In late March, as rain poured down on Iran’s northern provinces, a somber crowd snaked through the mountains of Asara carrying the coffin of Mohammad Reza Kia. Banners in the town of just a few thousand people hailed the young nuclear scientist as a “martyr of an imposed war.”
It’s difficult to piece together information about Kia and the unclear circumstances of his death, but two weeks ago his mother said in a short video that Kia died in an attack.
Other than a few research papers attributed to him and an inactive social media page bearing his name, the only information available is that he was a doctoral candidate in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at the Amicaville Institute of Technology from 2010 to 2017.
The Kia killings, and the killings of countless Iranian scientists across the country, demonstrate the lengths Israel and the United States are willing to go to to significantly curb Iran’s ability to weaponize its nuclear program after the war ends.
Last week, US President Donald Trump said the US was on track to achieve its goals in the Iran war, including stopping Iran from developing nuclear weapons, and suggested the conflict could last two to three more weeks. But Iran still has hundreds of kilograms of nuclear components and decades of expertise needed to build a bomb. The United States and Israel are seeking to reduce the war and are determined to target their expertise to cripple their nuclear programs.
Over the past few decades, Iran has built an extensive knowledge ecosystem around its nuclear program. It is a robust system that includes university departments, specialized machinery, domestic uranium mining, processing, enrichment using advanced centrifuges, and storage of stockpiles. Experts say that even if Iran’s plans are peaceful, the Iranian government has the structures in place to weaponize them if it so chooses.
Israeli security officials said they were all on the target list.
Days after Kia’s funeral, another airstrike struck a building 300 miles away, killing nine people. Among them was scientist Ali Hooradvand, head of research at a key organization long accused by the West and Israel of being a front for acquiring the knowledge needed to weaponize Iran’s nuclear program.
The organization’s founder, known by its Persian acronym SPND, was Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a leading nuclear scientist who is widely believed to have been assassinated by Israel six years ago. The organization’s current president, Jabal Amerian, was killed in the first wave of attacks by Israel and the United States in late February, but other key figures have also been systematically targeted by Israel since last year.
“Every link in the nuclear production chain will be targeted, from the knowledge base to the production site. The goal is to cut off all the roots,” an Israeli security source told CNN. “From the people who work in the lab to the factories that produce components for that lab.”
When the United States and Israel launched a war against Iran last month, the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei and senior military and intelligence officials were killed in a targeted operation aimed at eliminating the regime’s leaders.
Israel appears to be taking the lead in assassinating even low-level figures involved in Iran’s nuclear program while systematically undermining knowledge centers that may prove useful in the future.
Israel’s strategy expanded in June 2025. It killed the leaders of the Revolutionary Guard’s Aerospace Forces, the commanders in charge of Iran’s missile capabilities that could help develop nuclear warheads, and also targeted more than a dozen of the country’s top nuclear professors and academics, including Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi, one of Iran’s most prominent physicists.
“Israel is attacking all stages of the production process, including steel factories that are not directly involved in the military industry, but could ultimately help rebuild the production process,” the official said.
It also seeks to attack specific university departments while significantly undermining the complex supply chain needed to sustain Iran’s nuclear program.
“In terms of knowledge, scientists, libraries, archives, chemical laboratories, people who work in all these places, and the ranks that could replace them, are all targeted as well,” the source told CNN.
Despite Iran’s insistence that its nuclear program is entirely peaceful, Western countries have long suspected that Iran is using front companies to circumvent international oversight and develop dual-use technology that could be quickly repurposed to weaponize the program if a decision were made.
Nuclear experts say Iran has been conducting diagnostic experiments, nuclear effects modeling and explosion simulations, all of which they believe are signs that Iran is acquiring the knowledge it needs to weaponize its program if it wishes, said Nicole Grajewski, an assistant professor at the International Research Center of the Polytechnic Institute in Paris.
Although U.S. intelligence assessments say there is no evidence that Iran was seeking to weaponize its nuclear program, experts say Iran used its status as a marginal nuclear power (a country with bomb-making capabilities) as leverage in talks with the West.
Iranian officials at the heavily sanctioned SPND have built a network of subordinate organizations to develop expertise and acquire dual-use technology, which the United States says is aimed at gathering the knowledge needed to develop nuclear weapons.
“Iran, the only country in the world without nuclear weapons that produces 60% enriched uranium, continues to use front companies and procurement agencies to hide its efforts to obtain dual-use items from foreign suppliers,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement announcing sanctions against SPND last year.
After President Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal signed by the Obama administration in 2015, the Iranian government began installing state-of-the-art centrifuges to accelerate uranium enrichment. They succeeded in accumulating large amounts of highly enriched uranium, enough to make nuclear weapons.
Iran has a stockpile of more than 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium, raising serious concerns among international organizations and questioning why the Islamic Republic needs so much uranium if its nuclear program is truly peaceful. The enrichment required for nuclear power generation is less than 4%, but after President Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal in 2018, Iran began enriching uranium to up to 60%.
The fate of highly enriched uranium became increasingly uncertain last year when Israel and the United States attacked Iran’s highly fortified nuclear facilities. The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog, Rafael Grossi, told PBS in an interview published Friday that the material is believed to be in Isfahan and could be moved.
“The nuclear facilities that we destroyed…were hit so hard that it would take months for them to even approach nuclear dust,” Trump said in a speech last week. In an April 1 interview with Reuters, he added that the concentrated material is “quite underground, so I don’t care about that.”
The comments came after the Wall Street Journal quoted U.S. officials as saying that President Trump was considering military operations to extract uranium, although no decisions had been made.
Iran had been deliberately vague about its access to the material, but offered to dilute it during negotiations with the United States before the war began in February.
“This was a big offer, a big concession to prove that Iran didn’t want nuclear weapons and never will,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Aragushi told CBS last month.
Even though Israel is targeting key facilities to undermine Iran’s nuclear program, Grajewski said Iran’s uranium stockpile and years of technological knowledge would be enough to build an improvised gun-shaped bomb if the country decided to change its stance.
“Iran can still build nuclear weapons. It’s a matter of political will,” Grajewski said. “If the war stops, Iran could theoretically move toward rapid weaponization within a year or two.”
