Barely 72 hours after United States President Donald Trump’s air strikes against Iran, a controversy erupted over the extent of the damage they had done to the country’s uranium enrichment facilities in Fordow and Natanz.
The New York Times and CNN leaked a preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assessment that the damage may have been “from moderate to severe”, noting it had “low confidence” in the findings because they were an early assessment.
Trump had claimed the sites were “obliterated”.
The difference in opinion mattered because it goes to the heart of whether the US and Israel had eliminated Iran’s ability to enrich uranium to levels that would allow it to make nuclear weapons, at least for years.
Israel has long claimed – without evidence – that Iran plans to build nuclear bombs. Iran has consistently insisted that its nuclear programme is purely of a civilian nature. And the US has been divided on the question – its intelligence community concluding as recently as March that Tehran was not building a nuclear bomb, but Trump claiming earlier in June that Iran was close to building such a weapon.
Yet amid the conflicting claims and assessments on the damage from the US strikes to Iranian nuclear facilities and whether the country wants atomic weapons, one thing is clear: Tehran says it has no intentions of giving up on its nuclear programme.
So what is the future of that programme? How much damage has it suffered? Will the US and Israel allow Iran to revive its nuclear programme? And can a 2015 diplomatic deal with Iran – that was working well until Trump walked out of it – be brought back to life?
What Iran wants
In his first public comments since the US bombing, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that the attack “did nothing significant” to Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Reporting from Tehran, Al Jazeera’s Resul Serdar said Khamenei spoke of how “most of the [nuclear] sites are still in place and that Iran is going to continue its nuclear programme”.
Mohammad Eslami, the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, on Tuesday said that “preparations for recovery had already been anticipated, and our plan is to prevent any interruption in production or services”.
To be sure, even if they haven’t been destroyed, Natanz and Fordow – Iran’s only known enrichment sites – have suffered significant damage, according to satellite images. Israel has also assassinated several of Iran’s top nuclear scientists in its wave of strikes that began on June 13.
However, the DIA said in the initial assessment that the Trump administration has tried to dismiss, that the attacks had only set Iran’s nuclear programme back by months. It also said that Iran had moved uranium enriched at these facilities away from these sites prior to the strikes. Iranian officials have also made the same claim.
The UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), had accused Iran of enriching up to 400kg of uranium to 60 percent – not far below the 90 percent enrichment that is needed to make weapons.
Asked on Wednesday whether he thought the enriched uranium had been smuggled out from the nuclear facilities before the strikes, Trump said, “We think everything nuclear is down there, they didn’t take it out.” Asked again later, he said, “We think we hit them so hard and so fast they didn’t get to move.”
What was the extent of damage to Iran’s nuclear facilities?
Without on-site inspections, nobody can be sure.
Central Intelligence Agency director John Ratcliffe on Wednesday posted a statement saying, “several key Iranian nuclear facilities were destroyed and would have to be rebuilt over the course of years”. That’s a very different timeline from what the DIA suggested in its early assessment.
But it’s important to remember that the DIA and CIA also disagreed on whether Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in 2003.
The DIA sided with the UN’s view that inspections had proven Hussein didn’t have such weapons. The CIA, on the other hand, provided intelligence that backed the position of then-president George W Bush in favour of an invasion – intelligence that was later debunked. In that instance, the CIA proved politically more malleable than the DIA.
Amid the current debate over whether Iranian nuclear sites were destroyed, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, has also weighed in favour of the president’s view.
“Iran’s nuclear facilities have been destroyed. If the Iranians chose to rebuild, they would have to rebuild all three facilities (Natanz, Fordow, Esfahan) entirely, which would likely take years to do,” she posted on Twitter/X.
But Gabbard has already demonstrably changed her public statements to suit Trump.
In March, she testified before a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon, and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorised the nuclear weapons programme that he suspended in 2003”.
On June 20, Trump was asked for his reaction to that assessment. “She’s wrong,” he said.
Gabbard later that day posted that her testimony had been misquoted by “the dishonest media” and that “America has intelligence that Iran is at the point that it can produce a nuclear weapon within weeks to months, if they decide to finalise the assembly”.
Gabbard’s clarification did not contradict her earlier view, that Iran was not actively trying to build a weapon.
Asked in an interview with a French radio network whether Iran’s nuclear programme had been destroyed, IAEA chief Rafael Grossi replied, “I think ‘destroyed’ is too much. But it suffered enormous damage.”
On Wednesday, Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission concurred with the CIA, saying Iran’s nuclear facilities had been rendered “totally inoperable” and had “set back Iran’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons for many years to come”.
Also on Wednesday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the destruction of Iran’s surface facilities at Isfahan was proof enough of Iran’s inability to make a bomb.
“The conversion facility, which you can’t do a nuclear weapon without a conversion facility, we can’t even find where it is, where it used to be on the map,” he told reporters.
Can a 2015 diplomatic deal be resuscitated?
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), negotiated with Iran by France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the US, China, Russia and the European Union in 2015, was the only agreement ever reached governing Iran’s nuclear programme.
The JCPOA allowed Iran to enrich its own uranium, but limited it to the 3.7 percent enrichment levels required for a nuclear reactor to generate electricity. At Israel’s behest, Trump abandoned the agreement in 2018 and Iran walked away from it a year later – but before that, it was working.
Even though Trump has said he will never return to the JCPOA, which was negotiated by his predecessor, Barack Obama, he could return to an agreement of his own making that strongly resembles it. The crucial question is, whether Israel will this time back it, and whether Iran will be allowed to have even a peaceful nuclear programme, which it is legally entitled to.
On Wednesday, Trump didn’t sound as though he was moving in this direction. “We may sign an agreement. I don’t know. I don’t think it’s that necessary,” he told reporters at The Hague.
Any JCPOA-like agreement would also require Iran to allow IAEA inspectors to get back to ensuring that Tehran meets its nuclear safeguard commitments.
“IAEA inspectors have remained in Iran throughout the conflict and are ready to start working as soon as possible, going back to the country’s nuclear sites and verifying the inventories of nuclear material,” the IAEA said on Tuesday.
But Iran’s powerful Guardian Council on Thursday approved a parliamentary bill to suspend cooperation with the IAEA, suggesting that Tehran is at the moment not in the mood to entertain any UN oversight of its nuclear facilities.
What happens if Iran returns to enriching uranium?
“If Iran wants a civil nuclear programme, they can have one, just like many other countries in the world have one, and [the way for] that is, they import enriched material,” Rubio told journalist Bari Weiss on the Podcast, Honestly, in April.
“But if they insist on enriching [themselves], then they will be the only country in the world that doesn’t have a weapons programme, quote unquote, but is enriching. And so I think that’s problematic,” he said.
Ali Ansari, an Iran historian at St. Andrews University in the UK, told Al Jazeera that “there have already been calls to cease uranium enrichment from activists within the country”.
But the defiant statements from Iranian officials since the US strikes – including from Khamenei on Thursday – suggest that Tehran is not ready to give up on enrichment.
Trump has, in recent days, suggested that he wants Iran to give up its nuclear programme altogether.
On Tuesday, Trump posted on TruthSocial, “IRAN WILL NEVER REBUILD THEIR NUCLEAR FACILITIES!”
He doubled down on that view on Wednesday.
“Iran has a huge advantage. They have great oil, and they can do things. I don’t see them getting back involved in the nuclear business any more, I think they’ve had it,” he told reporters at the end of the NATO summit in The Hague.
And then he suggested the US would again strike Iran’s facilities, even if it weren’t building a bomb. “If [Iran] does [get involved], we’re always there, we’ll have to do something about it.” If he didn’t, “someone else” would hit Iran’s nuclear facilities, he suggested.
That “someone” would be Israel – which has long tried to kill any diplomatic effort over Iran’s nuclear programme.
At the NATO summit, Trump was asked whether Israel and Iran might start a war again soon.
