Rafael Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, said this week that he believed the centrifuges were “no longer operational” at Fordow, Iran’s nuclear facility deep underground. Grossi assessed that the program suffered “enormous damage,” though he didn’t put a timeline on it. Iran’s foreign minister also confirmed “excessive and serious” damage to the sites. These evaluations will all change as more information and intel emerge, though both Israel and Iran have an incentive to upsell the operations. So does Iran, especially if it doesn’t want to get attacked again, or if it wants a buffer to reconstitute its nuclear program. But Rafael Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, said “no one” could fully assess the damage at Fordow, one of Iran’s key nuclear sites.
Grossi also suggested that Iran likely moved some of its enriched uranium stockpiles before the rather telegraphed U.S. attack – something even U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance has conceded. For months, long before the U.S. dispatched its bunker-busting bombs, the IAEA had worried that Iran might have centrifuges – used to enrich uranium to weapons-grade fuel – at undeclared sites.
“If Iran is able to preserve a few hundred advanced centrifuges, and even a fraction of the 400 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent, it will be back to near zero breakout in a short time – breakout being the time it would take for Iran to enrich enough material to weapons-grade levels,” said Kelsey Davenport, Director for Nonproliferation Policy at the Arms Control Association at a press briefing Monday. “This underscores that the strikes may have temporarily set back Iran’s program, but military action is not an effective long-term strategy for preventing a nuclear armed Iran.”
The White House may claim that Iran’s nuclear sites have been “obliterated,” but it can’t fully bomb away Iran’s nuclear knowledge, even if Israel takes out Iran’s scientists and even if America’s 30,000-pound bombs significantly damage Iran’s nuclear facilities. Iran’s got a lot of problems, made worse by this 12-day war, and the war did set back technical capabilities and infrastructure. But the strikes might fortify its resolve to get a weapon. As I reported for Splinter back in October, a “targeted attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities may achieve the opposite of what Israel, and the U.S., says it wants: potentially pushing Iran closer to the bomb.”
As experts told me last year, a military strike on Iran had the potential to considerably roll back Iran’s nuclear program, but it was likely too advanced to eliminate it entirely. If Iran hadn’t made the decision to put a nuke on a warhead – which U.S. intelligence had concluded it had not prior to its attack – a military operation might give Tehran the incentive to do so. If its conventional military capabilities, or diplomatic negotiations failed to deter a strike, Iran might decide the only thing that would work is a credible nuclear deterrent.
Many still see that as the likely outcome of these past couple of weeks. The Iranian government has already said it will accelerate its civilian nuclear program, and the Iranian parliament approved a bill to suspend cooperation with the IAEA, which could block inspectors from fully assessing the damage at the bombed nuclear facilities or from tracking down where some of that enriched uranium may have ended up. Iran has also threatened to withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), a move that would end international inspections and serve as a de facto declaration of Iran’s pursuit of weaponization.
“Regardless of what either leader says, Israel knows that a one-off kinetic act against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure is insufficient if it wants to remove the Iranian capability to build a nuclear weapon,” said Alan Eyre, a former U.S. diplomat and distinguished diplomatic fellow at the Middle East Institute on a press call Wednesday.
Eyre added that Iran doesn’t even need to rebuild their civilian program if they decide to build a bomb. “They can say, ‘well, we don’t need to reveal all this stuff. We don’t need to rebuild Fordow. We have lots of mountains. We have lots of Earth excavators. They could build a new one.”
All of that goes back to the question of what this strike accomplished, and whether this is merely a pause before another escalation – one that might be weeks or months or years away – or whether this really is the “peace through strength” that the Trump administration claims that it is.
But Iran was negotiating with the U.S. on limits to its nuclear program, and it got attacked anyway – first by Israel, America’s closest and ostensibly less powerful ally, and then by America itself. A decade before that, Iran signed a deal with the U.S. to limit its nuclear program, and Trump withdrew from it in his first term, though Iran was in compliance until that point.
As Jennifer Kavanagh and Rosemary Kelanic write in Foreign Affairs, the Trump administration has proven that its threats are credible through these strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. But that is only half the equation. “These warnings and actions, however, may still have limited impact on Iranian behavior without the second requirement: meaningful U.S. assurances that Iran won’t suffer the threatened consequences—or other repercussions—if it acquiesces to U.S. demands,” they write. “Iran’s leaders need to believe that if their country bends, the United States won’t try to break it.”
In other words, why would Iran seriously negotiate on its nuclear program when it’s been burned so many times before, particularly, although not exclusively, by Trump? If Tehran doesn’t have reasonable confidence the U.S. will stand by its commitments – which will have to include stopping Israel from attacking its territory – then the pathway for a diplomatic end to this crisis becomes very, very steep. Any credible nuclear deal that really does put limits on any Iranian nuclear ambitions will require intrusive and robust inspections, including of its military facilities, which Iran has always been reluctant to do, and may be even more reluctant to do so now, as it may look like a kind of surrender. If Iran doesn’t think the U.S. is negotiating in good faith, it has no incentive to do so; the U.S. and Israel already assume as much, generally entrenching this doom loop of distrust.
These U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities have only heightened this fundamental dilemma, not altered it. And for all the victory laps the U.S. and Israel are taking, no one in leadership has offered a credible plan for a lasting settlement – or for fully preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.
Trump says the U.S. is talking to Iran soon, but he’s also indicated that there is no need for a deal because everything’s destroyed. But Iran has still retained enough capabilities to make a nuke — a fact Israel and US intelligence probably know, increasing the possibility of re-igniting the war. Or, to borrow a phrase from Trump: everyone’s “been fighting for so long and for so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.”
In 2020, the first Trump administration assassinated Qasem Soleimani, leader of Iran Revolutionary Guards’ elite Quds Force. For a brief moment, an Iran-U.S. war looked like the worst possible crisis of that year. But both Iran and the U.S. de-escalated. Soleimani’s death had serious regional repercussions, though it largely played out of view of the American public. It would be possible to imagine a world where Trump declares the Iranian nuclear strikes the greatest U.S. victory of all times and walks away from Iran, for now. That doesn’t eliminate the possibility of renewed escalation in the region, but its urgency might fade away.
But the Middle East after October 7, 2023 looks a lot different than it did after Soleimani’s death. Even if America avoids a “boots on the ground”-type entanglement, the U.S. strikes did not offer a permanent solution to Israel or Iran’s ambitions in the region. Diplomacy may not be totally dead, but it will take a lot to revive at this moment, and it’s not clear leadership in the U.S., Israel, or Iran have the fortitude to get there – or that they even agree on the end game. If the U.S. and Israel hold that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon, and negotiations flounder, the alternative may be more bombs. Even targeted military action always threatens escalation and deeper entanglement. Just because Iran and the U.S. avoided it in past rounds, and maybe have done so in this round, doesn’t stop future miscalculations from turning a crisis into a cataclysm.
Israel is still waging war in the Middle East and devastating Gaza, with U.S. backing. America has continued its bipartisan tradition of deferring to force while saying it wants peace. Trump has his ceasefire, but, for now, little is guaranteeing its permanence.
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