Before the weekend’s U.S.-led strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, most Washington policy experts—including Donald Trump’s first defense secretary—believed such a move was unwise, could push Iran’s nuclear efforts underground, and might accelerate its development of a nuclear weapon. It remains unclear just how much damage was done by the bunker-busters and Tomahawks on Saturday, which followed Israeli strikes with lighter weapons. But the strikes alone—whether isolated or sustained—are unlikely to curb Iran’s ambitions.
On Saturday night, the president described the strikes as “a spectacular military success” that “totally obliterated” the Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan nuclear facilities.
Satellite imagery from Maxar shows bomb craters, blocked tunnel entrances, and damage to some surface features. But there’s no way to know if Trump’s assessment is accurate, Pranay Reddy Vaddi, a former special assistant to President Biden and senior director for arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation at the National Security Council, told Defense One via email.
“If the deeper reaches of Fordow survive, Iran is able to enrich, and there’s no monitoring anymore because Iran suspends any IAEA access, that’s a bad outcome and may require further U.S. action—entanglement of a high-risk nature—if the locations are beyond the reach of [Massive Ordnance Penetrator] bombs,” wrote Vaddi, now a senior nuclear fellow at the MIT Center for Nuclear Security Policy.
“Iran will retain substantial know-how as it relates to enrichment and possibly nuclear weaponization. An asymmetric and worrisome approach by Iran could be to share this knowledge with non-state actors or future proliferators looking to build a nuclear program,” he wrote.
No matter how damaged the sites may be, Vaddi wrote, Iran will likely continue relevant research discreetly “while retaining or eventually repairing some enrichment capability to ensure there’s enough material to get a bomb’s worth of 90% [enriched uranium].”
Even if the strike “obliterated” the three facilities, the best-case scenario is a delay of “some years” to Iran’s nuclear-enrichment efforts, one former U.S. nuclear security official said.
And there’s no way for the United States to say conclusively that even that has been achieved. The reason, the official said, stems from Trump’s 2018 decision to pull the United States out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA. That deal, forged under the Obama administration, gave the U.S. a much greater ability to monitor Iran’s nuclear development. And, importantly, Iran was in compliance with the deal before Trump canceled it.
“We don’t have the monitoring and verification that we had back during the JCPOA. So if I were the Iranians, I would not be putting that in one single nuclear facility,” the former nuclear security official said.
Because Iran is still a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, it remains obligated to allow some international inspections. And the former nuclear security official said that IAEA inspectors were actually in Tehran on the night of the U.S. strikes.
“All of that is in question now, in terms of what will Iran do next,” the official said.
Vaddi offered a similar assessment: the United States and the world will likely remain in a state of uncertainty regarding Iran’s capabilities.
“I suspect [Iran] will be much more quiet about their intentions moving forward, particularly if they are able to recover critical components of their program from Natanz, Fordow, and Esfahan and reconstitute an enrichment/weapons effort. If I had to guess, Iran will probably ghost the U.S. in talks,” he said.
Tehran’s options are also limited. The collapse of the regime’s proxy forces in Gaza (Hamas), Lebanon (Hezbollah), and Syria (the Assad regime) was at least as significant a factor in Israel’s decision to strike as the 60-percent uranium enrichment threshold reportedly reached in March, according to former Israeli intelligence chief Amos Yadlin.
Vaddi said Iran “may be at the weakest point right now since embarking upon its nuclear program, if not since the revolution.” But in order to avoid appearing toothless to an increasingly dissatisfied population, Iran is likely to increase hostile activity in the region in retaliation for the strikes. That retaliation could include additional rocket launches at Israel, disruption of shipping in the Strait of Hormuz—which the regime may already be preparing for—strikes against U.S. military targets in the region via Iraqi militant groups, and other isolated responses. These may become part of a new, more violent “normal” across the Middle East.
However, Vaddi described Iran’s options as “pretty bad.”
They include:
- Accept a deal with zero enrichment and give up any nuclear ambition, which means Israel or the United States can act with impunity against Iran anytime they wish and Iran will be far away from a bomb;
- Ignore diplomacy, try to reconstitute their program in secret. “In this scenario they are running the risks of the U.S. and Israel attacking again, of course… so this only works if they feel confident they can protect their program.” Russia or China could play a role in that assurance;
- Negotiate a deal with the White House that allows for gradual phasing out of enrichment activities. “I don’t see this as likely,” he said.
Much now depends on the degree to which China or Russia chooses to intervene on Iran’s behalf. Iran’s foreign minister is reportedly flying to Russia to make the case for greater Kremlin support. On Sunday, Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, said that “a number of countries are ready to directly supply Iran with their own nuclear warheads.” But Medvedev threatens nuclear confrontation somewhat regularly.
“Iran is finding out now that Russia does indeed have its back—but only rhetorically. Medvedev’s crazy rants on X aside, it is unlikely to receive any substantive help from Moscow,” Dmitri Alperovitch, chairman of the Silverado Policy Accelerator, a geopolitics think-tank in Washington, told Defense One.
Both the former nuclear security official and Vaddi said that the best course of action for the United States now is for Trump to attempt to reconstitute something like the Iran nuclear deal he walked away from in his first term. Some reporting out today suggests Trump was actually open to the idea and had planned a trip to Turkey to pursue some kind of new Iran deal—but that was before the strikes.
“I feel like he kind of gave up quickly there at the end,” the former official said.
“A comprehensive JCPOA-like or DPRK Agreed Framework approach could be resumed,” Vaddi said, but added that Iranian fears of continued U.S. and Israeli military action make that less likely.
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