Israel has struck a blow to Iran’s nuclear program – but it isn’t yet a knockout

Israel has taken out centrifuges at Iran’s biggest enrichment facility at Natanz, killed up to 10 of the country’s top nuclear scientists and destroyed key pieces of the supply chain for building a bomb – but the war is far from over.

Fire and smoke rise into the sky after an Israeli attack on the Shahran oil depot Tehran, Iran. Picture: Getty Images

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Israel has delivered a powerful blow to parts of Iran’s nuclear program, but it hasn’t yet taken out the most heavily protected of Iran’s nuclear sites, leaving Tehran a potential path to the bomb.

By Sunday, three days into its campaign, Israel had knocked out centrifuges at Iran’s biggest enrichment facility at Natanz, killed up to 10 of the country’s top nuclear scientists and destroyed key pieces of the supply chain for building a bomb, according to Israeli and UN atomic agency officials.

The course of Israel’s military campaign will determine whether it can achieve a goal it has sought for decades – neutralizing Iran’s nuclear program or setting it back years. Falling short carries great risk, possibly prompting Iran to kick out international inspectors and accelerate its efforts to build an atomic bomb.

Israel’s biggest challenge remains: taking out Iran’s most fortified nuclear facility, Fordow, where Iran produces highly enriched uranium. Many believe Fordow, which is built deep into a mountainside near Iran’s holy city of Qom, could only be destroyed with a massive bunker-busting US bomb.

“Israel thus far has targeted important parts of the Iranian nuclear program. But if you are worried about a nuclear breakout, Fordow is the game,” said Richard Nephew, who served as a negotiator with Iran during the Biden and Obama administrations.

Still, the damage to Iran’s nuclear program that Israel has already achieved is considerable. The International Atomic Energy Agency said the sudden loss of power at Natanz may have destroyed some of the roughly 14,000 underground centrifuges. The long cascades of centrifuge machines, which spin to produce uranium, are fragile and can break if they aren’t shut down gradually.

An Israeli official said there were indications that the underground portion of the Natanz facility may have imploded, though he cautioned that additional assessments were needed.

Israel has also struck critical parts of the supply chain for making a bomb. At Iran’s Isfahan complex in central Iran, Israel took out four buildings, two of which are must-haves for a nuclear weapon. One is Iran’s uranium conversion facility, which turns uranium into the gaseous form needed to feed it into centrifuges. The second was Iran’s fuel fabrication plant, which converts enriched uranium into uranium metal, which makes up a large part of a nuclear warhead.

Experts said that unless Iran has stashed equipment away, it could take Tehran up to a year to rebuild the fuel enrichment plant. Iran doesn’t have stocks of highly enriched uranium metal that it needs for the bomb, according to the IAEA.

Israel has also killed up to 10 Iranian nuclear scientists, including veterans who had gained valuable experience building and testing components of a nuclear weapon more than two decades ago. The IAEA says Iran had a broad nuclear weapons-related program until 2003.

Iran has denied that it is trying to build nuclear weapons and has said that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the targeting of the scientists could set Iran back years from making a nuclear weapon. However, some experts and former officials question that. They say Iran has developed a sophisticated network to preserve and pass much of its nuclear expertise to a new generation of scientists.

Other uncertainties remain. The fate of Iran’s stockpiles of enriched uranium, which were stored in canisters at Natanz, Isfahan and Fordow, is unknown. The Israeli official said that recent Iranian signals that it might disperse those supplies around the country added to Israel’s calculation that it was important to strike Iran now.

The stockpile includes enough 60 per cent highly enriched uranium to fuel around 10 nuclear weapons. David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, said Iran could use its stockpile to fuel nine nuclear weapons within a month and 13 by the end of a second month if it can continue to enrich at Fordow.

Many experts believe it will be difficult for Israel to destroy Fordow’s interior, deep in a mountain. It could potentially try to collapse the entrance, said Nephew, but there are a lot of uncertainties.

“Could the Israelis use drones to attack bulldozers if the Iranians tried to dig themselves out? Do the Iranians have a secret escape tunnel? We don’t know,” he said.

Even if Israel could make Fordow inoperable for a significant period, Iran has other possible covert routes to making a nuclear bomb if its stockpile of material is intact. For years, Iran has denied the UN atomic agency access to camera footage of its centrifuge production sites.

That means there could be large numbers of centrifuges stashed away, which could be installed at a secret underground facility to pursue a bomb. That site wouldn’t need to be particularly large. A few hundred more advanced centrifuges could work to produce weapons-grade material from the stockpile in a short period.

Still, “Israel’s intelligence is so intrusive that Iran has to worry about early discovery of any such effort and about the exposure and subsequent destruction of key hidden nuclear weapons-related assets,” said Albright.

Albright says the impact of Israel’s attacks have already “reduced Iran’s ability to make a nuclear weapon significantly.” But Israel is still likely far from achieving what he thinks it would consider acceptable: keeping Tehran months away from amassing enough weapons-grade material for a bomb and at least a year from building a bomb.

For the first goal, Albright says, Fordow and Natanz need to be badly damaged and the enriched uranium stockpile taken out. For the second goal, Israel might need to target more nuclear scientists and take out some of the testing, diagnostic and manufacturing equipment Tehran would need to build a bomb.

The success of Israel’s military campaign rests in large part on its ability to degrade Israel’s nuclear program, and the verdict is still out on that effort, said Sima Shine, former head of the research and evaluation division at Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency.

She says Israel could yet end up in the worst of situations, where its attack has legitimized and incentivised Tehran to rush into a covert effort to build a bomb. “I am sure if they are able to do it, they will do it,” she said.

WSJ