Israeli and American strikes appear to have created a major roadblock to Iran’s manufacture of atomic bombs, even if its cache of uranium fuel remains untouched, analysts say.
That’s because attacks on one of the sites, in Isfahan, shattered gear that Iran was preparing to use for the transformation of enriched uranium gas into dense metal. That process, known as metallization, is among the last steps in making the explosive core of an atomic bomb.
Some nuclear experts argue that the demolished gear might never have existed but for President Trump’s abandoning a restrictive nuclear deal in his first term that President Barack Obama had negotiated.
Mr. Trump and his allies faulted the 2015 Obama deal as preserving Iran’s ability to produce as much nuclear fuel as it wanted after 2030. But some experts see that criticism as ignoring a far more immediate threat. They note that Iran ramped up work at Isfahan only after Mr. Trump canceled the deal, and that now, in effect, he has been forced to neutralize a danger of his own making.
“It’s unlikely that we would have had to bomb uranium metal production facilities today if the first Trump administration had not pulled out of the Iran deal,” said Robert Einhorn, a former arms control official who worked on U.S. negotiations with Iran during the Obama administration and is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Michael S. Lubell, a professor of physics at the City College of New York who has held federal clearances that gave him access to government secrets on nuclear arms, agreed. President Trump “created this mess,” he said. “There’s no question that the Iran deal was working. He tore it up, created a mess and is now saying, ‘I’m the savior.’”
Asked about the criticisms, a White House spokeswoman said that Mr. Trump was “right about everything” related to the conflict in Iran, including his contempt for the 2015 accord.
“The United States should have never entered into Obama’s terrible Iran deal,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement. In attacking Iran’s nuclear sites, she added, “President Trump did what past presidents have only talked about. Iran’s nuclear program is obliterated, a historic ceasefire has been brokered, and the entire world is safer.”
Analysts are now closely examining the Israeli and American campaign’s impacts. Many lace their assessments with caveats, given Iran’s decades of planning for open conflict and its creation of clandestine sites meant to advance its nuclear work in secret. Some evidence suggests that Iran developed plans for duplicate covert sites that might serve as emergency backups.
Rafi Meron, who served as deputy head of Israel’s National Security Council, said part of the war’s rationale was Iran’s progress on preparing uranium for use in a weapon. Israel’s planners saw advances in those abilities, he added, as bringing Tehran closer to obtaining a nuclear weapon in a short period of time.
“It was decided to go to war in order to fundamentally change this situation,” he said.
Some early assessments of the war cast the Israeli and American strikes as setting Iran’s nuclear program back only a few months but apparently without specifying which part of its nuclear infrastructure could be quickly rebuilt.
Now, however, nuclear experts say the destruction of Iran’s metallization plants has seemingly ended Tehran’s near-term ability to make a bomb’s explosive core. Rebuilding the crucial sites, they add, will most likely take years.
“It’s a bottleneck,” said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a private group in Washington that tracks nuclear proliferation. “They have to rebuild it.”
On Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio made the same argument. He said the destruction of the conversion plants — an alternative name for the metallization sites — set the Iranians back for years, not a few months as claimed in a preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency report on the war’s impact.
“You can’t do a nuclear weapon without a conversion facility,” said Mr. Rubio, who serves simultaneously as Mr. Trump’s interim national security adviser. “We can’t even find where it is, where it used to be on the map,” he added. “The whole thing is blackened out. It’s gone. It’s wiped out.”
The seeming consensus on the metallization issue is unusual as experts and intelligence agencies often clash on threat and damage assessments. Some critics of the war say Iran long worked on metallization at other sites, citing, for instance, Varamin, a research station that Iran dismantled and sanitized in 2004. But such sites appear to have been minor, unfinished or forsaken compared to what became the giant complex at Isfahan.
Iran began its nuclear weapons push four decades ago in great secrecy. International inspectors first visited Iran in 2003 and found a maze of suspicious work.
Many detailed warnings focused on Tehran’s growing ability to use centrifuges to enrich, or raise, the concentrations of an extremely rare type of mined uranium. Relatively few reports focused on the final stages of bomb making, known collectively as weaponization.
In 2015, the Obama administration announced a comprehensive deal with Iran. It included a ban on converting uranium gas from its whirling centrifuges into uranium metal that could form a bomb’s core.
“It was prohibited,” Corey Hinderstein, a nuclear nonproliferation expert in the Biden administration now at the Carnegie Endowment, said of the metallization step. “A lot of people talk about how fast you can get to weapons-grade uranium. But that’s not the end of the process.”
In the 2015 pact’s short life, she added, Washington saw no signs that the Iranians were moving forward on metallization.
In 2018, Mr. Trump abandoned the Obama-era deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. He ridiculed its nuclear restrictions as “a giant fiction.”
Soon after, Iran, free of constraints, started to build plants that could convert uranium gas into metal. In late 2020, it publicly announced plans to begin the process.
In response, the German, French and British foreign ministries issued a joint statement of deep concern. “Iran has no credible civilian use for uranium metal,” the nations said. “The production of uranium metal has potentially grave military implications.”
In February 2021, the International Atomic Energy Agency, which was then closely monitoring Iran’s nuclear sites, reported that the complex at Isfahan had in fact begun to make uranium metal.
The amount was minuscule — 3.6 grams, a tiny fraction of an ounce. But nuclear experts saw it as marking a dramatic escalation in the gravity of the Iranian weapons threat.
In the war’s first days, Israel bombed Iran’s metallization sites at Isfahan and later restruck the industrial complex, which is made up of scores of large buildings and lesser structures.
On June 13, the Israel Defense Forces said two main sites of the Isfahan complex had been destroyed — one a plant for producing “metallic uranium,” the other “infrastructure” for turning enriched uranium into nuclear arms. Israel’s annotated satellite photo showed the targeted buildings and said the attacks centered on the “stage after uranium enrichment in the process of producing nuclear weapons.”
In an apparent reference to the destroyed “infrastructure,” the International Atomic Energy Agency reported on June 19 that the Israeli strikes hit “the enriched uranium metal processing facility, which was under construction.”
The United States then entered the war. On June 22, a Navy submarine in the region fired more than a dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles at Isfahan, widening the destruction.
Eric Brewer, a former government Iran analyst who worked in both the Obama and Trump administrations and is now at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, said the war overall was remarkable in its surprising mix of ambiguity and achievement. It left open questions about the fate of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile but turned Iran’s metallization complex into heaps of ashes.
“Israel has had more success against the weaponization aspects of the program than in destroying the enrichment part,” he said. “That’s notable.”
William J. Broad has reported on science at The Times since 1983. He is based in New York.
Ronen Bergman is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in Tel Aviv.
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