Iran’s other would-be WMD program lies in ruins following strikes by Israel and the US

BERLIN — Iranian facilities affiliated with chemical and biological weapons research have been hit by the United States and Israel without much fanfare, satellite imagery and the analysis of images shared on social media show. Among the sites destroyed in recent weeks are key sites operated by the Iranian Ministry of Defense, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and hybrid entities that straddle civilian and military applications. In some cases, the Israeli armed forces publicized the strikes either as early warnings or after the fact; in others, they were not publicized at all and were only detected by researchers using satellite imagery and ground-truth photos trickling out of Iran. “It almost seems like an afterthought and lower priority to the war planners,” said Jim Lamson, a former Iran analyst for the CIA of 23 years who is now a visiting fellow at the Department of War Studies with King’s College London and senior research associate at the California-based Center for Nonproliferation Studies. “To me, it doesn’t look like a real robust CBW-specific campaign,” he said, using the acronym for chemical and biological weapons. Many of the sites that were struck, like the headquarters of the Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research (SPND) or the Malek Ashtar University of Technology, were hit for their roles in the nuclear and missile programs rather than their chemical and biological research, according to Israeli messaging. The Strait of Hormuz offers a lesson i…