Targeting Nuclear Scientists
Inside sources told the reporter Ronen Bergman that the assumption of the leaders of Israeli intelligence was that the uranium enrichment issue was now “more or less lost for us [Israel]” because Iran, liberated from the 2015 JCPOA restrictions, had advanced to a point where its enrichment activities could no longer be stopped.
What was left to be done was to focus on the weaponization group – the scientists who take the enriched uranium and fashion a bomb from it.
In late fall 2024, after the decimation of Hezbollah, the IDF began to work in earnest on the plan to attack Iran.
A central element of that plan was to seriously disrupt, if not altogether end, Iran’s march toward the bomb – and the key to that was the killing of the most important scientists in Iran’s nuclear weaponization group.
The ten Iranian nuclear scientists who were killed in their beds in the first minutes of Israel’s surprise attack, on the night of 13 June, were the leaders the weaponization group.
In subsequent days, four more weaponization group members were killed.
Scientists Killed
Below is a partial list of Iranian nuclear scientists killed by Israel since 2000.
The fourteen scientists killed on and since 13 June were killed by precise aerial munitions. The methods used before 13 June varied: shooting from motorbikes approaching the scientists’ cars in heavy traffic; attaching magnetic bombs to the driver’s side door while cars were idling at traffic lights; attaching bombs to cars, Mafia-like, which exploded when the ignition key was turned; shooting of scientists by remote-controlled drones; and AI-controlled machine gun mounted on a pickup truck (Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, 27 November 2020).
Israel also killed other, non-nuclear scientists who were helping countries develop advanced weapons. Examples:
Gerld Bull, a Canadian long-range artillery expert who, in the late 1980s, helped the Saddam Hussein regime develop a long-range gun. He received $25 million from Iraq to build the PC-2 machine, a gun which was 150 meters long, weighed 1,510 tons, with a bore of one meter (39 inches) which would allow the firing of multi-stage rocket-assisted shells with a range of over 5,000 mi (8,000 km) or to launch 1,200 lb (540 kg) satellites into orbit.
On 22 March 1990 he was killed by Mossd agents –he was shot five times in the head and back at point-blank range – as he tried to open the door to his Brussels, Belgium apartment.
Heinz Krug, the director of an Egyptian dummy company operating out of Munich which was involved in building missiles in Egypt, was killed by Mossad operatives in September 1962. He was kidnapped and kept in a safe house for a few days, and was subjected to harsh interrogation about Egypt’s program to use Germn scientists to build missiles to carry warheads filled with radioactive waste for attacks on Israel’s population center.
The killing of Krug was part of a broad Israeli campaign against about two dozen German scientists – many with a Nazi past – who moved to Egypt to develop Nasser’s “radiation bomb” project. The Mossad used letter bombs, shooting, and threats to persuade the Germn scientists to leave Egypt. The secret Israeli operation was discovered when Swiss police arrested two Mossd agents, on 2 March 1963, in Basel, Switzerland. They were charged with kidnapping and illegally detaining the daughter of Dr. Paul Goercke, a former Nazi scientist working in Egypt on the radiation-bomb. The operatives sent a message to Goercke that unless he left Egypt, his daughter would be killed (several attempt to kill Goercke had failed).
The revelations about the Mossad campaign moved Prime Minister Davod Ben Gurion to order an end to the campaign.
Nuclear Scientists Killed
Yahya El Mashad, 1980. Egyptian nuclear engineer, former head of Iraq’s nuclear program. Found dead in Paris hotel room on 14 June 1980 — throat cut, signs of bludgeoning. Weeks later, a prostitute linked to the case was also killed. Widely attributed to Mossad, aiming to delay Iraq’s nuclear program..
Assassinations in Iran (2007–2020)
Ardeshir Hosseinpour, nuclear physicist at uranium plant, Jan 15, 2007. Alleged “gas poisoning” in Isfahan lab.
Masoud Ali-Mohammadi, physics prof. with links to Iran’s nuclear program, Jan 12, 2010. Remote-controlled motorcycle bomb in Tehran.
Majid Shahriari, nuclear engineer at Atomic Energy Org, Nov 29, 2010. Magnetic car bomb
Fereidoon Abbasi‑Davani, key isotope separation expert, Nov 29, 2010. Simultaneous blast near car.
Darioush Rezaeinejad, linked to high-voltage switch design, Jul 23, 2011. Gunmen on motorcycle shooting in Tehran.
Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, supervisor at Natanz enrichment plant, Jan 11, 2012. Magnetic bomb affixed to car in Tehran.
Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, chief of Iran’s nuclear program, Nov 27, 2020. Remote-controlled, AI‑guided machine‑gun in Absard suburb.
Iranian Nuclear Scientists Killed on and Since 13 June 2025
(Note: the last three scientists on the list were killed in the days following 13 June)
Fereydoon Abbasi, former Vice President of Iran and Head of Atomic Energy Organization, expert in nuclear engineering
Seyyed Amir Hossein Faqhi, full professor at Shahid Beheshti University. Deputy of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran
Akbar Motabizadeh, nuclear engineer
Mohammad Mehdi Tehranch,president of the Islamic Azad University, expert in physics
Akbar Motalebi Zadeh, expert in chemical engineering
Saeed Barji, Expert in materials engineering
Amir Hassan Fakhahi, expert in physics
Abdolhamid Minoocher, head of the Faculty of Nuclear Engineering at Shahid Beheshti University, expert in reactor physics
Mansour Asgari, expert in physics
Ahmadreza Zolfaghari Daryani, distinguished professor of nuclear engineering at Shahid Beheshti University, expert in nuclear engineering
Ali Bakhouei Katirimi, expert in mechanics
Abdolhamid Minouchehr, nuclear physicist and nuclear engineer, head Nuclear Engineering at Shahid Beheshti University
Ahmad Reza Zolfaghari, Iranian professor of nuclear physics
Does the killing of nuclear scientists make a meaningful contribution to the efforts to thwart a country’s nuclear ambitions? There is no evidence one way or the other because the sample consists of only one case: Israel’s campaign against the Iranian program.
And that case, at least so far, shows that such killings may, at best, slow down but not seriously derail a country’s nuclear weapons program (this does not mean that these scientists, who were working on providing the ayatollahs with the means with which to destroy Israel, did not deserve their fate).
Iran began to work on its nuclear weapons program in the late 1980s, in the wake of the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war. Israel (and in some cases, the United States) used covert means – cyberattacks, sabotage, killing of scientists – against the backdrop of harsh economic sanctions to try and stop the Iranian program.
Nothing worked. With determination and discipline, Iran kept moving forward, concealing its weaponization activities from the IAEA (Iran is a member of the NPT).
The only time during which Iran not only stopped progressing toward the bomb, but significantly rolled its nuclear weapons program back, was during the 2015-2018 JCPOA period.
But in May 2018 Trump unilaterally withdrew from the nuclear deal, throwing the doors wide open for Iran to run through and accelerate, unhindered, its dash toward the bomb.
Will the Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, which was accompanied by the killing of the senior scientists of the weaponization group and capped by the United States dropping 30,000lb massive ordnance penetrator bombs (MOPs) on the enrichment facilities at Fodrow and Natanz, put an end to Iran’s nuclear weapons program?
My answer is “No.” Only a new JCPOA-like deal, or, better yet, a regime change, would achieve that.
Ben Frankel is the editor of the Homeland Security News Wire.
