QUICK TAKES // By Ben FrankelTargeting Nuclear Scientists
The killing of Iranian nuclear scientists has been an integral part of Israel’s campaign, stretching back more than two decades, to disrupt and derail Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The 14 Iranian scientists killed on and since 13 June were all leading members of the Iran’s nuclear weaponization group.
“What’s past is prologue”: History provides the context for understanding the present. Events in the past have set the stage for current circumstances.
This applies to the Israel-Iran war.
To understand one important aspect of Israel’s surprise attack on Iran, we need to go back to 2018, to a decision that President Donld Trump, then in his first term, made that year.
The killing of Iranian nuclear scientists has been an integral part of Israel’s campaign, stretching back more than two decades, to disrupt and derail Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
This campaign became even more urgent – and more focused — after President Donald Trump’s impetuous May 2018 decision to withdraw the United States unilaterally from the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA).
JCPOA not only imposed severe restrictions on Iran’s nuclear activity, and imposed on it the most intrusive nuclear inspection regime of the nuclear age: it also rolled back the progress Iran had made toward the bomb, and extended Iran’s breakout time from a about two months to about eighteen months (see Ben Frankel, “Fiasco: How Trump’s 2018 Decision Facilitated Iran’s Nuclear-Weapons Program,” HSNW, 28 December 2023).
Israel’s 13 June 2025 surprise attack on Iran – or, more precisely, the contours of the nuclear aspects of that attack – were the direct result of the Trump’s ill-conceived May 2018 decision.
The information on Iranian nuclear scientists has been collected by what came to be called the “Decapitation Forum” of AMAN, the intelligence branch of the Israel Defense Force (IDF). The Forum relies on both technical means and humint to collect detailed information on hundreds of scientists, engineers, and technical experts who work in Iran’s nuclear weapons program, preparing a detailed dossier on each of them.
When a decision is made to kill one of these Iranian scientists, the Forum provides the information it had gathered on that individuals to the IDF’s operation branch.
In the years following Trump’s 2018 decision, the focus of the Forum shifted from scientists working in the enrichment part of the weapons program to scientists who were part of the weaponization group.
