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| A satellite view shows the Fordow nuclear facility after the U.S. struck the underground complex in Iran on June 22. (Maxar Technologies/Reuters) |
| It’s not clear how much of Iran’s nuclear program is destroyed or inoperable. But the “total obliteration” declared by President Donald Trump after U.S. warplanes joined an Israeli campaign against the Islamic Republic does not seem accurate. An initial U.S. intelligence report assessed that airstrikes on three key Iranian nuclear facilities have set Tehran’s program back by months, but not wholly eliminated it. On Sunday, my colleagues also reported on intercepted communications between senior Iranian officials who seemed to believe the attacks were less devastating than feared. Rafael Mariano Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog, told CBS’s “Face the Nation” over the weekend that Iran probably still had the ability to resume uranium enrichment activities. “The capacities they have are there. They can have … in a matter of months, I would say, a few cascades of centrifuges spinning and producing enriched uranium, or less than that,” Grossi said, casting doubt on the confidence of Trump and his allies that Iran would never be able to build an atomic weapon and stressing the need for more diplomacy. “Frankly speaking, one cannot claim that everything has disappeared and there is nothing there.”
The question of what the U.S. intervention achieved has become politicized in Washington. On Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth laid into media at a Pentagon briefing for supposed bias. Trump has suggested that his administration would look into prosecuting journalists as well as those responsible for leaking information to them about the government’s intelligence assessments. A lawyer for Trump sent letters last week to the New York Times and CNN threatening to sue for publishing on the report. In separate remarks, Trump suggested that he would “absolutely” be willing to bomb Iran again should he determine it was on the verge of nuclear breakout. Iran’s embattled leadership preached defiance in the wake of the U.S.-Israeli attacks. Much to Trump’s irritation, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, said his country “slapped America in the face” when it launched a largely symbolic barrage of missiles that left U.S. forces based in Qatar unscathed. Much to Grossi’s frustration, Iranian lawmakers in Tehran approved measures to suspend cooperation with IAEA inspectors.
Even as a tenuous ceasefire between Israel and Iran holds, much hangs in the balance. Speculation is rife that Iran may withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or NPT — to which it is a signatory, but Israel, an actual nuclear-armed state, is not. A withdrawal would heighten geopolitical tensions and pave the way for Tehran, if it chooses, to rush toward developing a bomb without international oversight. U.S. officials have been unable to prove whether a major Iranian cache of uranium enriched at 60 percent — a vital supply to produce enough fissile material for a weapon — has been taken out of commission. Analysts suggest it wouldn’t take much for Iran to go from there toward weaponization. “A single cascade of 174 IR-6 centrifuges could produce a bomb’s worth of 90% highly enriched uranium from the 60% enriched material, whose location is unknown, in 10-20 days,” wrote James Acton, co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Iran doesn’t need to rebuild enrichment facilities on their previous scale to get the bomb.”
Israeli strikes and other clandestine operations have targeted facilities as well as top generals and nuclear scientists in Ira Yet Grossi stressed that Iran still has the “knowledge” and “industrial capacity” to press ahead. The question is one of strategic intent. For the decades that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spent claiming Iran was on the precipice of creating a nuclear weapon, Iran refrained from doing so and largely abided by U.N.-mandated inspection regimes. Since Trump’s arrival on the scene, the dynamic has shifted. In his first term, Trump unilaterally abrogated U.S. commitments to the nuclear deal that had kept effective curbs on Iran’s enrichment activities. “It’s unlikely that we would have had to bomb uranium metal production facilities today if the first Trump administration had not pulled out of the Iran deal,” Robert Einhorn, a former federal arms control official who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told the New York Times. The past 20 months of ruinous conflict further changed the equation. The theocratic regime in Tehran has seen its strategic depth in the Middle East crumble, with its Palestinian, Lebanese and Syrian proxies damaged, degraded and defeated in turn. Then, Israel showed how fragile Iran’s own defenses were through a series of attacks and assassinations. But the precedent it has set may convince hard-liners within Iran that a cornered regime finally needs that genuine deterrent. “Iran has been a few months away from a nuclear weapon since about 2007. It’s clear that the thing that keeps them a few months away is not their technical capacity; it’s their political will,” arms control expert Jeffrey Lewis told the Independent. “And I think whatever loss in technical capacity they have suffered, it is more than compensated for by an increase in political will.” “Netanyahu clearly hoped to draw the U.S. into a longer-term conflict to topple the Iranian government, and he cannot be happy with Trump launching one strike then declaring a cease-fire,” observed Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy. “But the fact remains that he has now successfully normalized the idea that Israel can unilaterally attack Iran whenever it wants.”
In the past, Iran was among a small coterie of troublesome regimes considering nuclear programs to better insulate their rule. The Cold War had seen both the United States and the Soviet Union agree to guardrails around the usage and proliferation of nuclear weapons, as well as measures to dissuade other governments from pursuing their own. That security architecture, though, is collapsing, warned Vipin Narang and Pranay Vaddi in Foreign Affairs. Existing nuclear agreements between the United States and Russia about their deployed weapons are set to expire next year, while China’s expanding nuclear stockpile, the steady growth of North Korea’s arsenal and the U.S.’s own delayed nuclear modernization efforts have created “a Category 5 hurricane of nuclear threats” for Washington, they wrote. In the face of new uncertainties, even U.S. allies — from South Korea to Saudi Arabia to Germany — are reckoning with the value in boosting their nuclear weapons. “The advent of more nuclear powers, regardless of whether they are U.S. allies, would open a Pandora’s box that Washington has fought for decades to keep closed,” Narang and Vaddi argued. “A lot of countries will now be thinking that nuclear weapons are the ticket to sovereignty,” Kurt Volker, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO who served as special envoy for Ukraine in the first Trump administration, told the Wall Street Journal. “If we don’t change our behavior — and I don’t expect we will — the world we’re going to live in 20 years from now will be a world with lots of nuclear-weapons states.” | ||||||||||||||||||||