I’ve spent the past several days telling incredulous reporters that Israel’s bombing campaign against Iran, even with help from the United States, looked anemic—and that it would, at best, set Iran’s nuclear program back by several months, maybe a year if we were lucky.
Now CNN, the New York Times, Reuters, and even a sweating Fox News are reporting on the conclusions of a five-page classified assessment of the strikes that was prepared by the United States’ Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). It turns out that I may have been overestimating the effectiveness of the bombing campaign. That report indicated that the strike has set Iran’s nuclear program back by one to two months on the low end and less than a year on the high end. (The CIA estimate that it would take Iran “years” to rebuild the facilities that were destroyed is beside the point, since no one thinks Iran will do that.)
The DIA assessment relies on both satellite imagery and signals intelligence. People such as myself, working with open-source information, can’t eavesdrop on Iranian phone calls, but I can look at satellite imagery. And I see the same thing.
When Israel started its bombing campaign against Iran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went out of his way to highlight material, saying that “Iran has produced enough highly enriched uranium for nine atom bombs—nine.” This material is the MacGuffin in our tale of woe. Iran would have to further enrich this material to weapons grade, but it could have done so quickly, in a matter of about three weeks, at the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant.
Where is that material now? According to the U.S. intelligence assessment, Iran moved it early on in the conflict, likely to a secret location. That, by the way, is precisely what the Iranians told Rafael Grossi, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). U.S. officials, no doubt embarrassed by the fact that they had no idea where the material went, tried a number of ridiculous explanations. Vice President J.D. Vance claimed that it was buried. Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed that trucks couldn’t move in Iran without being almost immediately targeted by Israel, even though there are numerous satellite images showing trucks arriving at the facilities, followed by images of more trucks covering the entrances with dirt. We now know that the DIA thinks the material is on the lam.
If Iran dashes to a bomb, it will have to further enrich this material and eventually convert it from its current form—gas—into metal hemispheres that can be assembled in a bomb. These steps are called conversion and casting. Vance and others have sought to downplay the dangers of the missing material by claiming that Israel and the United States had completely eliminated Iran’s ability to enrich uranium and fabricate uranium metal.
Even before the latest DIA assessment, it was clear that this was false and that Iran retained a significant ability to reconstitute its uranium enrichment program.
Shortly before the bombing campaign began, there was a contentious meeting of the IAEA board of governors on June 12, from which several important items of information emerged. This meeting has largely been forgotten the rush of events that followed the bombing campaign, which we now know had been long planned and was on hold until the expiration of the 60-day window that U.S. President Donald Trump claimed he gave to Iran.
During that meeting, Grossi indicated that the IAEA had “lost continuity of knowledge in relation to the production and current inventory of centrifuges, rotors and bellows … which it will not be possible to restore.” What that means, practically, is that the IAEA no longer knows how many centrifuges Iran has stockpiled or where they are all stored. Iran could use any centrifuges in storage to replace centrifuges that have been destroyed or to set up new centrifuge facilities.
In addition to whatever centrifuges Iran already has, it also can make more. In recent years, Iran has constructed a giant underground facility near Natanz, under the picturesquely named Pickaxe Mountain (Kuh-e Kolang Gaz La). After Israel conducted a 2021 attack that sabotaged a nearby workshop that made centrifuges, Iran moved the production equipment here. Israel and the United States didn’t strike this underground workshop at Pickaxe Mountain, but Israel did strike the empty buildings elsewhere that used to house the equipment. Perhaps they used a time machine.
Where would Iran install these centrifuges? The assessment reportedly states that Iran “maintains secret nuclear facilities that were not targeted in the strike and remain operational.” One of those sites, according to Jennifer Griffin at Fox News—a really good reporter who asks tough questions—is the so-called third site for enrichment.
Yes, there is a third site for enrichment beside Fordow and Natanz, which the U.S. hit. After the IAEA board of governors found Iran in violation of its obligations under its safeguards agreement, Iran announced that it had completed construction of a new centrifuge facility in a “secure location” and was ready to begin installing centrifuges there. Iran invited the IAEA to inspect the facility, but then the bombing happened.
The location of this centrifuge facility is not publicly known, although Grossi has said that it is near Esfahan. Neither Israel nor the United States attempted to attack this facility, as best I can tell. Iran could start installing centrifuges there any day now.
Iran has, historically, been able to install one to two cascades of centrifuges a week. (A cascade is set of centrifuges, usually about 170.) The country could install a Fordow-sized replacement facility in less than three months. The first bomb’s worth of material would be available two to three days after that.
There may be other potential enrichment sites. In 2010, when Iran revealed the Fordow enrichment plant, it also claimed that it planned to construct 10 such sites. While U.S. officials at the time thought that was bluster, a few months later, Iran indicated that it planned to start construction on two more facilities buried deep underground in the following year. It seems likely that Iran’s new facility was constructed in this time period but not brought into operation until now.
Surprisingly, one of Iran’s options is to reinstall the centrifuges at Fordow. The Defense Intelligence Agency report concludes that while the strike damaged the electrical system and collapsed the entrance tunnels, the underground enrichment hall remains intact. This helps explain why all these other underground facilities weren’t attacked. They are even deeper than Fordow. I guess the U.S. is going to need a bigger MOP.
It’s not clear where Iran would turn this material into a bomb. While the aboveground buildings at the uranium conversion facility have been destroyed, the tunnels nearby appear to be untouched. Iran also has a large underground facility outside Tehran, called the Shahid Boroujerdi project, which is next to the military site called Parchin. This tunnel complex was originally constructed to convert uranium hexafluoride into metal and cast the metal hemispheres for nuclear weapons. Iran never brought that facility into operation, although that may change now. While Israel struck other parts of the Parchin military site, the Shahid Boroujerdi tunnel—like the other underground facilities—remains untouched.
All told, Iran likely retains the 900 pounds of highly enriched uranium that the IAEA said Iran had produced, as well as an extensive network of underground facilities to produce centrifuges, enrich the material further, and assemble it into a small stockpile of nuclear weapons if that’s what it chooses to do. It’s no surprise that the DIA thinks the program hasn’t been set back all that much.
One to two months! Even if the program was delayed two to three years, as some Israelis claim, the much-maligned 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) delayed Iran’s program by many times that. Opponents of the diplomatic solution complained that many of its provisions sunsetted after 10 or 15 years. (And even this claim was misleading, because many other important provisions were intended to last forever.)
Yet these same people who complained that 10 or 15 years wasn’t long enough for a deal are now forming up to cheer a measly few months of delay by bombing—a delay, mind you, for which they have absolutely no plan what to do with, other than to do it all again when Netanyahu’s poll numbers start to slip. I don’t blame them—they’ve never wanted a diplomatic solution, just regime change—but I don’t understand how they get away with it. We hold treaties to impossibly exacting standards, as though any agreement made by humans can be perfect, but then we grade military operations on a curve.
While a lot of experts focused on the limits in the JCPOA—how many centrifuges, what type, and how much enriched uranium Iran could have—I consistent argued that its real value was how much it enhanced our ability to detect covert facilities. This included cradle-to-grave safeguards starting from the moment that the uranium was mined, monitoring of the machines used to make centrifuges, measures that limited where Iran could enrich uranium, and extraordinary rights for the IAEA to look around.
These measures weren’t perfect, but we’re now learning how blind we are without them. And most importantly, these measures effectively prevented Iran from using underground facilities such as Fordow to enrich uranium for years, something that we now know the Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs couldn’t dream of doing.
Perhaps it is hard to square the limited impact of the bombing with the spectacular appearance of a bombing campaign, with its screaming missiles and thunderous explosions. It says a lot that one of the most impressive displays of airpower in history did so little to damage Iran’s nuclear program. This is precisely why, at the outset of the campaign, I made clear that the strike would likely only succeed if the Iranian regime fell.
While regime change by airpower always seemed to be a desperately long shot, it was somehow still more plausible than the obliteration of a large, dispersed, and deeply buried nuclear program such as Iran’s. I think that the Israelis knew that, too. After all, Netanyahu named the operation Rising Lion, after the national symbol of prerevolutionary Iran. Israel’s national animal is the gazelle.
Was regime change what Washington really wanted, at least if its goal was keeping Iran nonnuclear? Iran, after all, has been a few months away from the bomb for almost 20 years. The thing holding Iran back was never primarily technical—it was always political. For everything that I dislike about the repressive and meddling Islamic Republic, it has at least been reluctant to build the bomb.
Iran’s supreme leader suspended the nuclear weapons program in 2003 for reasons that still aren’t clear. That program, according to the U.S. intelligence community, was still suspended right up to the moment that Israel started bombing. We don’t know what Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his advisors said when they went around the table debating a nuclear weapons program in the past. But something stayed his hand.
Even when Iranian officials dragged their feet about cooperating with the IAEA or negotiators stonewalled in talks, Iran always seemed to be seeking some sort of diplomatic resolution. The Trump administration, for its part, is sure that it’s taught Iran a lesson. Trump officials say that the Iranians will now return to negotiations, chastened by the bombing. There are, of course, other lessons that some Iranians might have learned.
Either way, I am sure the inevitable internal discussions in Iran will now look different, not least because there are going to be a number of new faces at the table. The United States and Israel have changed the regime in some sense—just maybe not in the way that they hoped.
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