Last December, a news story came from Britain that appears to have gotten little traction at the time. According to reports, British authorities had intercepted a “rogue, non-manifested package” containing “kilos of uranium.” British radiation sensors at Heathrow International Airport alerted British authorities to the presence of what has since been described as non-weapons-grade uranium.
But don’t allow a false sense of security to wash over you.
Non-weapons-grade uranium is still radioactive and is a critical component for the creation of dirty bombs.
It has been ten months since this story out of England broke and there has been no follow-up or greater information shared with the public. Given recent events in Israel, however, it is essential to understand this little-reported story from last year.
Because we know for a fact that Iran is the mothership of global Islamic terrorism.
A Most Twisted Web
Having spent the last 40 years building a worldwide illicit network of supply chains and alternative trade routes to support their bloodthirsty vision of a global jihad in the name of their radical interpretation of Shia Islam, Iran has its tentacles everywhere.
The Islamic Republic has become proficient in facilitating the movement of key personnel, equipment, and funds from its own territory to anywhere in the world.
London itself, along with other major European cities, has become a hub for Iranian-backed international terrorism. The Iranian-supported Lebanese Shiite militia group, Hezbollah, has exploited these Iranian-built networks spanning the world.
As I reported initially in my book, The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy, “Western intelligence services have accused Hezbollah of purchasing and storing large quantities of ammonium nitrate in covert depots from Germany to Belgium to England—to be used in a future campaign of unmitigated terror against Israel.”
The Hamas attack on Israel is but the opening salvo in a much larger Iranian-orchestrated attack against Israel. The German newspaper Die Welt originally reported in 2020 that “Iran’s Revolutionary Guards made three deals with Hezbollah at the price of nearly 400,000 Euros between July 2013 and April 2014” for Hezbollah to take possession of the ammonium nitrate that Iran had spent much time and money covertly purchasing from unscrupulous and unsuspecting Western sources.
That same Die Welt report revealed that the late Iranian Quds Force commander, General Qassem Soleimani had brokered the deal between his forces and Hezbollah.
Make no mistake: it is not only ammonium nitrate and other, non-nuclear explosives that are being shifted around global Iranian-and-Hezbollah-controlled terrorist logistical networks, it is now apparently kilos of uranium.
And those are just sources of uranium that we have detected.
Given the open nature of Western societies and the fact that few Western democracies appear willing or able to stop the flow of illegal immigration into their porous borders, what’s stopping Hezbollah or Hamas from smuggling small batches of uranium for the construction of dirty bombs into the United States?
We already know that scores of Hezbollah and other terrorist agents loyal to Iran have infiltrated through America’s broken southwestern border. That’s to say nothing of the seemingly endless flow of illicit narcotics and chemicals—notably fentanyl—that are poisoning our people daily.
Given the robustness of Iran and Hezbollah’s global, illicit supply chains, there’s nothing truly stopping them from prepositioning small amounts of uranium in target cities along with their key operatives, awaiting the right moment to strike.
The interception of Iranian uranium by British authorities was likely a fluke—and it was far from the only attempt by Iran and its terrorist proxies to move nuclear material around the globe as part of their larger offensive against Israel and its Western allies, notably the United States. The Iranians have likely been doing this for years, especially as their own nuclear weapons program has evolved.
Iran Ships Uranium Everywhere
There was another example of shadowy movements by Iranian nuclear elements even before the British example.
According to Maariv, the Hebrew-language sister publication to The Jerusalem Post, last November reported that several unnamed intelligence sources within Israel’s intelligence community claimed that a shipment of uranium that had left Iran and was bound for Iranian-backed Houthi rebels fighting in Yemen was intercepted by al Qaeda.
The Jerusalem Post at the time asserted this was some form of a disinformation operation. Yet, just a month thereafter, the British authorities admitted to having intercepted kilos of uranium in London.
For years, counterterrorism officials have not only feared the prospect of a dirty bomb being detonated in a Western city by Islamic extremists but that the mad mullahs of Iran, who’ve spent years building up their country’s illicit nuclear weapons program, would hand nuclear weapons off to a terrorist proxy, like Hezbollah.
And with all that has transpired between Iranian-backed Hamas in Israel—with Hezbollah starting their own, though limited, attacks against Israel from the north along with direct threats from Iran toward Israel in its hour of need—the likelihood that the Hamas attack against Israel was part of a larger offensive concocted by Iran becomes far greater.
Now, the United States has indicated that it will use force if necessary to prevent a larger Iranian offensive from being opened against Israel. This is the right course of action by Washington, but if the United States does decide to act in mutual defense of their Israeli allies against Iranian targets, Iran may initiate a larger attack using dirty bombs against Western cities.
To Help Our Allies in the Mideast, Secure the US Border
Rather than spend its time hunting Russian ghosts under every bed at Mar-a-Lago or pursuing MAGA-hat-wearing grandmas and grandpas, America’s elephantine domestic security services must fixate on rooting out whatever Hamas, Hezbollah, or Iranian operatives have arrived in the United States through its broken border and the Biden Administration must immediately reverse its lax, open-border policies.
The world has never been closer to a nuclear terrorist event than it is now.
Iran is orchestrating the attacks against Israel as part of a larger move to push American power out of the Middle East. Washington must not allow Iran to succeed—and it must do everything in its power to prevent catastrophe from unfolding here.
But America must first secure itself from the inevitable reprisals that will come its way for daring to stand with its Israeli allies. Border security and a crackdown on suspected Hezbollah and Iranian militants operating within the US must be the priority of the Biden Administration well before any strikes may occur in the Mideast.
President Joe Biden has not only failed to protect U.S. national interests and allies abroad from vicious foreign foes. His administration has failed to defend our border and protect our populace from the rising threat of nuclear terrorism.
A 19FortyFive Senior Editor and an energy analyst at the The-Pipeline, Brandon J. Weichert is a former Congressional staffer and geopolitical analyst who is a contributor at The Washington Times, as well as at the Asia Times. He is the author of Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower (Republic Book Publishers), Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life (Encounter Books), and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy (July 23). Weichert occasionally serves as a Subject Matter Expert for various organizations, including the Department of Defense.
