As the dust continues to settle after the U.S. airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, which were meant to destroy Tehran’s ability to build nuclear weapons but did not apparently succeed entirely, one question looms above all: What did the United States gain from walking away from the nuclear deal with Iran seven years ago?
The Trump administration insists that the strikes, including 14 massive “bunker-buster” bombs dropped on three key installations, completely destroyed Iran’s nuclear program. Yet a preliminary assessment by the U.S. intelligence community concluded that the attacks did little lasting damage to the Iranian facilities and set the nuclear program back by only a few months. U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has reiterated the “flawless” nature of the unprecedented operation and reaffirmed that the attacks rendered inoperable Iran’s main underground nuclear facility at Fordow. CIA Director John Ratcliffe, like some Israeli sources, also stressed that fresh assessments of the attack indicate that Iran’s nuclear program has been set back by years.
But the Trump administration has acknowledged that it does not know where Iran’s large stockpile of almost half a metric ton of highly enriched uranium is—reports and satellite imagery suggest that Iran may have moved the cache before last weekend’s airstrikes. That pile of uranium is enriched to 60 percent purity, which in enrichment terms is very close to the 90 percent purity referred to as weapons-grade. The administration, like the rest of the international community, is also in the dark about how many advanced centrifuges Iran has or where they are or how many additional ones Tehran can build. All the building blocks, in other words, for an Iranian bomb appear to remain in place, but now Iran has more reason than ever to scramble to put those pieces together.
On balance then, seven years after the first Trump administration withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal, the net result has been a sharp and sustained increase in Iranian nuclear enrichment over several years, followed by a few weeks of desultory diplomacy and capped by historic airstrikes that may have left the Iranian nuclear program reeling but still functioning.
“We have to judge by where we were in 2018 and where we are today. And I think today is a lot more dangerous and Iran is closer to getting a bomb,” said Jon Wolfsthal, the director of global risk at the Federation of American Scientists who worked on nonproliferation for the Obama administration.
The U.S. strikes, a complement to almost two weeks of lower-intensity Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities and regime nerve centers, were the capstone of U.S. President Donald Trump’s approach to Iran that began in his first term. The throughline is a determination that Iran cannot develop a nuclear weapon or even the building blocks for it, such as any enriched uranium. That helped drive Trump’s decision to walk away from the Obama-era 2015 multilateral Iran nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which established agreed-on limits to Iran’s nuclear ambitions in exchange for relief from crushing economic sanctions.
Many U.S. Republicans and Iran hawks faulted the JCPOA because they argued it offered Tehran too much economic relief, only provided a partial and time-limited constraint on Iran’s ability to enrich uranium, and did nothing to address either Iran’s regional destabilization efforts or its sweeping advances in ballistic missiles, which have become a serious security threat for Israel.
But the nuclear deal, for all its flaws, did put a cap on Iran’s uranium enrichment efforts, limiting it to the extremely low levels used in civilian nuclear reactors. The deal also limited Iran’s ability to install more advanced centrifuges that could enrich more uranium more quickly. And, perhaps most importantly, the deal established a robust monitoring and verification regime granting international atomic inspectors unprecedented access to Iran’s nuclear facilities. The deal, with which Iran was in compliance at the time of Trump’s withdrawal in 2018, had promised to put Iran’s nuclear program in a well-watched cage for at least a decade.
“Now, we are having a debate about whether Fordow was set back by a few weeks or a few months. Under JCPOA, Fordow was neutered for 15 years. So it is a simple math problem. The diplomatic solution was durable and very viable,” said Ali Vaez, the Iran project director at the International Crisis Group who was involved in the JCPOA negotiations.
Dueling assessments over the strikes’ efficacy continue. The International Atomic Energy Agency said on Thursday that the shocks of the heavy U.S. ordnance appear to have knocked out the advanced centrifuges at Fordow, even as Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, described the nuclear impact of U.S. strikes as insignificant in his first remarks since the weekend attacks. But what seems clear is that Iran’s stockpile of more than 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium remains unaccounted for, and that is enough fissile material to assemble nine bombs.
“If we didn’t actually incapacitate the highly enriched uranium, then the threat remains out there,” said Richard Nephew, another former Obama national security official now at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.
While uranium at 60 percent enrichment would be enough for a crude bomb, Iran would need to enrich it to 90 percent purity to develop a more sophisticated weapon. The fastest way to do that would be with advanced centrifuges, especially the so-called IR-6, the most advanced centrifuges that Iran has installed in operational cascades. Since 2021, international inspectors have had no visibility into Iran’s production of new centrifuges, and they don’t know how many Iran has or how many more it could build and install in order to accelerate the final enrichment it needs to sprint for a bomb. Manufacturing centrifuges requires some special materials, such as carbon fiber and very specialized steel, but that’s already likely in the warehouse somewhere underground.
“It is highly likely that they have been storing precursors for centrifuges, and they already said they had a new underground facility,” Wolfsthal said. “It’s entirely possible they are enriching uranium and we don’t know it.”
The combination of U.S. strikes and what appears to be at least a partial survival of the Iranian nuclear program and its constituent components means that Iran may be closer to a bomb than it ever was before or during the years of the JCPOA, when the so-called breakout time for a bomb was assessed at about a year. The U.S. intelligence community concluded as recently as this March that Iran was not actively seeking to weaponize nuclear material, but those calculations may be out the window now that Khamenei has invoked the specter of “Iran’s surrender.” Now the breakout is breakneck.
“If Iran still has more than 400 kilos and a bunch of IR-6 centrifuges, the sneakout option is available more than ever before,” Vaez said.
Looking back, the United States (and Israel) would likely have been in a better position to contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions by maintaining the negotiated limits on its ability to enrich uranium. But since 2018, and especially in the past few years, Iran has taken advantage of the lack of restraint to make advances that cannot be undone even by a new diplomatic deal. There is no way to put the advances in nuclear know-how, or the accumulation of many more advanced centrifuges, back in the bottle.
“You cannot make a good-faith argument that we are better off without the JCPOA,” Nephew said.
On Wednesday, Trump said the United States and Iran would resume their indirect talks aimed at resolving the nuclear impasse next week. Five rounds have already foundered on familiar red lines, including Iran’s insistence that it has a right to domestic enrichment, and a sixth was canceled following the Israeli bombardment. Further talks, Vaez noted, are an implicit U.S. acknowledgement that the mission was not entirely accomplished.
“If the U.S. were sure they had obliterated the nuclear program, there would be nothing to negotiate about. But because of that outstanding question, they are keen to get back to the table,” he said.
He hopes that both sides can soften their red lines, with Iran perhaps pausing its enrichment while the United States musters an international coalition for regional uranium enrichment that would allow all sides to save face and avoid the ultimate showdown.
“The mistrust is deeper than it has ever been, but it must always be measured against the alternatives,” Vaez said. “Iran is very vulnerable—they are in dire economic straits, their air defenses have been decimated, their proxies are on their knees. So even if they don’t trust the Trump administration, there is not a better option for them now.”
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