An axiom in the national security world says you cannot bomb a country into giving up its nuclear weapons programs. The attack itself only reinforces a country’s determination to build the ultimate deterrent.
Ten days after President Trump deployed America’s most powerful bunker busters and missiles from an offshore submarine to take out three of Iran’s most critical nuclear sites, that proposition is about to be tested in real life.
On Wednesday, in what may be a glimpse of the future, Iran’s president signed a new law suspending all cooperation with United Nations nuclear inspectors. The move violates Iran’s obligations as a signer of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
But after American B-2 Spirit bombers flew roughly 7,000 miles nonstop to attack facilities that came to represent Iran’s determination to take on America and Israel, such legal niceties may not seem as important to the Iranians as they once did. And a new chapter in the quarter-century saga of Iran’s nuclear aspirations may now be starting, one in which the country’s main objective is to keep the world guessing about how fast it can recover from a devastating setback — and whether it has the uranium, the hidden technological capability and the will to race for a bomb.
By any short-term measure — the only yardsticks the White House wants to talk about — the mission in the early hours of June 22 was a success. No regional war broke out, as past presidents who considered similar military action always feared. Even skeptics about how long the Iranians were set back — six months? three years? — acknowledge that the 18,000 centrifuges that were spinning at supersonic speeds, producing near-bomb-grade uranium at a record pace, are now inoperable. Most experts believe they were destroyed.
Mr. Trump talks as if this were a one-and-done operation. “I don’t see them being back involved in the nuclear business anymore,” Mr. Trump said at the NATO summit in The Hague last week, as if Iran’s aspirations had disappeared beneath the rubble of Fordo and Natanz.
It may not be that simple. As Washington and Tehran stumble toward a post-bombing reality, the White House has avoided any public description of a longer-term strategy. Mr. Trump has hinted occasionally about new negotiations that could lead to the lifting of sanctions — but presumably only in return for Iran’s commitment to dismantle whatever is left of its nuclear program and let inspectors roam the country verifying that work. That does not seem to match the mood in Tehran right now. Not surprisingly, Mr. Trump has also said he is “absolutely” willing to strike again if there are signs that the country is trying to rebuild its capabilities. Israeli officials refer to that approach as “mowing the lawn.”
But that suggests a constant state of low-level war. And it creates the likelihood that Iran will use the mystery around the fate and whereabouts of its near-bomb-grade uranium, and a prospect of a secret cache of uncompleted new centrifuges, as leverage.
If before the strike Iran seemed able to race for a bomb but was not yet quite ready, after the strike it is dependent on playing a giant game of nuclear three-card monte. Iran will keep shuffling its nuclear assets around, as the Mossad, American intelligence agencies and the banned U.N. inspectors will constantly be looking for human intelligence or satellite evidence of the tunnels and caves where the projects might be hidden.
“After the strike the old problem remains: Iran has enriched uranium, it has centrifuges and there are no inspectors,” said Jake Sullivan, who helped refine strike plans against the Iranian program when he served as national security adviser under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who decided against using them.
“With mowing the lawn, you have uncertainty, instability and continued military action,” he said. “Yet if you try to do a deal, President Trump will confront the same problem he had before: Do you insist on complete dismantlement, which Iran probably won’t agree to even now? Or try to contain the program,” allowing for some form of low-level, highly inspected enrichment, “in a way that gives you confidence they can’t go for a nuke?”
With their main production facilities buried beneath the rubble, the only leverage the Iranians have these days is the suggestion — with no proof — that their stockpile of 10 or so bombs’ worth of fuel survived, and their surviving nuclear scientists have access to it. Maybe they are bluffing. But it is the best card they have to play. And the only way to be sure, Mr. Sullivan noted, is “with a deal, one that ensures every inch of the program is inspected.”
Other experts agree. “We can’t yet judge how likely the covert nuclear weapons production scenario really is,” said Robert Einhorn, a former American diplomat and Brookings Institution nuclear expert who dealt with the Iranian program a decade ago. But, he noted, “it is a potential pathway for Iran building a small nuclear arsenal relatively soon, and so we must do what we can to block it,” chiefly getting International Atomic Energy Agency monitors back into the country’s widely distributed nuclear facilities, including two suspected new enrichment centers.
Iranian officials have accused the agency’s director general, Rafael Mariano Grossi, of complicity in the attacks. Mr. Grossi says he had no involvement or advance warning.
Early talk of a meeting between Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, and Mr. Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, to reach a post-strike nuclear deal — presumably a more restrictive one than was on the table before the attack — has melted away, at least for now.
The Iranians insist they want assurances they will not be attacked again, during negotiations. It is unclear they would believe such a commitment even if it is offered, since Mr. Trump declared in mid-June that he was giving them two weeks to respond to a final American offer. The B-2 bombers were over their targets two days later.
With Iran’s leaders portraying the end of the conflict with Israel a victory, and downplaying the damage done by the U.S. strikes, experts see little hope of an accord that would satisfy both sides.
“They are not going to agree to unconditional surrender next week or even next month,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, using the term Mr. Trump employed before he ordered military action. “I think that’s a process which plays out the more we tighten the economic grip on their ability to export oil.”
The central question, of course, is what lesson the Iranians emerge with as they survey the damage done.
Mr. Trump and his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, have declared there is only one lesson for the Iranians: Their nuclear program is over. That is why Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth are so invested in the narrative that the program was “obliterated,” suggesting it could never be revived.
Most experts expect Iran to come to a different conclusion, that the lesson of the past 10 days is that countries that inch toward a nuclear weapon — but stop short of crossing the line, as Iran did — get bombed. In contrast, countries that race for an arsenal do not.
The Israelis bombed the Osirak reactor in 1981 to keep Iraq from getting the bomb, though Saddam Hussein resurrected the program before the first gulf war, only to have it discovered and dismantled. (He famously failed to build it anew before the American-led invasion in 2003.)
A little more than two decades later, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi gave up his nascent nuclear program, before many of the components were unboxed, a move he may have regretted as he was chased across Libya and killed eight years later.
In 2007, Israeli jets took out a Syrian nuclear reactor that was being constructed with the help of North Korea, to prevent the Assad government from going down the nuclear road. In all three cases, the countries had not yet made it to the cusp of a bomb.
But Iran may conclude from the events of the past 10 days that its wiser choice for the future is to follow the path of North Korea. Rather than walk up to the nuclear line, it stepped over it, conducting its first nuclear test in 2006, when President George W. Bush was in office. Since then North Korea has developed an arsenal of 60 or more nuclear weapons, experts say, and it is creeping up on a capability to reach the United States with its missiles — one of the reasons Mr. Trump is pushing so hard for a “Golden Dome” defensive shield.
One former senior intelligence official noted that if Iran already had nuclear weapons, rather than inching toward them, neither Israel nor the United States would have taken the risk of attacking.
It is a mistake, he added, that the Iranians are not likely to make twice.
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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