After Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, expressed his opposition to the inspection of Iranian military facilities and the interrogation of Iranian scientists as part of any would-be nuclear deal, the issue quickly became the most controversial aspect of the nuclear negotiations in Iran. It is only natural that allowing foreign inspectors access to Iranian military facilities and making Iranian scientists vulnerable to such questioning would damage Iranian national pride, as it would in any country. In fact, this is a matter that threatens to scuttle the entire negotiating process.

This unprecedentedly invasive type of inspections hearkens back to the issue of possible military dimensions (PMD) to the Iranian nuclear program. Western concerns over PMD go back to even before 2003, when the Iranian nuclear program first came under international spotlight. In his 2006 book "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration," The New York Times journalist James Risen revealed that the CIA had attempted to plant evidence in Iran that would make it seem the country was pursuing nuclear weapons in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Such “evidence” could feasibly have been used as a pretext for military intervention against Iran. With that said, in 2011 the United States and its NATO allies released thousands of pages of documents and pictures to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that allegedly revealed there had been military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear program. The goals of these documents were to:

• Show that Iran had pursued nuclear weapons.
• Back and give legitimacy to the IAEA director’s case against Iran.
• Build the case for additional sanctions against Iran.

According to an Iranian diplomat who spoke to Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity about the agreement reached in Lausanne in April, the P5+1 had requested for Iran to inspect a few sites, namely two military facilities, and to conduct interviews with a number of military officials and nuclear scientists whose names had either directly or indirectly been mentioned in various IAEA reports. Iran strongly protested these requests, characterized them as insulting, and dismissed them.

At the same time, a central problem of the debate in Iran about this issue is that no efforts have been made to distinguish between the Additional Protocol to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and issues surrounding PMD, which has had the effect of confusing the general public as well.