All right, let’s talk about the leaked intel assessment on the bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites. CNN reported one US intelligence assessment concluded that Iran’s nuclear program has only been set back a few months. The New York Times soon followed with a nearly identical piece.
There are no specifics in either piece. We don’t know—and we it’s clear the reporters do not know—which sites they are relaying quotes about. And there’s a strange, or maybe not so strange, unwillingness to note that the assessment in question, from the Defense Intelligence Agency, was made with “low confidence”—which is code for “we don’t really know what happened so we’re going to guess, kind of.”
But here is one assertion in the Times report: “The strikes badly damaged the electrical system at Fordo, which is housed deep inside a mountain to shield it from attacks, officials said. It is not clear how long it will take Iran to gain access to the underground buildings and then repair the electrical systems and reinstall equipment that was moved.”
If the Times is reporting that detail accurately, then Fordow is done for. The power sources are down and no one can get inside the facility. So it is accurate to say the site was not completely destroyed physically, but that doesn’t mean it is functional or operational. The facility is hundreds of meters deep. Among other things, there’s no air in there.
At the same time, some of the phrasing seems designed to pooh-pooh and confuse. Take this passage from CNN: “Instead, the impact to all three sites—Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan—was largely restricted to aboveground structures, which were severely damaged, the sources said. That includes the sites’ power infrastructure and some of the aboveground facilities used to turn uranium into metal for bomb-making.”
Exactly. “Aboveground facilities” are not coat rooms or lounges. They are in-use facilities. Here’s how David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Studies, who knows more about the Iranian nuclear program than almost anyone on earth, summed up the damage to the main sites: “In particular, major setbacks include: the elimination of, or severe damage to, the majority of the centrifuges at the Natanz site, significant damage to the Fordow underground site, destruction and damage to several facilities at the Esfahan Nuclear Complex, including one used in the conversion of enriched uranium to uranium metal and another that converts natural uranium into uranium hexafluoride. Related, the attack on the IR-40 Arak Heavy Water Reactor has likely destroyed the reactor, eliminating a potential future source of plutonium that could be used in nuclear weapons. In addition, several sites involved in past and more recent nuclear weapon efforts have been destroyed.”
Albright is basing his judgments off of satellite imagery he provides in his own initial damage report, which means readers can check his work—as opposed to the Times and CNN, whose reporters likely had the intel report summarized for them verbally. The initial evidence all suggests the damage was considerable.
Now, the CNN and Times reports are correct in critiquing the word “obliterated,” which President Trump used in his address to the nation on Saturday night. The US mission to the United Nations, which delivered the administration’s own initial claims to that forum, didn’t repeat the world. Instead, the US said it had “effectively fulfilled our narrow objective: to degrade Iran’s capacity to produce a nuclear weapon,” as well as to “mitigate the threat posed by Iran to Israel, the region and to, more broadly, international peace and security.”
As the Times story notes, Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Sunday that the bombing campaign “was designed to severely degrade Iran’s nuclear weapons infrastructure.”
The threat, then, is not that the pre-bombing nuclear program in Iran will be back up and running in a few months to where it was. The threat is that if Iran has indeed squirreled away enriched uranium, it doesn’t have to start the entire process of enrichment over again. But it still needs facilities to enrich the surviving uranium to weapons-grade level. We are not talking about Walter White cooking meth in an RV. It still needs housing for that uranium, and a myriad of other components necessary to produce an actual bomb.
Additionally, as Albright notes, we know the leaked report is already outdated. It underestimated the amount of uranium that was buried in the strikes and therefore based its conclusions on Iran’s having more uranium to work with than it actually does. Reassessments will continue, and our knowledge of what happened in the raid will grow in accuracy.
The only way it is correct to say that Iran would be able now to sprint to a bomb in six months is if nothing else changes. That would mean Israel would be rolling up up its spy network in Iran, would not be patrolling the skies above the country, and the US satellites wouldn’t be watching. It would also mean Iran doing nothing at the bargaining table to satisfy Trump. Perhaps the Iranians will be stubborn and obnoxious. But that won’t mean the Israelis will end their surveillance and stand down forever—and will only encourage the US to supply every piece of intelligence it can garner.
What is going to happen is that any Iranian attempts to get back in the blocked facilities will be stopped in their tracks by the Israel Air Force. And Israel’s agents within Iran will likely have more, not less, success from here on out because the chain of command is decimated. Also decimated? The team of scientists working on the program. Ayatollah Khamenei cannot simply ChatGPT his way to a bomb even if he’s got a few canisters of uranium in his wine cellar.
Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons has been made more dangerous for them, vastly more expensive, and more difficult by significant margins. And any progress at all will have to evade Israel’s watchful eye.
Trump’s insistence on an immediate ceasefire may turn out to have been a miscalculation—perhaps even a costly one. It’s possible that the Iranian pursuit of nukes could have been finished off and weren’t. But that is not because the bombings were ineffectual.
