Are the Iranians actively attempting to rebuild their capabilities, or aren’t they?
Are the Iranians actively attempting to rebuild their capabilities, or aren’t they?
T he casus belli the Trump administration has publicly floated for a new round of strikes on Iranian regime targets varies. Sometimes, the logic for a renewed air campaign against the mullahs and their instruments of terror is rooted in the Iranian security services’ slaughtering of civilians in January. At other times, the administration contends that Iran invited a decisive conflict by waging a prolonged terror war against American soldiers, civilians, and public servants for nearly a half century. Increasingly, though, administration figures also insist that the Iranian nuclear threat is as potent as it has ever been, the strikes on Iranian nuclear targets last June very much notwithstanding.
The relative urgency of the Iranian nuclear threat fluctuates depending on the administration figure describing it. President Trump’s favorite diplomatic envoy, Steve Witkoff, said this week that Iran is “probably a week away from having industrial-grade bombmaking material” — specifically, uranium at “60 percent” enrichment. No other administration figure has lent any credence to Witkoff’s assessment, but they’re not dismissive of Iran’s nuclear ambitions either.
“If they try to rebuild a nuclear weapon, that causes problems for us,” Vice President JD Vance recently told Fox News. “In fact, we’ve seen evidence that they have tried to do exactly that.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio echoed Vance’s more circumspect outlook. “After their nuclear program was obliterated, they were told not to try to restart it, and here they are,” he told reporters on Wednesday. “You can see them always trying to rebuild elements of it.”
Rubio maintains that the Iranians are “not enriching right now,” while “they’re trying to get to the point where they ultimately can.” In his State of the Union address, Trump emphasized Iran’s desire to obtain a fissionable device, not Iran’s efforts to get one. “We wiped it out, and they want to start it all over again and are at this moment again pursuing their sinister ambitions,” he told the nation on Tuesday night. “They want to make a deal, but we haven’t heard those secret words, ‘We will never have a nuclear weapon.’”
It’s hard to blame anyone who is confused by the case the administration is making. Is the Iranian nuclear program “obliterated” or not? Are the Iranians actively attempting to rebuild their nuclear weapons–development capabilities, or aren’t they?
In the months since Operation Midnight Hammer, public reporting supported by satellite imagery has indicated that there are few indications Iran has either the resources or capabilities to recover its enriched uranium or reconstitute its weapons program. “Viewing the satellite imagery and monitoring the Iranian nuclear sites, we don’t see any evidence that they are trying to reconstitute their nuclear-weapons program,” David Albright, a onetime U.N. weapons inspector, told the Wall Street Journal this week. “They are essentially on hold.”
It is at least theoretically true that, unmolested, Iran could commit to a crash course effort to restaff its decimated nuclear science community and rebuild its broken facilities. At the time of the strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, some warned that the Islamic Republic could use the cascading centrifuge arrays at other, undeclared sites to enrich its remaining uranium stockpiles to weapons grade. With luck and industry, they said at the time, Iran could race to breakout with a nuclear weapon within a year.
Neither Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission nor the U.S. intelligence community shared that assessment — not publicly, at least. And the International Atomic Energy Agency remains under the “firm impression” that the bulk of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpiles remain entombed at the sites the United States took out last summer. It would be next to impossible for Iran to reembark on a quest for the bomb without that activity alerting U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies.
So, what explains the administration’s rationale for dredging the nuclear issue back up amid its bizarrely tentative efforts to make the public case for a new air campaign against the Islamic Republic?
One possibility is that nuclear weapons are what the Iranian regime wanted to talk about. When Trump promised the Iranian civilians who were being slaughtered in the streets that “help is on the way” in early January, the warning came at a time when U.S. naval assets in and around the Middle East were too scant to execute the President’s threat. He needed time to put those assets in place, and a renewed diplomatic track — even one that was destined to fail — would satisfy America’s concerned Middle Eastern partners.
It’s also possible that the administration is sensitive to public opinion. Voters are not yet convinced of the necessity of an air war against the Iranian regime that aims not just to disarm it but to topple it. As a consequence of almost 50 years of American trepidation, the state of war in which U.S.–Iranian relations have existed since the founding of the Islamic Republic looks to many like the status quo, with a certain level of terrorism to be expected. The urgency of a change to that status quo, like an imminent nuclear breakout, is more easily communicated to the public.
But the administration has not rested its case against Iran on the nuclear issue alone. “Beyond just the nuclear program, they possess these conventional weapons that are solely designed to attack America and attack Americans if they so choose to do so,” Rubio told reporters. “They already possess weapons that can reach much of Europe already now, as we speak.” That was Trump’s message, too. “They’ve already developed missiles that can threaten Europe and our bases overseas, and they’re working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America,” the President warned. The regime is the “world’s number one sponsor of terror,” Trump added. “They’ve killed and maimed thousands of American service members,” and “they’ve killed at least, it looks like, 32,000 protesters.”
Oddly, the administration has put itself in a position in which it is arguing that the June 2025 strikes on the Iranian nuclear sites weren’t as comprehensive as it once claimed, even as the international and expert communities contend that they were. This dynamic is sowing unnecessary confusion.
The case for a final showdown with the regime does not need to rest on Iran’s mere desire for a nuclear weapon. The Islamic Republic has been at war with the United States from its inception. It has spilled too much blood — that of Westerners and Iranians alike. It is an illegitimate, criminal enterprise, and whatever challenges will confront us after its collapse are desirable compared with the time, energy, and resources the U.S. currently devotes to containing the mullahs’ well-funded aggression. As a result of its military blunders and the abuse of its own people, the Iranian regime has never been weaker. The time to act is now.