Three national newspapers spotlight killings of Iranian nuclear scientists

By Steven T. Corneliussen

On 12 January, the front pages of the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times included the latest in a series of terrorist-type murders of important figures in Iran's nuclear program. Above-the-fold headlines called all of the victims scientists—including the latest, chemical engineer Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, who was killed while riding in a car.

The Washington Post's article called Roshan's murder "a bold rush-hour attack that experts say points to a further escalation in a covert campaign targeting the country's atomic officials and institutions."

In an online sidebar with photos of the victims, the Wall Street Journal reported that in 2011 physicist Darioush Rezaie had been murdered. Comparable attacks, said the WSJ, occurred in 2010, killing nuclear physics professor Masoud Ali Mohammadi and nuclear scientist Majid Shahriari, who had represented Iran at the international SESAME light-source project in Jordan.

The New York Times's article asserted that a total of five scientists "with nuclear connections" have been killed since 2007. And according to the WSJ, an attack wounded Fereidoun Abbasi Davani, "a laser specialist and the head of atomic research and training at the Ministry of Defense and one of Iran's few experts in the field of nuclear-isotope separation."

The Post mentioned "speculation" that Israel has conducted the attacks. The WSJ said, "Many intelligence officials and diplomats in Washington say they believe Israel has played a central role." The Times ventured further, declaring that "experts believe" the campaign "is being carried out mainly by Israel." The Times observed that "Israel has used assassination as a tool of statecraft since its creation in 1948, historians say, killing dozens of Palestinian and other militants and a small number of foreign scientists, military officials or people accused of being Holocaust collaborators."

On 13 January, the WSJ editorial "The intrigues of Persia" asserted that "covert actions won't stop Iran's bomb." The WSJ editors closed with a hard line:

Much of the world wants to believe that force won't be necessary to stop Iran's nuclear ambitions, but the explosions and killings show that a covert war involving deadly force is already underway. The Obama Administration says Iran plotted to kill a Saudi ambassador in a Washington, D.C. restaurant, and Iran is trying to kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan as it previously did in Iraq. Many more people will die if the world doesn't get serious about stopping this rogue regime.

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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.