Did the Attacks on Iran Succeed?

Israel and America Bought Themselves Time but Will Pay in Other Ways – Richard Nephew

On June 24, Iran, Israel, and the United States agreed to a cease-fire, putting a halt to nearly two weeks of war. During the conflict, Israel hit dozens of confirmed or suspected Iranian nuclear targets. When the United States joined in, it dropped bunker-busting bombs on Fordow, a nuclear site that was hard for the Israelis to reach, and attacked two other facilities. Now, as the dust settles, analysts must begin determining what the strikes accomplished—and whether they were worth the consequences.

It is still too soon to say exactly how much Operations Rising Lion and Midnight Hammer, as the Israelis and Americans named their respective campaigns, set back Iran’s nuclear program. A leaked preliminary U.S. intelligence report estimates the strikes added just a few months to Iran’s breakout time. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump, meanwhile, say the damage was more sweeping. The official assessments released thus far from Israel and the United States generally support the idea that the strikes set back Iran significantly, but they focus on general damage and offer little specificity about the effect on Iran’s breakout time. In truth, even Iran probably does not understand the full scale of the damage to its enterprise, and its leaders are still deciding what to do next.

But experts can start to catalogue the tangible results. They know that the attacks dealt serious damage to Iran’s enrichment facilities and killed many top scientists. They know that important equipment was blown apart and buried. But Iran may still have much of what it needs to make a weapon, including highly enriched uranium, either because it is safely in storage or because it can be salvaged from the rubble. The Iranian government will also now make its efforts more opaque than ever, even if it engages in diplomacy. Iran’s new timeline may therefore vary wildly. The country may never produce a weapon. Or it could produce one very quickly.

WHAT IRAN LOST

Whatever the effect on Tehran’s breakout time, this much is clear: Iran’s nuclear program was badly mauled. The Isfahan nuclear research center, the Natanz fuel enrichment plant and its associated buildings, and the Fordow fuel enrichment plant—Iran’s three main nuclear sites—were all seriously damaged. Entire parts of Isfahan and Natanz were outright destroyed. Iran’s Arak reactor was destroyed and, with it, any near-term chance that Iran could produce weapons-grade plutonium. The Israelis also attacked several other research and development sites throughout Iran, including parts of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran and of the Iranian military’s Organization of Defensive Innovation, which analysts suspect is responsible for nuclear weapons–related research and development. The deaths of at least a dozen Iranian scientists in the Israeli strikes have cost Iran decades of practical knowledge useful to building nuclear weapons. Israeli attacks targeting Iran’s missile program may hinder the country’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon that could fit on a warhead.

Such damage, however, is to be expected. When Israel and the United States contemplated military action in the past, they never doubted they could hit every site they tried to reach. By ensuring the existence of munitions that could hit Iran’s most important nuclear sites and conducting an enormous amount of practice and planning, the countries entered the conflict with a high degree of confidence. The ultimate attacks were still operationally impressive and technically complex, a credit to the professionalism of the armed services. But such tactical success does not answer open questions about what the bombings achieved, and thus how long it could take for Iran to go nuclear.

The biggest issue is whether Iran’s stockpile of 60 percent highly enriched uranium still exists and is accessible. Current reports seem to suggest that the material is buried at Fordow and Isfahan, beneath the rubble created by U.S. and Israeli strikes. But the Iranians placed much of their uranium deep underground precisely to protect it from an American attack, and there are reports that Iran itself sealed some of the tunnel entrances at Isfahan to shield it from bombings. If part of this stockpile remains intact, Iran need only dig it out for it to be available as feedstock. The country possesses both shovels and bulldozers.

Iran’s nuclear program was badly mauled.

Analysts also do not know whether Iran still has centrifuges that can enrich uranium to weapons grade. Similarly, experts are not certain that Iran retains the equipment necessary to turn enriched uranium into a weapon. Tehran, after all, has worked to obscure how much such equipment it has. After the United States exited the 2015 nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Iran began producing advanced centrifuge components. In 2021, Tehran moved the production of these components underground, at Natanz, and stopped providing public information about just how many of them it was making. On June 13, the day the Israeli attacks began, Iran had been poised to announce the inauguration of a new enrichment site that the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Grossi, said would be at Isfahan. Grossi, however, has yet to provide more precise information, and may not know more.

This site could be in the tunnels where Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile was largely being stored. But even then, experts do not know whether these tunnels have been destroyed or what is in them has been rendered useless. The attacks on other parts of Isfahan almost certainly destroyed equipment that could convert weapons-grade uranium into arms components. But Iran may have additional such gear stored elsewhere. The country’s failure to answer questions about its past weapons-related uranium work was one of the reasons why the IAEA formally found Iran to be in breach of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty on June 12.

Iran, then, could still have short-term breakout options. It might still have enough uranium and weapons-making equipment. The same is true when it comes to expertise: there are still Iranian nuclear scientists who—as far as anyone knows—are alive and well and working. If Iran’s bomb project is a marathon carried out largely by top experts, the program may be seriously hindered by the deaths of the last two weeks. But if, instead, it is a relay, with scientists working closely together and sharing information, knowledge, and practical skills, the lost expertise may be far less significant. The people who are left could have or quickly acquire all the knowledge they need.

COLLATERAL DAMAGE

Even in the best-case scenario, in which Washington and Israel have set Tehran back by many years, the military campaign could prove costly to U.S. efforts with Iran in other ways. Iran’s parliament, for example, just passed legislation that will greatly reduce its cooperation with the IAEA. That body’s inspectors may not be perfect, and their access to Iran’s program has been incomplete: the Fordow facility, for example, was constructed in Iran for many years before it was disclosed to the agency and subject to inspections. But the IAEA has been of great value nonetheless. The organization alerted the world when Iran’s uranium conversion facility restarted in August 2005 and when Iran began operating its first centrifuges underground at Natanz. Now, the IAEA may lose its access to the country.

The fallout would be serious. In addition to detecting important breakthroughs, IAEA inspectors provided a transparent and trusted check on foreign intelligence findings about Iran’s nuclear program. When the agency provided information on Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile, for instance, independent experts were able to calculate how much nuclear weapons material Tehran had, showing the world that Washington’s claims were not conspiracy theories. Intelligence services also used the IAEA’s public reporting to check their own assessments, giving them greater confidence that they understood Iran’s nuclear program. Perhaps most important, the body’s inspectors were able to provide some confidence to other countries that Iran had not produced nuclear weapons. In other words, the IAEA served its core function: providing the transparency necessary to allow for civil nuclear energy programs to proceed.

Iran may also stop adhering to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which, among other things, commits signatories to not pursuing nuclear weapons and subjects them to IAEA verification in exchange for access to nuclear technology. Although some analysts argue that the NPT was already irrelevant to Iran, given Tehran’s extensive nuclear projects over the years, the country’s violations of the treaty provided the legal justification necessary for the UN Security Council’s Iran sanctions. The NPT also provides a basis for demanding that Iran be transparent about its nuclear program and the requirement that it forswear nuclear weapons. But Tehran can withdraw from the treaty, and it now might. If so, it can make a compelling argument for why it did so. Without the NPT, Iran’s only legal barrier to developing a bomb will be Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s fatwa against it.

Iran might still have enough uranium and weapons-making equipment.

The risks from Israel’s and Washington’s strikes aren’t merely political. If Iran reconstitutes its nuclear program, it will probably do so in more hardened spaces. After all, every time aspects of its nuclear program have been discovered or attacked in the past, Tehran took steps to protect them. It moved its centrifuge component workshops underground in 2021 after they were attacked by drones. (The New York Times and other media outlets reported that Israel was behind this strike; the Israeli government neither confirmed nor denied responsibility.) As the country’s enriched uranium stock came under threat, it placed it inside tunnels. The U.S. Air Force’s Massive Ordnance Penetrator bomb can destroy deeply buried bunkers, but Iran still benefits from keeping its program beneath the earth, especially because Washington may have only a few such bombs left after the attack on Fordow. And open-source reporting suggests Tehran may have moved material out of Fordow before the United States launched its bombings. Moreover, if U.S. and Israeli strikes did not completely destroy all of Iran’s nuclear material and equipment, Iran will now have an opportunity during recovery operations to divert some of the equipment and material that was once under IAEA monitoring while claiming it was destroyed in the attacks. This should worry anyone concerned about a potential Iranian nuclear rebuild.

Finally, the United States may have lost the opportunity to deal with the nuclear program diplomatically. Tehran may still decide to hold talks and even enter into a new deal, but it probably would not trust it: the United States was in the middle of negotiating a new nuclear agreement when Israel, its ally, began its strikes. In fact, analysts do not even understand the full terms of the cease-fire Iran and Israel have reached, including what kind of activities would constitute a breach. It is possible, for example, that Iranian recovery operations—such as sending a bulldozer to reopen Fordow—would be a violation. If so, the United States and Israel might attack Fordow again and reignite the conflict. Trump has signaled that there will be no such need because the Iranian program is, in his words, “totally obliterated.” But it probably isn’t.

BRACE FOR IMPACT

The Israeli and U.S. attacks dealt a blow to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, at least in the near term. But they are clearly not the end of the story. As a result, American policymakers must be prepared for a situation in which Iran can and does make a dash for a weapon.

One plausible near-term scenario is that Iran gathers the remains of its uranium and further enriches it to weapons-usable levels in a new, hardened location in tunnels at Isfahan or Natanz. If Iran possesses the operational equipment needed to do so—of which it does not need much—the country could produce weapons-usable uranium metal in very short order. It could shape that material into the components necessary for a nuclear device. Iran could then package that material with high explosives, giving it a rudimentary bomb for testing purposes at the least.

With a cease-fire in place, Iran could do all this quietly and slowly, especially if it pays no price for reconstruction or recovery. Tehran might take its time building a bomb until it has the process down perfectly. If the cease-fire appeared shaky, it could opt to move more quickly. Even if Iran decides not to move toward nuclear weapons right now, it will almost certainly reconstruct its program in more protected spaces, away from the prying eyes of the IAEA.

Trump may choose to disregard any warnings of an Iranian weapon.

To counter such risks, Israel and the United States will be even more reliant on their intelligence apparatus to detect and track Iran’s work. Their spy agencies may be up to the task; Israel, in particular, has demonstrated that it has deeply penetrated the Iranian nuclear enterprise. But after this conflict, with a heightened sense of insecurity, Iran’s counterintelligence operatives will be on particularly high alert.

Military action may have ultimately been necessary to deal with Iran’s nuclear program. But it always carried risks and complications. Having used force, the United States must now be committed to making sure that it matches the risks it accepted with a commitment to denying Iran a nuclear weapon.

Trump, however, may choose to disregard any warnings of an Iranian weapon. His administration has spent the last few days casting aspersions on any suggestion that Iran’s nuclear program suffered less than total devastation, and he may thus not want to acknowledge, publicly or privately, any warnings to the contrary. Whatever comes next, the world is entering a very uncertain and dangerous phase when it comes to Iran’s nuclear program.

[Foreign Affairs]