U.S. President Donald Trump’s “Operation Midnight Hammer” on June 21 (June 22, Iranian time) may be termed a success story as far as the overall global reaction is concerned.
Not to speak of disenchanted American allies and partners, including the NATO members, who have been terribly upset with the American policies ever since Trump began his second innings, even Russia and China have reacted in a highly subdued manner to the claimed destruction of Iran’s nuclear capacity.
In fact, there seems to be now a global consensus that Iran will never be allowed to have the bomb. Nor, for that matter, the world, including Russia and China, is going to approve of Iran’s retaliatory plan of closing the Strait of Hormuz that would risk vital energy and economic stakes.
But how much real damage in concrete terms the American and Israeli attacks on nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan have made to Iran’s nuclear capacity remains unclear in the absence of precise details.
Has Iran’s nuclear program been decapitated beyond a point of redemption? If not, what are then the American, or for that matter, the Israeli, plans of managing Iran’s degraded nuclear threat?
Reportedly, the B-2s dropped 14 GBU-57s on buried uranium-enrichment sites at Natanz and especially Fordow, which Trump described as the “primary” target.
The Tomahawks struck Isfahan, a complex of facilities where Iran supposedly converts uranium metal into a gaseous compound and makes centrifuges to enrich the gas and store highly enriched uranium (HEU) for making bombs.
It may be noted that when uranium is mined, it is composed of two types of isotopes — Uranium-238 and Uranium-235.
Uranium-238 makes up about 99.3% of the material, while Uranium-235 makes up .7%. Uranium-235 is key to making nuclear weapons, but since there are such small amounts of it in the material’s natural state, scientists increase the percentage of Uranium-235 in the material and separate it from Uranium-238. This is what is known as enriching uranium.
One only needs uranium to be enriched to about 3% to 5% for power plants (civilian use), but above 90% of this is needed for making nuclear weapons.
Concerns that Iran could start making nuclear weapons grew, with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) suspecting that Iran has accumulated more than 400 kg (880 pounds) of uranium enriched to 60%, adequate for making ten bombs.
The IAEA reported on May 31 that Iran is in breach of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action it signed with several major countries, stating that it would not surpass the 3.67% uranium enrichment level limit.
It may also be noted that before June 22, Israel had already hit Natanz and Isfahan, and destroyed much of Iran’s air-defence system, clearing the way for the Americans. But the site in Fordow, buried into a mountain, deep in about half a mile or 800 meters, was beyond the reach of Israeli bombs.
According to the Western strategists, “massive ordnance penetrator” (MOP) alone could have obliterated Fordow. These can burrow through 60 metres of standard concrete, and repeatedly striking the same spot allows them to strike deeper. This was exactly what the Americans did by using B-2s and MOPs.
President Trump has claimed that all of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure has been “obliterated”.
But experts have doubts.
Reportedly. General Dan Caine, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has been noticeably far less bullish in immediate assessments of the results of Saturday’s raids than the President or Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Darya Dolzikova, Senior Research Fellow at London’s Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies, points out that “If Fordow was indeed seriously damaged in the latest round of strikes – which remains unclear – that would certainly be a significant blow to Iran’s ability to produce fissile material for a nuclear weapon. The Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant (FFEP) has been key to Iran’s nuclear programme, enriching uranium to 60%, more efficiently than at Natanz. Further attacks on Natanz and Isfahan, depending on the nature and extent of the damage, would have also helped set the program back further.
“However, questions remain as to where Iran may be storing its already enriched stocks of HEU, as these will have almost certainly been moved to hardened and undisclosed locations, out of the way of potential Israeli or US strikes.
It is also unclear what secret facilities may exist inside Iran that Tehran could use for continued centrifuge production, enrichment, and weapons-relevant activities.
There is also currently no information on the state of the facility at Kolang Gaz La, not far from Natanz, which has been under construction inside a mountainside – reportedly deeper than the FFEP.”
In other words, if Iran has really moved or hidden the 400 kg of uranium enriched to 60%, to a secret place and quickly enriched them to above 90 per cent, the threshold required to manufacture an atomic bomb, the threat will continue, notwithstanding the latest U.S. strikes.
Though it is the Natanz Enrichment Complex that is Iran’s largest nuclear enrichment facility, experts agree that Israel’s attacks earlier last week probably caused significant damage to the centrifuges, if they had been in operation at the time Israeli warplanes knocked out the electricity to the plant.
The same may have been the case with the Isfahan site, the oldest of Iran’s established nuclear research centres that has been operational since the early 1980s. At least 3,000 scientists and engineers reportedly worked at the site, but there was no large-scale enrichment taking place at the facility, according to the IAEA officials.
Of course, Iran has several other nuclear facilities spread across the country. Still, the largest and most crucial are the Bushehr nuclear power plant and the Bandar Abbas uranium production plant. Explosions have been reported near Bushehr in recent weeks, but it is not clear if the facility has been directly hit by Israeli warplanes.
Western reports suggest that radiation levels have not jumped, indicating that Israel may have been seeking to damage the infrastructure around the plant rather than the nuclear reactor itself.
Incidentally, on June 12, Mohammad Eslami, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, had said that Iran had completed the construction of a third enrichment facility in a secret location.
“The new site is fully constructed and located in a secure, invulnerable location,” he said, according to the semi-official Mehr News Agency. “As soon as centrifuge installation and set-up are complete, enrichment will begin.”
If one takes his claim seriously, then Iran’s nuclear capacity being obliterated will always remain debatable.
All told, as Dolzikova says, “ ‘Besides the actual physical capabilities, Iran retains extensive expertise that will allow it to eventually reconstitute what aspects of the programme have been damaged or destroyed. The Iranian nuclear programme is decades old and draws on extensive Iranian indigenous expertise. The physical elimination of the programme’s infrastructure – and even the assassination of Iranian scientists – will not be sufficient to destroy the latent knowledge that exists in the country”.
The point that, thus, emerges is that Iran’s nuclear project has been much more extensive and dispersed than those that Iraq and Syria were suspected to have and bombed by Israel in 1981 and 2007, respectively.
As Nicholas Miller, a non-proliferation expert at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, seems to suggest, unlike in Syria or, for that matter, Iraq, “repeated intervention is required in Iran” if the current regime continues to stay in power.
- Author and veteran journalist Prakash Nanda is Chairman of the Editorial Board of the EurAsian Times and has been commenting on politics, foreign policy, and strategic affairs for nearly three decades. He is a former National Fellow of the Indian Council for Historical Research and a recipient of the Seoul Peace Prize Scholarship.
- VIEWS PERSONAL OF THE AUTHOR
- CONTACT: prakash.nanda (at) hotmail.com
