Photo Gallery Setbacks for Iran's Nuclear Program
A general view of Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant: Iran's nuclear efforts are stagnating in key areas. Tehran has not been able to significantly increase the number of its functioning centrifuges or the amount of enriched uranium it has. The Stuxnet computer virus and a cyber war against Iran may well be the causes of these setbacks.
In January, in what was dubbed a "confidence-building measure," Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad invited selected ambassadors accredited with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to visit the facility. But the event, intended as a PR coup, proved to be an embarrassment for the regime. The representatives of Germany, France and Great Britain, who are particularly suspicious of Iran's nuclear ambitions, were not invited -- nor, for that matter, was anyone from the United States.
United Nations experts and foreign intelligence agencies suspect Iranian scientists like Jalilian could be working on a nuclear weapon. Several of his colleagues have already been assassinated in the past. In January 2010, a remotely detonated bomb killed nuclear physicist Massoud Ali Mohammadi. This television image grab shows authorities removing Mohammadi's body. A few months later, the nuclear scientists Majid Shahriari and Fereidoun Abbasi Davani were targeted in a double attack carried out almost simultaneously.
In all likelihood, Israeli hit squads carried out the attacks. Officially, all three victims were professors. Mohammadi taught at the University of Tehran. Shahriari, an expert on neutron transport, taught at Shahid Beheshti University. Abbasi Davani, the only survivor of the attacks, was expert in isotope separation. Although Jalilian is not on a UN list of Iranian scientists barred from traveling abroad, like Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a professor and Revolutionary Guard who is suspected of being the chief organizer of a weapons program, he could be on a secret death list maintained by the Israeli Mossad.
