When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday evening that Israel had struck “Iran’s main enrichment facility in Natanz,” he was signaling the scope of his country’s ambitions in the largest strike it has ever aimed at Iran: It sought to destroy the beating heart of the Iranian nuclear program.
The Natanz facility is where Iran has produced the vast majority of its nuclear fuel — and, in the past three years, much of the near-bomb-grade fuel that has put the country on the threshold of building nuclear weapons.
There are no reports yet of whether Iran’s other major enrichment site, called Fordow, was targeted as well. It is a much harder target, buried deep under a mountain, deliberately designed to be out of Israel’s reach.
As a result, it may take days, or weeks, to answer one of the most critical questions surrounding the attack of Iran’s facilities: How long has Israel set back the Iranian nuclear program? If the program is delayed only a year or two, it may look as if Israel has taken a huge risk for a fairly short-term delay. And among those risks is not only the possibility of a long-lasting war, but also that Iran will withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, take its program underground, and race for a weapon — exactly the outcome Mr. Netanyahu was out to prevent.
History suggests such attacks have unpredictable results. Even the most ingenious attack on the program 15 years ago — a cyberassault that put malware into the system, destroying centrifuges — only slowed Iran for a year or two. And when the program came back, it was bigger than ever.
Over nearly 20 years, Israel and the United States have targeted the thousands of centrifuges that spin inside the Natanz facility, in hopes of choking off the key ingredient Iranian scientists needed to build a nuclear arsenal. Together the two countries developed the Stuxnet worm, the cyberweapon intended to make the centrifuges spin out of control. That operation, code named Olympic Games, was born in George W. Bush’s administration and flourished in Barack Obama’s until the operation was exposed.
Then Israel sabotaged buildings that produced critical parts for the centrifuges, and began assassinating scientists key to the operation. But those were temporary setbacks. Iran recovered quickly. And the centrifuges at Natanz continued to spin, until the 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran forced the country to give up 97 percent of its fuel and slow the enrichment at Natanz to a crawl. That agreement also capped the level of enrichment to a level useful for generating nuclear power but not sufficient to make a bomb.
For three years, it seemed like the threat posed by Natanz had been contained. Most American officials believed that while the agreement had not terminated the program, it had contained it. The output of the Natanz plant was minimal.
But then President Trump pulled the United States out of the accord in 2018, calling the deal a disaster. And within a few years, Iran began revving up the facility, and putting new, far more efficient centrifuges in place. It increased enrichment levels to 60 percent purity — just shy of bomb grade. Experts said it would take only a few weeks to further raise the level to 90 percent, commonly used in atomic weapons.
Iran also made other moves that painted an even bigger target on Natanz. Over the past few months, international inspectors have concluded, Iran sped up its enrichment. On Thursday night — Friday morning in Israel — Mr. Netanyahu used its recent progress to argue that Iran now has enough fuel for nine weapons and that the country could “weaponize” that fuel within a year. That accords with what inspectors reported a week ago.
Mr. Netanyahu made the argument in an address to the Israeli people that the intelligence suggested the risk to Israel of not acting was too high. That judgment will be long debated — along with the question of whether the diplomacy that Mr. Trump had underway might have contained Iran’s capability, as the accord a decade ago did.
But it is still too early to know how much damage Israel did. Natanz is not deeply buried, but the centrifuge halls are 50 yards or more beneath the desert, and covered by highly reinforced concrete. The question is whether the centrifuges were destroyed.
Israel’s attacks went beyond the facilities. It also sought to decapitate both the military and nuclear leadership.
For years, Israel targeted top nuclear scientists individually. Some were killed by sticky bombs attached to their car doors. The country’s chief nuclear scientist was killed in a robot-assisted assassination. But some of the strikes Thursday night appeared to wipe out their headquarters and living spaces, part of an apparent effort to kill the personnel en masse.
One mystery still surrounding the attack is whether Israel made any attempt to hit the deepest, most protected facility among its sprawling nuclear complexes: the enrichment center called Fordow. It is on an Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps base, and is deep within a mountain — nearly a half-mile under the surface, according to Rafael Mariano Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who has visited the site.
“If you don’t get Fordow,” Brett McGurk, who has served as Middle East coordinator for several American presidents of both parties, “you haven’t eliminated their ability to produce weapons-grade material.”
American officials have said Israel does not have the bunker-busting bombs to get at that facility, where Iran’s most advanced centrifuges have been installed. And if Fordow survives the attacks, then there is a good chance the key technology of the country’s the nuclear program will survive with it.
David E. Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy and national security challenges.
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