Matthew Levitt is the Fromer-Wexler Senior Fellow and director of the Reinhard Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence at The Washington Institute.
Articles & Testimony
Concerns over the regime’s longstanding R&D on weaponized anesthetics and other PBAs have become more pressing given the high risk of transfer to various hostile proxies.
As early as the 1980s, the U.S. intelligence community documented Iran’s deployment of chemical weapons for tactical delivery on the battlefield. Nearly 40 years later, U.S. officials formally assessed that Iran was in non-compliance with its Chemical Weapons Convention obligations, pointing to its development of pharmaceutical-based agents (PBAs) that attack a person’s central nervous system. Over time, concern about this program has increased, with numerous reports and sanctions issued by U.S. and international agencies. Today, with Iran’s proxies wreaking havoc throughout the Middle East, officials worry that Tehran may have already provided weaponized PBAs to several of its partners. If tactically deployed on the battlefield, such a capability could enable further major attacks on Israel and other actors...
