Did Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu just drop the most impressively timed intelligence scoop of the decade? The Israeli officials who hyped the event to journalists beforehand seemed to think so. On Monday afternoon, or 8 p.m. Israel time, the prime minister stood before a camera and delivered a low-budget PowerPoint presentation featuring photos and slides in Farsi. Israeli intelligence, he said, had uncovered evidence that Iran was working on “Project Amad,” a secret plan to develop and test nuclear weapons, in 2015 at the time of the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

“The Iran nuclear deal is based on lies!” Netanyahu declared in English. “One-hundred-thousand files right here prove that they lied.” And then he appealed to Trump, who has said he will decide on whether to stay or leave the deal by May 12. “I’m sure you’ll do the right thing: The right thing for the United States, the right thing for Israel, and the right thing for the peace of the world.”

Heady brew. But is this new information the deal-breaker Netanyahu presented it as being? I asked James Acton, the co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace, for his perspective on the striking twenty minutes of television.



How much of the information Netanyahu just presented was new?

Netanyahu presumably only presented a small fraction of what he has: We don’t know how much new information Israelis have in their hands. That said, what he presented seemed largely consistent with what the International Atomic Energy Agency had previously reported. In particular, in 2011 it published this long report on Iranian so-called possible military dimensions, and it talked about Project Amad there. Having not had the chance to reread that report and go through Netanyahu’s claims one by one, what I would say in general terms is that everything that he said appeared to be broadly consistent with what the IAEA had previously reported.