Doubt cast on scale of Iran's nuclear setback
America’s bombing campaign caused a “total obliteration” of Iranian nuclear facilities, insisted Donald Trump this afternoon, as he furiously dismissed a leaked Pentagon assessment that the US attack did not destroy Iran’s nuclear programme but rather set it back by “a few months, tops”.
Speaking today from NATO’s summit in the Hague, the US President claimed that American strikes on Iranian sites last weekend set back the ayatollah’s nuclear programme by “basically decades”, adding “"I think they've had it, they just went through hell... the last thing they want to do is enrich."
The aspiring Nobel Peace Prize recipient used his favourite wartime analogy - one he’s applied to Russia and Ukraine too - describing the conflict between Israel and Iran as just like "two kids in a school yard".
What do we know so far about the level of damage to Iran’s nuclear programme?
The three nuclear sites targetted by the US over the weekend are Isfahan, Fordo and Natanz. They have also been hit by Israeli air strikes, thought it has long been assumed that Iran’s uranium enrichment plant at Fordow was hidden so deeply beneath the country’s mountains that it would be impossible for Israel alone to destroy it. America’s Ordnance Penetrator bomb was thought to be the only weapon capable of doing so.
The early Pentagon assessment - leaked to US media overnight by "a low-level loser in the intelligence community", in the words of the White House - suggests that even the Ordnance Penetrator bomb was unable to complete the job. According to the evaluation, Iran's stockpile of enriched uranium was not eliminated and, although some infrastructure was destroyed or damaged in the US strikes, much of the facilities, which are deep underground, remains intact.
According to CBS, the intelligence assessment also claims that some of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile was secretly transported out of the country’s nuclear facilities prior to the strikes. And the IAEA says it does not know where Iran’s stockpile of 400kg of 60 per cent enriched uranium is. Even without further enrichment, this could be turned into a crude nuclear weapon.
Iran has long claimed that it is not developing nuclear weapons but rather enriching uranium for peaceful civilian purposes of energy generation. But Israel views Iran’s advancing nuclear capabilities as an existential threat, claiming that it is part of a wider plan to eventually strike it with an atomic bomb. It is also widely accepted that Israel has nuclear weapons of its own, although it neither admits nor denies having them.
Clearly, Iran’s nuclear ambitions have suffered a major setback. Aside from damage at enrichment sites, Israel has killed many of its top nuclear scientists. Yet this leaked assessment - while only preliminary - is a reminder that any setback suffered, however dramatic, is unlikely to be permanent.
“Once the damage is repaired and the replacements are found for the scientists who were killed, Iran will only accelerate its nuclear programme,” predicted Kelsey Davenport, the director for non-proliferation policy at the Arms Control Association, today.
Sure enough, Iran's parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf vowed hours later that the country’s nuclear programme “will move forward at a faster pace”. The Iranian parliament also approved a bill today to stop co-operation with the global nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency.
As Davenport argues, “Israel cannot destroy the knowledge Iran has gained about nuclear development… Israeli strikes can set back the programme, but [they] cannot stop Iran indefinitely”.
Which may explain why Trump, despite originally claiming it wasn’t on the cards, is now hinting at a new goal: “regime change”. Though that of course would require co-operation from the Iranian people.
Caitlin Allen
Deputy Editor
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