David Albright

David Albright is a physicist and the founder and president of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) in Washington DC, not to be confused with the militant group. He is the most cited independent open-source analyst of Iranian nuclear infrastructure, having spent three decades assessing satellite imagery and technical documents. ISIS produced the canonical post-strike damage assessments of Operation Rising Lion and Operation Midnight Hammer (June 2025): the "12-Day Assessment" and the "Five-Month Comprehensive Assessment" are the most widely cited non-governmental analyses of what each operation destroyed at Natanz, Esfahan, and Fordow. Albright's assessment that Fordow was "likely destroyed" (12-day report) and that Fordow's ventilation system destruction alone rendered it inoperable (five-month report) became the baseline for all subsequent proliferation analysis.

Albright worked as an IAEA inspector in Iraq after the Gulf War and co-authored the seminal analysis of Iran's Natanz enrichment facility in the early 2000s. His ISIS satellite-imagery analyses have been referenced by governments, UN sanctions panels, and courts. His April 2026 commentary on Fordow remaining intact and inoperable (cited in Lowdown briefing #72) sits on top of that 2025 assessment base: the question he was answering was not whether Feb 2026 had damaged Fordow, but whether the June 2025 damage had been repaired. His answer was no.

With the Iranian Majlis suspending IAEA cooperation 221-0 on 11 April 2026, Albright and ISIS are now among the few credible non-governmental benchmarks for Iranian nuclear status. ISIS analyses are public, methodologically explicit, and updated in near-real-time as commercial satellite imagery becomes available. Albright has testified before Congress on Iran's nuclear programme multiple times and his assessments have informed both US and Israeli intelligence community understanding of facility vulnerabilities.