Project Midan: Developing and Building an Underground Nuclear Test Site in Iran

Iran’s Amad Plan called for it to develop and build five nuclear weapons in the first part of the 2000s.¹ It also created an extensive program to construct an underground test site so that Iran would be prepared to test a nuclear explosive by the end of 2003.  A portion of the Nuclear Archives seized by Israel in early 2018 contains a variety of information on Iran’s development and implementation of plans for underground nuclear testing, some of which was known before to the IAEA.² These findings add more weight to the side of a figurative balance or scale that represents evidence of Iran’s violations of its commitments under the NPT.  Under Article II of the NPT, Iran is committed “not to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.”  Moreover, although Iran has not ratified the CTBT, it did sign the treaty in 1996.  Thus, it has an obligation to refrain, in good faith, from acts that would defeat the primary objective of the CTBT, namely the provision, “Each State Party undertakes not to carry out any nuclear weapon test explosion or any other nuclear explosion, and to prohibit and prevent any such nuclear explosion at any place under its jurisdiction or control.”³ Undertaking a multi-year project to build a nuclear test site hardly qualifies as fulfilling the spirit of that international obligation.

Based on available archive information dated to about 2002, Iran would not have met its planned, initial deadline to have the test site ready by the end of 2003.  Despite evidence that Iran had made significant progress on being able to test a nuclear explosive underground, the authors could not determine if actual construction of a deep shaft had started.  The project had conducted nuclear test site selection, identifying five potential test site locations, and had focused on developing approaches, including seismic and other methods, to measure the yield of an underground nuclear test.

The work on building a test site appears to have halted when the Amad Plan was downsized and reoriented in late 2003.  However, given the existence of a post-Amad nuclear weapons program, now determined through analysis of the archive and other information to have existed after 2003, it is logical to assume that Iran continued to maintain preparedness to test and work on developing yield prediction methods after 2003.  These efforts would be expected to fall in line with guidelines in an archive document that aimed to integrate and hide certain nuclear weapons activities in civilian programs at universities, and maintain separate secret military programs for other activities that could not be explained by contrived civil or non-nuclear military rationales.⁴

The information in the archives is far more extensive than that collected by the IAEA in its past investigations of Iran’s nuclear weapons programs.  The new information shows a much more elaborate Iranian effort in developing and building a nuclear test site than known previously.

As we have stated in the findings of our previous reports on the Iranian Nuclear Archives, the IAEA needs to inspect the sites and meet the experts and decision makers involved in Project Amad, including Project Midan.  A new issue is that the parties of the CTBT need to look into Project Midan and evaluate the implications for their own work and the scope of the Treaty.

Click Here for Full Report.

Download PDF.