Iran Redline

  Dear Redline fans,   Do you ever find that life gets in the way and stops you getting on with even the most important things? Well we here at Redline have been away for a little while, but we never wavered in our commitment to uncovering the latest antics of SPND ( سپند or sepand) , the secretive Iranian defense research organization. That’s right, we’re back in town, and we’ve got some very exciting discoveries to share with you which we think will more than make up for lost time.   Stay tuned over the coming weeks to find out what we’ve got in store for you!   First up…    Another SPND front company unveiled: Milad Darou Noor   We thought we’d start with another dive into one of the multitude of front companies owned or used by SPND , the shadowy Iranian defense research organization responsible for Iran's pre-2003 nuclear weapons program.   The company's name is Milad Darou Noor, ( شرکت داروسازی میلاد دارو نور ), also known...

No villainous organization, factual or fictional, is truly complete without a part-time penchant for the truly weird. The Nazis had an obsession for finding the Spear of Destiny and Holy Grail. Spectre had a volcano lair and chinchilla cats. SPND ( سپند), the Iranian defense research organization that holds the ageing expertise from Iran's nuclear weapons program, is no exception. When SPND wants to get its freak on, it calls on one of its subsidiaries: the Sadra Cognitive Defense Science Center ( مرکز علوم شناختی دفاعی صدرا or مرکز علوم شناختی و دفاعی صدرا or مرکز پژوهشی صدرا or مرکـز مطالعات علوم شناختی دفاعی صدرا ). The Sadra Center has been around for a few years, but its status as a component of SPND was only revealed publicly in March 2019 in a US government sanctions list. Since then, a short article from a corporate intelligence company, Kharon, has provided some extra details on Sadra . Today, we want to provide even more evidence on the connections between SPND and Sadr...

With senior figures in Iran's Navy making noise again about pursuing a nuclear-powered submarine program , we here at Redline promised we would dig a little further into this expensive enterprise. So we thought we'd take a look behind the scenes at the Iranian organizations who will be elbowing each other out of the way to get some nuke sub cash.     Redline has been following the nuclear sub story since 2012, when Iran's navy first announced that Tehran was spinning up plans to "design and build nuclear submarine propulsion systems" . We said back then that the purported submarine plan was a fig-leaf to allow Iran to start enriching uranium to 60% - the point where uranium looks less like nuclear fuel for reactors and more like something you stick in a bomb. Thankfully, that hasn't happened yet, even if Iran did announce its intentions to enrich to 20%, already far beyond the 3.67% cap allowed by the JCPOA.   But the allure of a nuclear-powered su...