As rain poured on the northern provinces of Iran in late March, a somber crowd snaked through the mountain ranges of Asara carrying the coffin of Mohammad Reza Kia. The city of just a few thousand people was draped in banners now hailing the young nuclear scientist as a “martyr of the imposed war.”

Piecing together information on Kia and the circumstance of his obscure death is difficult, but two weeks ago his mother said in a short clip that he was killed in an attack.

Beyond 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 Amirkabir University of Technology from 2010 to 2017.

Kia’s killing, and those of countless Iranian scientists in all parts of the country, demonstrates the lengths to which Israel and the United States are willing to go to ensure that Tehran’s ability to weaponize its nuclear program is significantly curtailed after the war ends.

Last week, US President Donald Trump said the US was on track to achieve its objectives in the Iran war – including preventing Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon – and suggested the conflict could last two to three more weeks. But Iran still retains hundreds of kilograms of the core component needed to build a bomb, as well as decades of expertise. As the US and Israel look to wind down the war, they are determined to target that expertise in a bid to cripple the nuclear program.

Hit list

Over the past decades, Iran built an extensive knowledge ecosystem around its nuclear program - university departments, specialized machinery, and a robust system that included domestic uranium mining, processing, enrichment using advanced centrifuges, and storage in stockpiles. Experts say that even if Iran’s program is peaceful, Tehran has the architecture to weaponize it should it choose to.

An Israeli security source said all of those are on its hit list.

A few days after Kia’s funeral, another strike hit a building 300 miles away, killing nine people - including Ali Fouladvand, a scientist in charge of research at a leading organization long accused by Western powers and Israel of serving as a front for acquiring the knowledge needed to weaponize Iran’s nuclear program.

The founder of the organization, known by its Persian acronym SPND, was Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a leading nuclear scientist widely believed to have been assassinated by Israel six years ago. The organization’s current chairman, Jabal Amelian, was killed in the initial wave of Israeli-US strikes in late February, while other leading figures have been systematically targeted by Israel since last year.

“Every link in the nuclear production chain is a target – from the knowledge base to the production floor. The goal is to cut off all the roots,” an Israeli security source told CNN. “From the people working in laboratories to the factories that produce components for those labs.”

When the United States and Israel launched a war on Iran last month, the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his top military and intelligence officials were killed in a targeted operation designed to eliminate the regime’s leading figures.

Israel appears to have taken the lead on assassinating even low-level figures linked to Iran’s nuclear program while systematically degrading the knowledge centers that could prove useful in the future.

Israel’s strategy expanded in June 2025. It killed the top figures in the Revolutionary Guards’ aerospace force – the commanders responsible for Iran’s missile capabilities, which could aid in developing a nuclear warhead – while also targeting more than a dozen of the country’s top nuclear professors and scholars, including Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi, one of Iran’s most notable physicists.

“Israel is striking every stage of the production process – including iron and steel plants that are not directly part of the military industry but could eventually contribute to rebuilding the production process,” the source said.

It is also hitting specific departments at universities while also attempting to significantly degrade the complex supply chain needed to maintain Iran’s nuclear program.

“In terms of knowledge – scientists, libraries, archives, chemical labs, the people working in all these places - and also the ranks that could replace them” are all targets, the source told CNN.

Potential weaponization

Even as Iran insisted that its nuclear program was entirely peaceful, Western nations have long suspected it of using front companies to circumvent international monitoring and develop dual-use technologies that could be rapidly repurposed to weaponize the program if the decision were made.

Nicole Grajewski, an assistant professor at the Center for International Studies at Sciences Po in Paris, noted that nuclear experts believe Iran had conducted diagnostic tests, nuclear effects modeling, and detonation simulations, all signs that Tehran was acquiring the knowledge needed to weaponize its program when desired.

US intelligence assessments have said there is no evidence Iran was trying to weaponize its nuclear program, but experts say Iran used its status as a nuclear threshold state – one that retains the ability to build a bomb – as a source of leverage in talks with the West.

Iranian officials at the heavily sanctioned SPND had built a network of subordinate organizations designed to develop expertise and acquire dual-use technologies that the United States says are intended to gather the knowledge needed for nuclear weaponization.

“Iran is the only country in the world without nuclear weapons that is producing uranium enriched to 60 percent and it continues to use front companies and procurement agents to obscure its efforts to acquire dual-use items from foreign suppliers,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement announcing the sanctioning of SPND last year.

A key component for a nuclear bomb

After Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal struck by the Obama administration in 2015, Tehran began installing advanced centrifuges to accelerate its uranium enrichment. It succeeded in amassing a significant stockpile of highly enriched uranium – enough to build a nuclear weapon.

More than 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium had been stockpiled in Iran, raising serious concerns among international agencies, which questioned why the Islamic Republic would need such a large quantity if its nuclear program was truly peaceful. The level of enrichment needed for nuclear power is under 4%, but Iran began enriching uranium as much as 60% after Trump pulled out of the nuclear deal in 2018.

When Israel and the United States struck Iran’s heavily fortified nuclear facilities last year, the fate of the highly enriched uranium became increasingly unclear. The head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog, Rafael Grossi, told PBS in an interview published Friday that the material is believed to be in Isfahan and could possibly be moved.

“The nuclear sites that we obliterated… have been hit so hard that it would take months to get near the nuclear dust,” Trump said in an address last week. In a Reuters interview on April 1, he added that the enriched material is “so far underground, I don’t care about that.”

Before that comment, the Wall Street Journal cited US officials as saying Trump was weighing a military operation to extract the uranium, though no decision had been made.

Iran has been intentionally vague regarding its access to the material, but it offered to dilute it during negotiations with the US before the war began in February.

“That was a big offer, a big concession in order to prove that Iran has never wanted nuclear weapons and would never want them,” Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told CBS last month.

Despite Israel targeting key facilities to degrade Iran’s nuclear program, Grajewski said that Iran’s uranium stockpiles and years of accumulated technical knowledge would suffice to build a simplified, gun-type bomb should the country decide to shift its posture.

“Iran can still create a nuclear weapon, it’s just a matter of political will,” Grajewski said. “If the war stops, Iran could theoretically embark on a rapid effort for weaponization within one to two years.” (CNN)

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