Ex-top IAEA official warns of clandestine Iranian nuke sites

"Iran may be hiding as many as five underground clandestine nuclear sites from the IAEA, former deputy director-general for Safeguards at the International Atomic Energy Agency Olli Heinonen has told The Jerusalem Post.

Heinonen, one of the world's leading nuclear experts, noted that it is known that some time ago Iran was considering 10 underground locations for new nuclear facilities, and that it had performed a more in-depth review of five of the locations.

'I don't think they have told the IAEA where those five places are... how ready are' the five sites, he said following a conference in Tel Aviv hosted by the Israel Intelligence and Heritage Commemoration Center.

All of these observations were part of a comprehensive and rare insider discussion by Heinonen about exactly how Iran could break out to a nuclear weapon, from a technical perspective...

Part of what worries Heinonen is that 'no one is investigating what is the real status of [Iran's] missile delivery systems. There is no monitoring... it is not part of the JCPOA... that it left out the missile part was unfortunate. Our knowledge is very limited and only based on human intelligence and maybe some signal intelligence,' such that guesses about how long it will take Iran to properly fire a ballistic missile with a nuclear warhead (instead of a conventional one) range wildly.

His concern was that it could be as short as six to 12 months, in which case Tehran could complete those preparations at the same time that it finished enriching enough uranium for a bomb..."