Iran is no longer enriching uranium because they no longer have functioning tools to enrich uranium.
Iran’s deputy foreign minister Saeed Khatibzadeh gave CNN an exclusive interview Sunday and described his country’s nuclear program as still “intact,” but admitting that U.S. and Israeli strikes badly damaged facilities earlier this year. He said, “this country is not a country that you can bomb and then think that you are going to ruin everything.”
Now, calling the program “intact” is a little curious because just a few weeks ago, Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian pledged to rebuild the program. “Destroying buildings and factories will not create a problem for us, we will rebuild and with greater strength.” If the program’s intact, you don’t really need to rebuild that much, now do you?
A week ago, Joseph Rodgers, co-author of an analysis for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, summed up what we could discern about the state of Iran’s nuclear program to NPR.
RODGERS: So for me, the top line is that the Iranian nuclear program appears to be in limbo without clear leadership guidance. We see some activity building new nuclear facilities nearby the facilities that the U.S. destroyed. And simultaneously, it appears that the three facilities that the U.S. struck there have been basically no attempts to rehabilitate whatsoever.
INSKEEP: This strikes me as important. You’re saying that for all practical purposes, maybe the Fordo facility was completely and totally obliterated. They haven’t tried to fire it back up. But you’re telling me there’s activity elsewhere?
RODGERS: Yes, indeed. So about a mile south of the Natanz enrichment facility, there’s a site called Pickaxe Mountain that has been under construction since about 2020. But since June, construction has really been in an uptick. We see much more mining and drilling into the mountain, and we also see the construction of a huge security perimeter around the site.
…INSKEEP: How worried are you about this?
RODGERS: I think that this is definitely something that we should monitor very closely. You know, Iran really needs to build a new enrichment facility if they want to sort of break out and build a bomb.
INSKEEP: Do they still have the expertise to do this, given that a lot of their scientists have been targeted? And I imagine people were killed in these strikes.
RODGERS: That’s a really important piece of the picture. In the aftermath of the strikes, Israeli Ambassador Zarka claimed that Israel had assassinated about 14 of the top, leading nuclear scientists in the Iranian nuclear program. And rebuilding buildings is hard. It’s equally as hard to rebuild the social capital required for that level of deep expertise.
Satellite imagery of each of the three facilities reveals virtually zero activity or attempts to rehabilitate these sites. Transformers and power generators were destroyed during the strikes against Natanz, and these essential pieces of site infrastructure have not been reestablished. At Isfahan, debris remains visibly scattered in the roadway, blocking access to many of the damaged buildings. Based on these images, it is clear that the U.S. strikes effectively halted uranium enrichment and uranium processing at these critical sites.
For what it’s worth, Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said Sunday that Tehran is no longer enriching uranium at any site in the country. That may not be all that much of a concession, because this summer after the airstrikes, Rafael Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that given the power of the bombs dropped on Fordo and the technical characteristics of the plant, “we already know that these centrifuges are no longer operational.” In other words, Iran is no longer enriching uranium because it no longer has functioning tools to enrich uranium.
Between the Israeli assassinations and the U.S. airstrikes, the Iranian nuclear weapons program has been dealt a serious setback. Experts will debate just how long it will take the Iranians to rebuild what was lost; this summer, the Pentagon said the program had been set back close to two years. Some may argue that’s not enough of a delay, but it’s unclear whether any non-airstrike plan would have set it back at all.