Centrifuges at the Fordo uranium enrichment plant in Iran are “no longer operational” after the United States attacked the facility with bunker-busting bombs, Rafael Grossi, the head of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, said on French radio on Thursday.
Inspectors from the watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, have been unable to gain access to the nuclear sites since the strikes. Mr. Grossi told Radio France Internationale in an interview that while evaluating the damage from the strikes using satellite images alone is difficult, given the power of the bombs dropped on Fordo and the technical characteristics of the plant “we already know that these centrifuges are no longer operational.”
Centrifuges, which are spinning machines used to enrich uranium, require a high-degree of precision and are vulnerable to intense vibrations, he said. “There was no escaping significant physical damage,” Mr. Grossi added. “So we can come to a fairly accurate technical conclusion.”
He said, however, that it would be “too much” to assert that Iran’s nuclear program had been “wiped out” after the Israeli and American bombing campaign. Mr. Grossi noted that not all of Iran’s nuclear sites had been struck, and said Iranian officials had told him that they would take “protective measures” for the uranium they had already enriched.
Still, he added, the nuclear program has definitely suffered “enormous damage.”
The comments from Mr. Grossi, the director general of the I.A.E.A., came amid questions over the effectiveness of the U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites.
President Trump has insisted that the bombing “obliterated” the Fordo site, a position that some in his administration have continued to defend after the leak of a classified, preliminary U.S. intelligence report that found that the attack had set back Iran’s nuclear program by only a few months. The C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe, later said that the strikes had “severely damaged” Iran’s nuclear program.
On Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave more details about the planning and execution of the U.S. strikes. But they offered no new assessments of the damage inflicted on the sites or on the state of Iran’s nuclear program.
In the interview with the French radio station, Mr. Grossi declined to say how far Iran’s nuclear program had been set back by the strikes.
“Perhaps decades, depending on the type of activity or objective,” he said, echoing comments made by Mr. Trump this week at a NATO summit in the Netherlands.
“It’s true that with these reduced capacities,” Mr. Grossi added, “it will be much more difficult for Iran to continue at the same pace as before.”
One of the main purposes of the agency is to monitor nuclear activity in Iran and other countries, including those who have signed on to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. But the agency’s relations with Iran were at a low point even before Israel attacked the country on June 13.
I.A.E.A. inspectors remained in Iran throughout the war but were not able to gain access to the nuclear sites amid the fighting. And it was not clear when or even if they would be allowed to do so again now that a cease-fire has taken hold.
Iran’s Parliament, which is dominated by hard-liners, voted on Wednesday for a bill to “suspend” cooperation with the agency and bar its inspectors from the country. While the bill would still need approval from a higher Iranian authority before it can take effect, its passage was seen as a show of defiance from Tehran.
But as a signatory of the Nonproliferation Treaty, Mr. Grossi noted in the interview, Iran is “required to have an inspection system.” He urged the Iranian authorities not to “unilaterally” reject inspections, “because otherwise we’d be on the brink of another major crisis.”
Mr. Grossi, who said Iran’s cooperation with the I.A.E.A. before the war was “limited,” said that he had reached out to Iran’s foreign minister to discuss a potential return of agency inspectors to Iranian nuclear sites but had yet to receive a response.
Aurelien Breeden is a reporter for The Times in Paris, covering news from France.
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