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IRAN'S RADIOACTIVE DILEMMAAmid continued US strikes, new intelligence says Iran's partially enriched uranium has been compromised
President Donald Trump, in a striking change of tone, has told the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, that he is prepared to escalate the current US attacks on Iran. “We’re going to hit them hard tonight, but we’ll see how it all works out” Trump said. The targets, a report in the New York Times said, would include the nation’s infrastructure and desalination plans—all potential war crimes. There is a previously unknown explanation for the change in tone. The US and Israeli intelligence communities have recently learned that Iran’s supposedly existential threat to Israel and the West—its underground supply of partially enriched uranium—has degraded while in underground storage. Two of the three Iranian nuclear storage depots, at Fordow and Isfahan, are “hot”—that is, filled with radioactivity from what clearly has been significant degradation of the storage containers Iran had used for the keep saving of Iran’s hope of eventually upgrading the stored material to weapons level and becoming another player in the nuclear world. I have been told by sources close to US and Israeli intelligence that a recent inspection of the underground storage areas led to the death of at least two Iranian technicians—they may have been members of the Iranian military—who were exposed to high levels of radioactivity. The enriched uranium was stored in heavy cylinders encased in lead and concrete, each weighing hundreds of pounds, that were designed, as has been widely reported, to last for decades. It was those materials that were famously considered by Benjamin Netanyahu, the embattled Israeli prime minister, to be an existential threat to Israel, whether buried underground or not. (A third storage site in Iran for the canisters of enriched uranium, at Natanz, remains free of radiation contamination.) The breach between Netanyahu and the Trump Administration has been one of the most significant aspects of Trump’s recent foreign policy, whose main element seems to be the president’s desire to control a great percentage of the world’s oil supply. Iran, with its religious leadership and large oil reserves, clearly was a confounding dilemma for the president in its willingness to stand up to his threats and his promises of wealth to come. He remains in a standoff, despite his renewed bombing and after his repeated warnings to Iran of Armageddon. There would be billions in internationally sanctioned funds that could flow to Iran if a political agreement can be reached. The new information about Iran’s loss of much of its stored uranium could lead, at first blush, to an Iranian diplomatic breakthrough with Washington that would leave the Israeli public more isolated and more frightened than it now is. The contamination from the enriched materials can only be seen as a huge setback to any Iranian long-range plan to become a nuclear power. I immediately shared my reporting about the underground radiation in Iran, from sources in Washington, with sources I’ve known and trusted on strategic Israeli issues going back more than five decades. I had watched what amounted to a sea change in the attitude of President Trump as he began to turn on Netanyahu and the Israeli position, which he had earlier accepted, that any enriched nuclear materials, buried or not, was an existential threat to Israel—and thus, to the United States. It was clear in private talks here in Washington that, as one official put it, “the nuclear threat [from Iran] is no longer there. “An underground cache of partially enriched uranium, which is un-recoverable, is not a nuclear weapon,” the official said. A source close to Israel had a sharply different point of view about the contamination of the two Iranian nuclear storage sites. “This is not information,” he said of my reporting. “This is misinformation spread by the Trumpists in order to allow him to ignore the nuclear issue—by declaring it does not exist—and go forward with any deal the Iranians agree to, and declare victory.” The Israeli added that the worry in Israel and among some senior intelligence leaders in Washington—he named a high-ranking Washington analyst—“is that Iran’s nuclear threat has grown in the last few weeks, and not diminished.” The Israeli acknowledged, however, that the “kind of damage” done by US and Israeli bombs in Fordow and Isfahan “may have collapsed the tunnels where the 60 percent increased uranium has been kept, but this is not the case in Natanz.” He said that there is recent satellite imagery and reports from human intelligence noting that Iran has been moving canisters with the enriched uranium from Natanz to other locations. The Israeli said that the existence of radiation in the tunnels under Fordow and Isfahan “does not mean the stuff cannot be gotten out. It only means it has to be done more carefully.” He said, as many in Israel have in recent months, that there are thousands of pounds of uranium ore in Iran enriched to more than 20 percent for medical use that could easily be upgraded by centrifuges for weapons-grade use that is consistently ignored by media reporting on the Iranian nuclear stockpile. “This is all so Trumpist,” the Israeli concluded. “You declare a problem does not exist, and then you try to sell the people that there is nothing to worry about.” There you have it. Two views. Only one can be right. Invite your friends and earn rewardsIf you enjoy Seymour Hersh, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe. © 2026 Seymour Hersh |