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Some of Iran’s Enriched Uranium Survived Attacks, Israeli Official Says

The assessment came as experts are trying to determine how long it would take Iran to rebuild its nuclear program in the aftermath of U.S. and Israeli strikes.

A uranium processing site in Isfahan, which hosts Iran’s nuclear laboratory, seen in 2005.Credit...Reuters

A uranium processing site in Isfahan, which hosts Iran’s nuclear laboratory, seen in 2005.Credit...Reuters

Israel has concluded that some of Iran’s underground stockpile of near-bomb-grade enriched uranium survived American and Israeli attacks last month and may be accessible to Iranian nuclear engineers, according to a senior Israeli official.

The senior official also said that Israel had begun moving toward military action against Iran late last year after seeing what the official described as a race to build a bomb as part of a secret Iranian project. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information.

The official said Israeli intelligence picked up the nuclear weapons activity soon after the Israeli Air Force killed Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader of Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia in Lebanon. That observation prompted the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to prepare for an attack with or without U.S. help.

In the days surrounding Israel’s attack on Iran in mid-June, and President Trump’s subsequent decision to join in the action, U.S. intelligence officials said they had seen no evidence of a move by Iran to weaponize its stockpile of near-bomb-grade uranium. The United States struck two of Iran’s most critical enrichment sites with 30,000-pound bunker-busting bombs and aimed a barrage of submarine-launched Tomahawk missiles at a third site, where the fuel could be converted for use in weapons.

The Israeli official said the evidence gathered about the secret program — which the official did not describe in any detail — had been fully shared with the United States.

But in interviews in January, American officials said they did not believe Iran was yet racing for a weapon, even though they described a nascent effort to explore “faster, cruder” approaches to building one. And the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, told Congress in testimony in March that she saw no evidence the Iranians had decided to build a weapon, a position intelligence officials reiterated in June.

In a briefing for reporters on Wednesday evening, the senior Israeli official did not express concern about the assessment that some of the stockpile of 60 percent enriched uranium, stored in casks, had survived the attack. The official, and other Israelis with access to the country’s intelligence findings, said any attempts by Iran to recover it would almost certainly be detected — and there would be time to attack the facilities again.

Israel, the United States and now a growing number of outside experts agree that all of Iran’s working centrifuges at Natanz and Fordo — about 18,000 machines, which spin at supersonic speeds — were damaged or destroyed, probably beyond repair. The question they are now examining is how long it would take the Iranians to rebuild some or all of that capability, especially after the top scientists in their nuclear program were targeted and killed.

Mr. Trump has stuck to his insistence that the Iranian program was “obliterated,” and that Iran’s leaders were no longer interested in nuclear weapons after being struck by American warplanes. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said the bombing left the fuel and equipment at the most protected site, Fordo, “buried under a mountain, devastated and obliterated.”

The administration kept to that line on Thursday. “As President Trump has said many times, Operation Midnight Hammer totally obliterated Iran’s nuclear facilities,” said Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman. “The entire world is safer thanks to his decisive leadership.”

On one point — whether Iran moved a large part of its stockpile of 60 percent enriched uranium just before the American strike in the early morning of June 22 in Tehran — the Israeli assessment differs from the conclusion of Rafael Grossi, the secretary general of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

 

A satellite image of the Isfahan nuclear complex after the attacks on June 22. U.N. and Israeli officials differ in their assessments of whether the enriched uranium stored there had already been transferred away.Credit...Maxar Technologies, via Reuters
A satellite image of the Isfahan nuclear complex after the attacks on June 22. U.N. and Israeli officials differ in their assessments of whether the enriched uranium stored there had already been transferred away.Credit...Maxar Technologies, via Reuters

Mr. Grossi has said he believes that much of the stockpile that was stored in Iran’s nuclear laboratory at Isfahan was transferred from the site before Israeli and American weapons struck. The senior Israeli official contends that nothing was moved. The storage site at Isfahan, the official said, was too deep for even the most powerful American weapons to destroy.

But the U.S. attack on Isfahan did close off many entrances, and appears to have wiped out laboratories that convert enriched uranium into a form that could be used in a weapon, and that would then fashion it into a metal that could be shaped into a missile warhead.

Speaking at the nuclear summit at The Hague two weeks ago, Mr. Trump said the U.S. strikes “set back Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons for many years to come,” and suggested he would be willing to strike again if needed. “This achievement can continue indefinitely if Iran does not get access to nuclear material, which it won’t,” he told reporters.

Since then, Iran has expelled the I.A.E.A. inspectors who were in Tehran during the Israeli and American attacks, and has turned off some of the agency’s remaining cameras and other monitoring devices, cutting off the best window into Iranian activity that the West had. The result is that the agency, a unit of the United Nations, has been essentially blinded.

“The country is going dark,” said Ray Takeyh, an Iran scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations who has followed the program over its many iterations in the past 25 years. “I think where we are headed is that the next phase of Iranian proliferation will be the dispersal of the effort around the country into a large number of small workshops. What the Iranians have learned is that even something you put in a mountain can be bombed.”

If Mr. Takeyh is right — and his prediction has been echoed by several American, British and European intelligence officials over the past two weeks — Israel and the United States could be entering a new era of hide-and-seek. Iran seems unlikely to try to rebuild its nuclear sites at Fordo or Natanz. Even Fordo, built deep inside a mountain, was far more vulnerable than its Iranian designers had believed. (One key vulnerability was the existence of ventilation shafts that went deep into the plant; the American attack included strikes that sent the 30,000-pound bombs into those shafts, enabling them to plunge closer to the control rooms and enrichment halls than if they had to blast through the rock.)

For the Iranians, getting access to the fuel that is already enriched to 60 percent purity — just shy of the 90 percent ordinarily used in nuclear weapons — is critical. The vast majority of the effort to get to highly enriched uranium is at the initial stages.

But any effort to dig the fuel out from the rubble of Isfahan may be hard to hide from satellite surveillance. The Israeli official said he believed some additional stockpiles are still at Fordo and Natanz, the two major enrichment sites where the fuel is produced. Both were struck by the bunker-busting bombs, and Israel has assessed that recovering those supplies would be too difficult.

What remains unknown, American and British officials say, is how fast Iran could reproduce the facilities it has lost, and whether it could do so covertly to avoid another strike.

In the years leading up to the attacks, Iran was digging two deep-underground nuclear facilities, one near the Isfahan laboratories and another in Natanz. Neither was a target of the Israeli and U.S. strikes. But turning them into replacements for the two bombed enrichment facilities would be a major task, and it would require replacing more than 18,000 centrifuges believed destroyed or disabled in the attacks.

It is not clear how many new centrifuges Iran had under construction in workshops around the country, or when they would be ready to be installed.

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.

Author: David E. Sanger David E. Sanger, a White House and national security correspondent, has reported on the Iranian nuclear program for more than two decades.

Source: N.Y Times

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