From Shyam Bhatia
London, June 24, 2026. My scepticism about official assessments of nuclear programmes, including Iran’s, goes back more than half a century.
In 1972, two years before India conducted its first nuclear test at Pokhran, I concluded that the country was approaching the nuclear threshold. The judgement was not based on secret intelligence. It was based on reporting, observation and time spent with the scientists who were building India’s nuclear future.
I spent years visiting laboratories, interviewing scientists, attending lectures and studying the institutions that made up India’s nuclear establishment. The resulting research became my 1977 book India’s Nuclear Bomb.
The experience taught me a lesson that has remained with me ever since.
If you want to understand a nuclear programme, you do not begin with satellites.
You begin with people.
You sit in lecture halls. You listen to scientists discuss their ambitions. You spend time with engineers. You learn which institutions are expanding, which laboratories are attracting talent and which projects enjoy political support. You try to understand the hopes, frustrations and aspirations of the people doing the work.
Nuclear programmes are built from the ground up.
That lesson accompanied me throughout later reporting assignments in the Middle East.
Over the years I made repeated visits to Egypt’s nuclear research centre at Inshas, home of the country’s pioneering research reactors. I later travelled repeatedly to Iran, including rare access to Isfahan, one of the principal centres of the Iranian nuclear effort. Through friendships with Iraqi nuclear scientists living in Tehran during the Saddam Hussein era, I gained unusual access to the region’s scientific community. I also met figures such as Reza Amrollahi, the long-serving head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation.
Some of these experiences found their way into my later book Nuclear Rivals in the Middle East. Much of their significance became apparent only later.
What struck me was not any single reactor, laboratory or scientist.
It was the depth of the ecosystem.
At Inshas I encountered scientists from across the region. In Tehran and Isfahan I discovered a community that viewed nuclear technology not as a short-term project but as a national mission stretching across generations.
One memory has remained with me. In Isfahan, conversations with scientists and researchers rarely focused on politics. They spoke instead about technology, national achievement, scientific progress and the future. What struck me was their confidence. They did not sound like people participating in a temporary government project. They sounded like people who believed they were helping shape the destiny of their country.
More than twenty years ago, I remember an Iranian engineer speaking with surprising confidence about how outsiders routinely overestimated the technical obstacles facing advanced military technologies. Whether his confidence was justified was almost beside the point. What stayed with me was the mindset: a conviction that Iranian scientists could master problems the West assumed would take far longer.
The late Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan understood this reality. His proliferation network demonstrated that scientific knowledge does not remain neatly confined within national borders. Expertise travels. Techniques spread. Researchers learn from one another. Knowledge migrates even when governments try to prevent it.
A.Q. Khan also understood the sensitivity of the subject. When I investigated aspects of his activities, the response was not always friendly. At one point, rather than engage with uncomfortable questions, he dismissed me as a “Hindu bastard”. The insult itself was less significant than what it revealed. Nuclear programmes thrive on secrecy and often react badly to scrutiny.
There is another lesson I learned while reporting on nuclear issues.
They can be dangerous subjects to investigate.
Governments do not spend decades building strategic capabilities only to welcome outside inquiry. Journalists who ventured too close to sensitive facilities, procurement networks or key personalities often encountered intimidation, pressure or worse. The world of nuclear proliferation is a world in which information is guarded fiercely because the stakes are extraordinarily high.
This is why outsiders often misunderstand nuclear programmes.
They focus on facilities.
They should be focusing on people.
As Sun Tzu observed: “Know your enemy and know yourself.”
Western governments have spent decades trying to understand Iran’s facilities.
I am less certain they have spent enough time trying to understand Iran’s scientists.
For decades, analysts have concentrated on prominent individuals such as Reza Amrollahi, Ali Akbar Salehi and Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. Important men, certainly.
But history suggests that successful nuclear programmes depend far less on individuals than on institutions.
The obvious comparison is the Manhattan Project.
As J. Robert Oppenheimer later remarked:
“The optimists have one thing in common: they are wrong.”
The Manhattan Project succeeded not because of one brilliant scientist but because it mobilised an enormous ecosystem of physicists, engineers, chemists, metallurgists, mathematicians, military planners and industrial managers.
The Soviet programme required the same mobilisation.
China’s programme required it.
India’s programme required it.
Iran’s programme is no different.
The Manhattan Project also left a profound moral legacy.
Oppenheimer later reflected:
“In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humour, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin.”
He understood that nuclear weapons were not merely another technological achievement. They represented a transformation in humanity’s relationship with power itself.
After witnessing the first atomic explosion, Oppenheimer famously recalled a passage from the Bhagavad Gita:
“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” He was not celebrating scientific triumph. He was acknowledging the terrible burden that accompanies it.
More than eighty years later, the world is still grappling with the implications of that moment.
This reality has profound implications.
Kill a scientist and his students remain.
Destroy a laboratory and another institution absorbs the work.
Impose sanctions and domestic substitutes gradually emerge.
Progress may slow.
It rarely stops.
As Albert Einstein famously warned:
“The splitting of the atom has changed everything except our way of thinking.”
Those observations remain painfully relevant today.
Too many discussions of Iran still assume that technology can be separated from national ambition. My experience suggests otherwise.
The Iran I encountered was not a technological backwater. Nor was it an isolated state cut off from the wider world. It possessed capable universities, highly trained engineers and a large reservoir of scientific talent.
Indeed, one of the most persistent Western mistakes has been to underestimate Iranian competence.
Iran is not Venezuela.
It is a country with a long scientific tradition, a sophisticated technical elite and a political leadership capable of pursuing strategic objectives over decades rather than election cycles.
Nor did Iran develop in scientific isolation. Like every major nuclear programme before it, Iran benefited from international exchanges of knowledge, technology and expertise. Russia and China were important parts of that wider environment, just as A.Q. Khan’s network accelerated Iran’s mastery of centrifuge technology.
History suggests that nations rarely spend half a century acquiring scientific expertise, building institutions and enduring sanctions merely to remain permanently on the threshold.
That is why I remain unconvinced by claims that Iran’s nuclear ambitions have been permanently defeated.
Facilities can be damaged.
Equipment can be destroyed.
Scientists can be assassinated.
Knowledge survives.
Institutions survive.
Ambition survives.
As Winston Churchill observed:
“The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.”
The most important part of any nuclear programme is not the machinery.
It is the people who know how to rebuild it.
Indeed, my own assessment is that recent military action may have produced the opposite of its intended effect.
Rather than weakening Iran’s determination, it may have accelerated it.
Policymakers may disagree. They are entitled to do so.
But I am reminded of a lesson learned long ago while researching India’s programme before Pokhran.
By the time outsiders begin debating whether a country possesses the capability to do something, the people who built that capability are often already thinking about what comes next.
The central question today is no longer whether Iran possesses the scientific expertise, industrial base and institutional depth required to sustain a nuclear option.
In my judgement, it does. And that judgement owes less to ideology than to experience.
It reflects more than fifty years spent reporting on nuclear programmes, meeting the scientists who built them and watching institutions evolve over generations.
The question is whether Tehran has already reached a conclusion that much of the outside world is still debating.
Perhaps I am wrong.
But after spending more than half a century studying nuclear programmes from India and Egypt to Iraq and Iran, I find myself recalling the same lesson over and over again.
The most important developments are rarely visible from space.
They occur in laboratories, universities, lecture hall and in the minds of scientists.
History teaches a sobering lesson. By the time governments finally recognise how far a nuclear programme has advanced, they are usually measuring yesterday’s achievement rather than today’s reality.
My suspicion is that Iran has already reached that point.
The world may not discover how far it has travelled until Tehran itself decides the time has come.
