Speaking before a U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on March 25, 2025, U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard stated in her opening remarks that "The IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003."
Gabbard’s denial of an active and accelerating Iranian regime nuclear weapons program echoes a similar startling absence of significant threat assessment of Iran’s nuclear weapons program in the March 2025 Intelligence Community Annual Threat Assessment, where the barest of mentions is made about it, "Tehran will try to leverage its robust missile capability and expanded nuclear program, and its diplomatic outreach to regional states and U.S. rivals to bolster its regional influence and ensure regime survival."
What makes the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC)’s studied avoidance of any mention of Iran’s decades-long pursuit of deliverable nuclear weapons and recent acceleration of that program all the more startling is the massive United States (U.S.) build-up of air forces on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia and throughout the Mideast region.
According to Military Watch Magazine, in late March 2025, the U.S. Air Force deployed "at least seven B-2 strategic bombers to the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, with satellite imagery showing that at least three C-17 cargo planes and 10 aerial refueling tankers" arrived there from March 23-25 2025.
It’s worth noting that the B-2 bomber is one of the only aircraft capable of carrying the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) bombs, which can penetrate the most hardened, deeply-buried sites.
If they are "layered" in successive precision bombing attacks, they can reach fortified bunkers far underground.
Although throughout late March 2025, the U.S. has been carrying out an ongoing series of heavy strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen, these air assets on Diego Garcia are probably not intended for Yemen.
Director Gabbard and the U.S. IC must be aware of both recent reporting on Iran’s nuclear weapons program and that regime’s decades-long efforts to achieve a deliverable nuclear weapons capability.
In February 2025, for example, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) issued its latest quarterly report, which highlighted yet again the regime’s multiple violations of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and the Non-Proliferation Treaty Safeguards Agreement with the Islamic Republic of Iran (NPT).
On March 3, 2025, the Institute for Science and International Security (the "good ISIS") published its own assessment of those two reports, concluding that "Iran’s nuclear weaponization program is steadily making progress."
Both the IAEA and ISIS cite Iran’s refusal to resolve what are referred to as "possible military dimensions," that is, the regime’s work on building a deliverable nuclear bomb.
Other recent reporting comes from the Iranian resistance group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), which first blew the lid off Iran’s nuclear weapons program in 2002, with satellite photos of the Natanz uranium enrichment site and other sites later confirmed by the IAEA.
In December 2024, at a press conference at its Washington, D.C. office, the NCRI provided an update on the Iranian regime’s renewed focus and accelerated development of Exploding Bridge Wire Nuclear Detonators (EBWs), a key element in the development of an implosion type nuclear weapon.
Writing about this in a December 26, 2024 article for this writer's Newsmax.com blog site, I noted that the IAEA had focused the regime’s work on EBWs as far back as in its November 2011 Quarterly Report.
Then, at a Jan. 31, 2025 press briefing, Deputy Director of the NCRI, Alireza Jafarzadeh provided "alarming new information about Iran’s race to fit nuclear warheads to its arsenal of solid-fuel Ghaem-100 ballistic missiles," which I again wrote about at this writer's blog site on Newsmax.
What was especially alarming about this new information is that the work Tehran is conducting to adapt its nuclear warheads to the nosecones of its missiles is being done at two special sites outside of Tehran that are specifically ballistic missile sites.
The two sites, at Shahrud and Semnan, are under the overall authority of Iran’s Organization for Advanced Defence Research (SPND in the Farsi acronym), itself a unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).
These are alarming and accelerating developments in Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
What can and must be done about it (apart from whatever is developing at Diego Garcia) is the subject of a comprehensive new report from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), "Iran’s Nuclear Disarmament."
This 36-page report begins with an acknowledgement that Iran’s "ambitions to develop a nuclear arsenal represent a profound threat to regional and global security."
It also notes that discussions about negotiations with the Iran may only play into the Tehran regime’s ploy to stall for time while completing its nuclear weapons program.
The paper then lays out a "road map" and "call to action" that "outline the steps necessary to secure not just a temporary reprieve but a lasting solution that ensures that one of the world’s most dangerous regimes never acquires the world’s most dangerous weapon."
But as President Donald Trump told Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business in early March 2025, "We’re down to final strokes with Iran. . . we’re down to the final moments. Final moments. Can’t let them have a nuclear weapon…We have a situation with Iran that something’s going to happen very soon. . . "
We can only hope that time doesn’t run out before steps are taken to ensure the Iranian regime never achieves its nuclear weapons ambitions.
Clare M. Lopez is the Founder/President of Lopez Liberty LLC. Read More Clare M. Lopez — Here.
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