Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel told the United Nations on Thursday that his intelligence agents had discovered a “secret atomic warehouse” in downtown Tehran, escalating a growing confrontation with Iran and setting up a direct challenge to its government to open the facility to inspectors and prove it is not in violation of the 2015 nuclear deal.
Mr. Netanyahu’s claim, made at the same podium at the General Assembly where in past years he argued vociferously against signing the nuclear accord with Iran, came with photographs and map coordinates of the facility. He described it as a warehouse only three miles from the one that Israeli agents broke into last January, making off with 50,000 pages of documents and computer discs full of atomic weapons, warhead designs and production plans.
“Today, I am disclosing for the first time that Iran has another secret facility in Tehran,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “A secret atomic warehouse for storing massive amounts of equipment and material from Iran’s secret nuclear weapons program.”
Mr. Netanyahu did not describe what kind “equipment and material” was contained in the warehouse. Some types of equipment, especially if it was dismantled or could be put to a variety of industrial uses, may be permissible under the terms of the accord.
Nonetheless, Mr. Netanyahu’s assertion poses a delicate political challenge for the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, whose inspectors frequently visit Iran’s declared nuclear facilities. The agency must now decide whether to demand access to the facility, based on the Israeli intelligence.
If it does not do so, perhaps declaring that the evidence is too vague, it may strengthen Mr. Netanyahu’s argument that the inspections have been far too lax, and focused only on known facilities. On the other hand, if the inspectors demand access to the warehouse, Iran may well resist, claiming that they are tools of Israel, Iran’s chief adversary.
During the speech Mr. Netanyahu held up a map showing what he said was the site of the facility, in the neighborhood of Turquzabad.
“Let me show you exactly what the secret atomic warehouse looks like,” he said, before showing a Google street view of a building. “Another innocent-looking compound.”