet above a target — considered high enough for a nuclear detonation to maximize the damage below.’

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Via The New York Times