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IAEA's 'Soviet Nuclear Scientist' Never Worked on Weapons
WASHINGTON - The report of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) published by a Washington think tank Tuesday repeated the sensational claim previously reported by news media all over the world that a former Soviet nuclear weapons scientist had helped Iran construct a detonation system that could be used for a nuclear weapon.
The foreign expert, who is not named in the IAEA report but was identified in news reports as Vyacheslav Danilenko, is not a nuclear weapons scientist but one of the top specialists in the world in the production of nanodiamonds by explosives. ((AFP Photo/Joe Klamar) ) But it turns out that the foreign expert, who is not named in the IAEA report but was identified in news reports as Vyacheslav Danilenko, is not a nuclear weapons scientist but one of the top specialists in the world in the production of nanodiamonds by explosives.
In fact, Danilenko, a Ukrainian, has worked solely on nanodiamonds from the beginning of his research career and is considered one of the pioneers in the development of nanodiamond technology, as published scientific papers confirm.
It now appears that the IAEA and David Albright, the director of the International Institute for Science and Security in Washington, who was the source of the news reports about Danilenko, never bothered to check the accuracy of the original claim by an unnamed "Member State" on which the IAEA based its assertion about his nuclear weapons background.
Albright gave a "private briefing" for "intelligence professionals" last week, in which he named Danilenko as the foreign expert who had been contracted by Iran's Physics Research Centre in the mid-1990s and identified him as a "former Soviet nuclear scientist", according to a story by Joby Warrick of the Washington Post on Nov. 5.
The Danilenko story then went worldwide.
The IAEA report says the agency has "strong indications" that Iran's development of a "high explosions initiation system", which it has described as an "implosion system" for a nuclear weapon, was "assisted by the work of a foreign expert who was not only knowledgeable on these technologies, but who, a Member State has informed the Agency, worked for much of his career in the nuclear weapon program of the country of his origin."
The report offers no other evidence of Danilenko's involvement in the development of an initiation system.
The member state obviously learned that Danilenko had worked during the Soviet period at the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Technical Physics in Snezhinsk, Russia, which was well known for its work on development of nuclear warheads and simply assumed that he had been involved in that work.
However, further research would have revealed that Danilenko worked from the beginning of his career in a part of the Institute that specialised in the synthesis of diamonds. Danilenko wrote in an account of the early work in the field published in 2006 that he was among the scientists in the "gas dynamics group" at the Institute who were "the first to start studies on diamond synthesis in 1960".
Danilenko's recollections of the early period of his career are in a chapter of the book, "Ultrananocrystalline Diamond: Synthesis, Properties and Applications" edited by Olga A. Shenderova and Dieter M. Gruen, published in 2006.
Another chapter in the book covering the history of Russian patents related to nanodiamonds documents the fact that Danilenko's centre at the Institute developed key processes as early as 1963-66 that were later used at major "detonaton nanodiamond" production centres.
Danilenko left the Institute in 1989 and joined the Institute of Materials Science Problems in Ukraine, according to the authors of that chapter.
Danilenko's major accomplishment, according to the authors, has been the development of a large-scale technology for producing ultradispersed diamonds, a particular application of nanodiamonds. The technology, which was later implemented by the "ALIT" company in Zhitomir, Ukraine, is based on an explosion chamber 100 sq metres in volume, which Danilenko designed.
Beginning in 1993, Danilenko was a principal in a company called "Nanogroup" which was established initially in the Ukraine but is now based in Prague. The company's website boasts that it has "the strongest team of scientists" which had been involved in the "introduction of nanodiamonds in 1960 and the first commercial applications of nanodiamonds in 2000".
The declared aim of the company is to supply worldwide demand for nanodiamonds.
Iran has an aggressive programme to develop its nanotechnology sector, and it includes as one major focus nanodiamonds, as blogger Moon of Alabama has pointed out. That blog was the first source to call attention to Danilenko's nanodiamond background.
Danilenko clearly explained that the purpose of his work in Iran was to help the development of a nanodiamond industry in the country.
The report states that the "foreign expert" was in Iran from 1996 to about 2002, "ostensibly to assist in the development of a facility and techniques for making ultra dispersed diamonds (UDDs) or nanodiamonds…" That wording suggests that nanodiamonds were merely a cover for his real purpose in Iran.
The report says the expert "also lectured on explosive physics and its applications", without providing any further detail about what applications were involved.
The fact that the IAEA and Albright were made aware of Danilenko's nanodiamond work in Iran before embracing the "former Soviet nuclear weapons specialist" story makes their failure to make any independent inquiry into his background even more revealing.
The tale of a Russian nuclear weapons scientist helping construct an "implosion system" for a nuclear weapon is the most recent iteration of a theme that the IAEA introduced in its May 2008 report, which mentioned a five-page document describing experimentation with a "complex multipoint initiation system to detonate a substantial amount of high explosives in hemispherical geometry" and to monitor the detonation.
Iran acknowledged using "exploding bridge wire" detonators such as those mentioned in that document for conventional military and civilian applications. But it denounced the document, along with the others in the "alleged studies" collection purporting to be from an Iranian nuclear weapons research programme, as fakes.
Careful examination of the "alleged studies" documents has revealed inconsistencies and other anomalies that give evidence of fraud. But the IAEA, the United States and its allies in the IAEA continue to treat the documents as though there were no question about their authenticity.
The unnamed member state that informed the agency about Danilenko's alleged experience as a Soviet nuclear weapons scientist is almost certainly Israel, which has been the source of virtually all the purported intelligence on Iranian work on nuclear weapons over the past decade.
Israel has made no secret of its determination to influence world opinion on the Iranian nuclear programme by disseminating information to governments and news media, including purported Iran government documents. Israeli foreign ministry and intelligence officials told journalists Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins about the special unit of Mossad dedicated to that task at the very time the fraudulent documents were being produced.
In an interview in September 2008, Albright said Olli Heinonen, then deputy director for safeguards at the IAEA, had told him that a document from a member state had convinced him that the "alleged studies" documents were genuine. Albright said the state was "probably Israel".
The Jerusalem Post's Yaakov Katz reported Wednesday that Israeli intelligence agencies had "provided critical information used in the report", the purpose of which was to "push through a new regime of sanctions against Tehran…."
*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.
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42 Comments so far
Show AllYet another hoax perpetrated by the US Empire's Propaganda System. When will the world learn to just turn that System off? This article and the one by Pepe Escobar really put the screws to the Neoliberals pushing for escalating yet another war, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MK10Ak02.html
Making diamonds and causing a chain reaction in a bomb is exactly the same technology. Just say'n. What you learn for one application is what you need to do for the other. The hardest part of building a bomb is the conventional explosives you use to get the reaction started. If that is not perfect, the weapons "fizzles" and doesn't explode. Just because this scientist works in diamonds, doesn't mean he wasn't doing work on Iran's nuclear program or that if he was not intentionally, that the Iranians weren't taking his research and applying it to a bomb design.
I don't think the Iranians have a bomb, but I am not convinced they don't have a program to design one or possibly build one.
If I were Iran I would certainly be interested in having a nuke. They are surrounded by enemies and have every right to feel a little paranoid. Having a nuke would balance the powers in the mid east. Israel would suddenly have to play nice rather than bully everyone. Unless Israel is truly insane they are not going to alienate the entire world by attacking Iran. Iran has already said it could block the the strait of Hormuz. Such an action would send the world economies into a free fall.
No. Having one part of process A being in some way conceptually the same as process B does not make the expert of process A an expert in process B. One might just as well construct an argument about internal combustion becuase they too ustilise conventional explosives
OK. Here we go with more hate the Russian BS while the Prussians and act alike Israelis get a pass-- true some Prussians and Israeilis want to do the right thing, but the far right and further right won't let them. The Communists talking sense in Israel get the same demonization as the German Left Party gets in Prussia or Germany.
"The Communists talking sense in Israel get the same demonization as the German Left Party gets in Prussia or Germany.'
I'm confused. Last time I looked on a map, there is no Prussia anymore, you have to go to Poland to visit the former cities, such as Danzig, now called Gdansk. Is this some problem in Poland you are referring to?
OK. Here we go with more hate the Russian BS while the Prussians and act alike Israelis get a pass-- true some Prussians and Israeilis want to do the right thing, but the far right and further right won't let them. The Communists talking sense in Israel get the same demonization as the German Left Party gets in Prussia or Germany.
This fails to give credit to Tinkertoy experts whose constructions mirror those of nuclear weapons.
"I don't think the Iranians have a bomb". Iran doesn't have a [nuclear] bomb - there is nothing to think about. Not even the US claims Iran has a nuclear bomb. Your statement is an artful suggestion that maybe Iran does have a nuclear bomb.
As far as you not being convinced that Iran doesn't have a program to design or build a bomb. In 2007, the National Intelligence Estimate assessed Iran ended its nuclear weapon design program in 2003. No real evidence has come out since to change that assessment. Do you have better information? Iran has international weapons inspectors there and they haven't found anything. Bush and the neocons said it was up to Hussein to prove he doesn't have WMD. They knew Hussein couldn't prove he didn't have something that he doesn't have anymore than I can't prove I don't have a gold watch, which I don't. I can let you in my house and seach my belongings but I can't prove I don't have one hidden somewhere else.
Trolls like John Shade are best ignored or ridiculed. You've done a masterful job of the latter. :-)
And Pakistan is our "ally", storing all of those nukes in close proximity to all of those terrorists. Just sayin'.
Actually nano diamonds are useful in preventing meltdowns in nuclear power plants, like what happened at Chernobyl and Fukishama. I am not sure where you got your information.
"With the extreme heat created from the reactor, even the secondary cooling system is susceptible to overheating because it is not pressurized like the primary cooling system. It is in this secondary cooling system where scientists want to place diamond nanoparticles that will further improve heat conduction and reduce the temperature of the cooling system; thus, reducing the risk of overheating and the risk of meltdown.
Diamonds are excellent heat conductors and will capture the heat trapped in the water. The diamonds would then carry that heat more efficiently away from the reactor and improving safety. The role that diamonds could play in future nuclear power plants might be more involved."
http://www.abazias.com/diamondblog/diamond-news/the-future-of-diamonds-in-nuclear-power-plants
We should celebrate the fact that the Iranians are taking steps to make their energy plant safe, not try and paint the use of this technology as something it is not.
Interesting. I was wondering what application tiny diamonds - far too small for abrasives, saws or drill bits, would have.
You do not seem to have grasped the total nonsense you have written. Before this Russian scientist was beginning to make nanodiamonds with explosions the Soviet/Russian bomb-makers could have told him how to make nanodiamonds by explosions and not the other way around after he succeeded. Furthermore, the technology of making diamonds from graphite by explosive compression is much older than the work of this scientist. He has merely refined the technique to make nanodiamonds instead of "microdiamonds".
Incidentally, nanodiamonds have also been found in meteorites but these were probably formed by impact-compression which was also the process by which macrodiamonds formed in the Canyon Diablo meteorite from Arizona. These were findings that triggered making diamonds by explosions in our country. I do not think that our bomb-makers ever got interested.
Moon of Alabama is way ahead on this latest bogus attempt to gin up an attack on Iran. Don't we have actually important things to do?
http://www.moonofalabama.org/
Golly, gee whiz! Super über cool!! Is MOA back in action? Thanks, thanks for letting us know!
Dear hearts, who may not know, Moon of Alabama was/is the iheritor of the great BillMon's mantle - and always had the best poop and insights on the shit coming down the tube.
The threatened/imminent attack on Iran presages a fatefull turn down to a point of no-turning back which parallels global climate change - terrible times if we go much further down this road.
Excellent example of the power of the net, blogs, and independent, investigative journalism.
Exposes of such lies and manipulations may just avert a horrible war the world cannot afford.
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
“The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly - it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over”
And:
“Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.”
Joseph Goebbels, MiniProp for Hitler’s Third Reich
1897-1945
It never ends and the people fall for it every time.
"Naturally the common people don't want war: Neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same for any country."
Herman Goering to Gustave Gilbert at Nuremberg, 18 April, 1946
Regarding the loyalties of the current director of the IAEA, a US cable exposed by Wikileaks reads:
"Friday, 16 October 2009, 16:12
C O N F I D E N T I A L UNVIE VIENNA 000478
SIPDIS
FOR T, IO">IO">IO, ISN, EAP, AND INR/B
DOE FOR NA-20, NE-6
NSC FOR SAMORE, SCHEINMAN, HOLGATE, CONNERY
NRC FOR OIP
TOKYO FOR PEKO
EO 12958 DECL: 10/15/2019
TAGS AORC, PREL, KNNP, IAEA
SUBJECT: IAEA: AMANO READY FOR PRIME TIME
REF: A. STATE 91301 B. UNVIE 472 C. UNVIE 476
Classified By: Ambassador Glyn Davies, reasons 1.4 (b) and (d) [.......]
2. (C) In a meeting with Ambassador on the eve of the two-week Board of Governors (BoG) and General Conference (GC) marathon of mid-September, IAEA Director General-designate Yukiya Amano thanked the U.S. for having supported his candidacy and took pains to emphasize his support for U.S. strategic objectives for the Agency.Amano reminded [the] ambassador on several occasions that he would need to make concessions to the G-77 [the developing countries group], which correctly required him to be fair-minded and independent, but that he was solidly in the US court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program. [.....]"
Loyalty of the former IAEA director ElBaradei to the TRUTH has been redirected by its current director, Yukiya Amano, with loyalty to the US (and the US State Department's psychopathic puppet master, the Israeli Likud Party) foreign policy makers and its fellow traveler, neocon collaborators.
It really sucks that the US government's machinations and Julian Assage's laps in judgement has put Wikileaks out of business. Good that Garreth Porter is keeping us informed.
Thankyou Richsmith!!
Everyone should read your post.
"Loyalty of the former IAEA director ElBaradei to the TRUTH"
Oh, to hell with ElBaradei too, who in the runup to the Woor Agin EyeRackie Turr did a wonderful job of talking out of both sides of his mouth, ever careful to say enough to that both the Cheneyites/PNACites and the sane folks both thought he was providing arguments for their side.
Gareth Porter, thanks for the expose about the lack of credentials about the "nuclear expert".
You might also have raised uncomfortable questions about David Albright, who is trotted out as a "nuclear weapons inspector". Scott Ritter, who really WAS a nuclear weapons inspector in Iraq, doesn't think much of Albright. Ritter thinks that Albright vastly overstates his credentials and expertise. See Ritter's essay at
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080626_the_nuclear_expert_who_never_was/#166524
The Jerusalem Post's Yaakov Katz reported Wednesday that Israeli intelligence agencies had "provided critical information used in the report", the purpose of which was to "push through a new regime of sanctions against Tehran…."
Well, that's a pretty open declaration that the data is being fixed around the policy, again. A farrago of lies once again. In a just world, the people making these fabrications as well as the leaders making threats would be prosecuted.
Seems like Tzar Kozy was correct - the most important export from Mister Netanyahu's Jewish State is lies.
And as Scott Ritter writes about David Albright:
I have no objection to an academically based think tank capable of producing sound analysis about the myriad nuclear-based threats the world faces today. But David Albright has a track record of making half-baked analyses derived from questionable sources seem mainstream. He breathes false legitimacy into these factually challenged stories by cloaking himself in a résumé which is disingenuous in the extreme. Eventually, one must begin to question the motives of Albright and ISIS. No self-respecting think tank would allow itself to be used in such an egregious manner. The fact that ISIS is a creation of Albright himself, and as such operates as a mirror image of its founder and president, only underscores the concerns raised when an individual lacking in any demonstrable foundation of expertise has installed himself into the mainstream media in a manner that corrupts the public discourse and debate by propagating factually incorrect, illogical and misleading information.
_____________________________________
You know what, I could care less if Iran has a nuclear bomb or not. Get back to me when the 7-8 nations that possess them completes a joint mission to destroy them all. Until then, Iran has as much right to create them as anyone else. And sorry, but I don't trust the U.S. with a nuclear bomb anymore than Iran. In fact, out of all the countries that have held functional nuclear weapons for decades, who's the only one to have used one ...... twice?! And who's the only country to act militarily belligerent and circumvent international law all around the world for decades?!
____________________________________
Like I said, get back to me.
How many times are people going to fall for this stuff?
Good question. The production of diamonds by explosive compression does not need the precision that the explosion of a nuclear device demands by a long shot. The diamond target contains pieces of graphite. The shock-compression for the transformation of graphite to diamond must be close to the direction of one of the crystallographic axes of the graphite. Since the target probably contains graphite crystallites with this axis pointing in every direction even a one-dimensional shock created by explosion will make some diamonds. Multi-directional shock-compression is merely more effective in making nanodiamonds and the shock waves do not have to be in absolute sync as is required for the detonation of a nuclear device. The Russian scientist did not have to have information from the bomb-makers of his country to make the nanodiamonds and the nuclear scientist and technicians of Iran could not have learned anything from him.
Yeah, except this time the worker would be making a bicycle each time he thought he was putting together a machine gun.
I know :-) ... thats what a lot of people still believe.
Amazing, isn't it? The construction of the lies needed to motivate the US Congress, the US media, and the US population to demand more war, the very construction of the lies is done in public, where everyone can see that they are constructed lies. Nevertheless the lies work and we will have our war. It is unstoppable stupidity. Except that there are some eventual limits to stupidity, in that this next war will crush our economy like no other war has ever done before. We are the world's biggest consumer of oil and we going to make war on the region from where comes half of the world's oil. In medicine, we would call this death due to an auto-immune disease. In common parlance, we call this suicide. I already grieve for the families in Iran and downwind who will suffer and die because we in America like to arouse ourselves to war by listening to lies.
What is really amazing to me is that this is so much bigger than the question of weather or not Iran has a nuclear weapons ambition or not or that the US and Israel wish to use such an allegation to extend their hegemony, derail or suppress Iran's influence in the Middle East. Sure this rehash of "evidence" is all smoke and mirrors with the usual characters fabricating and repeating lies and innuendo as we plod slowly but surely from threats to acts of war (Iraq's WMD revisited, with a new twist).
The bigger picture is by far more important and that is the debasement of the IAEA to a sock puppet of the US and Israel. No other institution had the authority, equanimity and reliability globally to monitor, name and shame governments into fulfilling their obligations and commitments under international conventions governing the use of nuclear technology.
Even the illusion of that is now dead. Nothing has more undermined the principle of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or set back by decades the stated goals of nuclear disarmament or given a greater boost to the clandestine manufacture of nuclear weapons, than turning the IAEA and its (boss) Secretary General Amano into a lying ventriloquist sock puppet for the USA and the Zionists.
Israel's clandestine stockpile of nuclear WMD violates international law and accordingly, the US government violates its own laws providing military and other aid to that country. Also the US is in contravention of NPT terms, in providing nuclear and military cooperation to India and Pakistan, both non-signatories of NPT, as well as in reclassifying and renewing its own nuclear warheads, under the guise of maintenance and "technical up-grade" and many, many other areas which can only be brought to light by the IAEA. Compared to these gross violations, Iran's alleged weapons program can only be seen as no more than a deliberate and minor diversion in terms of the global nuclear arms threat.
Such inappropriate selective application of its mandate makes the IAEA totally useless, meaningless and ineffective, which in tern gives us, the common human being and potential victim, little hope or expectation of the absolutely necessary elimination of nuclear weapons in the world.
As George Orwell foresaw the pigs now run the farm.
"Such inappropriate selective application of its mandate makes the IAEA totally useless, meaningless and ineffective"
Not to the Israelis. It's proven very useful to them. .
Just so people are aware how the nano diamonds connect to the development of nuclear power. Iran should be applauded for trying to make their plants as safe as possible.
"With the extreme heat created from the reactor, even the secondary cooling system is susceptible to overheating because it is not pressurized like the primary cooling system. It is in this secondary cooling system where scientists want to place diamond nanoparticles that will further improve heat conduction and reduce the temperature of the cooling system; thus, reducing the risk of overheating and the risk of meltdown.
Diamonds are excellent heat conductors and will capture the heat trapped in the water. The diamonds would then carry that heat more efficiently away from the reactor and improving safety. The role that diamonds could play in future nuclear power plants might be more involved."
http://www.abazias.com/diamondblog/diamond-news/the-future-of-diamonds-in-nuclear-power-plants
After Chernobyl it should come as no surprise that the Russians have been working on the safety of nuclear plants.
When a German refugee to England, a nuclear scientist, in early 1940 concluded that only a few pounds of U235 were needed to produce a uranium-bomb instead of a ton or so, all that was needed to be known in principle to make one was known. The Iranians need no research or spy to find out. After that it was all technology and much of that is either known or well understood today. The notion that the Iranians need a foreigner to tell them is, once again, the arrogant assumption of an American that Iranian engineers are too stupid to be able to make a bomb if they wanted to make one.
In 1956 I was involved as a graduate student with a search for "not yet known radioactive nuclei" at the cyclotron of the University of Amsterdam. I can attest to the fact that almost every nuclear/atomic research that has nothing to do with attempts to make a nuclear bomb-and the Dutch government can certainly not be accused of ever having tried to get one-can be interpreted as: "at one time the Dutch were attempting to make a nuclear bomb" because they used the cyclotron to discover additional fissionable nuclei. A few years later I was involved with the development of the ultracentrifuge for the enrichment of U235, again in a Dutch lab. I know from direct information that its aim was never to make bomb-grade U235 but fuel for reactors, exactly what the Iranians are doing. With enriched U235 reactors can be smaller, hence safer.
BTW, the latest "news" from Tel Aviv seems to be that El Baradei, the former head of IAEA was a spy for Iran! The knives are sharpened but the caper of Libya is backfiring badly for President Obama. Neither Russia nor China are going to approve more UN sanctions against Iran.
Excellent, informative posts by all, except John Shade, of course. Thanks, people.
Speaking of lies and liars, Obama has embraced Netanyahu as his liar of choice.
I'm givin ten to one odds that this whole story has been fabricated by made up psywar information, with false names which could easily be done by the countries who want Iran on the world's hit list and who have the means and the motive to create false flag incidents to promote war and perhaps expand Israel... I wonder what axis that could be.... and what country has a back door into the intellegence and top secret defence network of the USA and who knows who else?
I bet a few can guess.
This is gonna be worse than Curve Ball and show how the War Racket used created information that fixes the facts for growth of the war industries in the world when that info never gets out with a freeze on the Intel that gave us these phoney trumped up amature stings and intrapments of compromised people who did not have a care or clue on what the old war machine was really up to.
Just remember to ask for the proof and that will effectively end their story.
The CIA's job is also to keep us from the truth that war is their racket too.
So now they just gonna want us ta fugetabout it.
J folk intel
Now we just have to have Colin Powell hold up a vile of nanodiamonds to prove the threat before the world.
Applying Occam's Razor, it seems to me that John Shade's explanation wins.
The New York Times coverage is about as biased against Israeli as most any newspaper in the country, except perhaps the Washington Post. See: Gross, "All the News That's Fit to Print, The New York Times and Israel, http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/NewYorkTimes.htm Yet the New York Times published this, entitled "The Truth about Iran", by the head of the IAEA about the IAEA report on November 9, 2011. It shows the volume of evidence that was considered, and the corroboration of each point, that leaves little doubt about Tehran's nuclear ambitions. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/10/opinion/the-truth-about-iran.html?ref=yukiyaamano According to Mr. Amano, "The report is chillingly comprehensive. It says that Iran created computer models of nuclear explosions, conducted experiments on nuclear triggers and did advanced research on a warhead that could be delivered by a medium-range missile.' "
Who could help more with implosions to serve as nuclear triggers than an expert on implosions, even though most of his experience was with implosions for another purpose. To conclude, as the author does, that his expertise on implosions disappears when he seeks to apply it to another purpose is likely motivated by a desire to be published.
"What gives the report particular credibility is its meticulous sourcing. The agency’s director, Yukiya Amano, built a case on more than a thousand pages of documents, the assistance of more than 10 agency member states and interviews with 'a number of individuals who were involved in relevant activities in Iran.' ”
You can read the report yourself at http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/world/2011/IAEA-Nov-2011-Report-Iran.pdf You may want to pay particular attention to the 14 page annex.