President Donald Trump’s decision to order US forces to attack three key Iranian nuclear installations may have sabotaged the Islamic Republic’s known atomic capabilities, but it’s also created a monumental new challenge to work out what’s left and where.
“The more likely scenario is that they convince Iran that cooperation and transparency don’t work and that building deeper facilities and ones not declared openly is more sensible to avoid similar targeting in future,” she said.
IAEA inspectors haven’t been able to verify the location of the Persian Gulf country’s stockpile of near-bomb-grade uranium for more than a week. Iranian officials acknowledged breaking IAEA seals and moving it to an undisclosed location.
No evidence of damage to the underground enrichment halls can be seen, and IAEA inspectors reported there were no radiation releases from the site. US Air Force General Dan Caine told a news conference on Sunday that an assessment of “final battle damage will take some time.”
Before the US intervention, images showed Israeli forces alone had met with limited success four days after the bombing began. Damage to the central facility in Natanz, located 300 kilometers (186 miles) south of Tehran, was primarily limited to electricity switch yards and transformers.
The US also joined in attacking the Isfahan Nuclear Technology and Research Center, located 450 kilometers south of Tehran. That was after the IAEA re-assessed the level of damage Israel had dealt to facility. Based on satellite images and communications with Iranian counterparts Isfahan appeared “extensively damaged,” the agency wrote late on Saturday.
The IAEA’s central mission is to account for gram-levels of uranium around the world and to ensure it isn’t used for nuclear weapons. The latest bombing now complicates tracking Iranian uranium even further, said Tariq Rauf, the former head of the IAEA’s nuclear-verification policy.
“It will now be very difficult for the IAEA to establish a material balance for the nearly 9,000 kilograms of enriched uranium, especially the nearly 410 kilograms of 60% enriched uranium,” he said.
That uranium inventory — enough to make 10 nuclear warheads at a clandestine location — was seen at Isfahan by IAEA inspectors. But the material, which could fit in as few as 16 small containers, may have already been spirited off site.
“Questions remain as to where Iran may be storing its already enriched stocks,” Dozikova said. “These will have almost certainly been moved to hardened and undisclosed locations, out of the way of potential Israeli or US strikes.”
Far from being just static points on a map, Iran’s ambitions to make the fuel needed for nuclear power plants and weapons are embedded in a heavily fortified infrastructure nationwide. Thousands of scientists and engineers work at dozens of sites.
Even as military analysts await new satellite images before determining the success of Trump’s mission, nuclear safeguards analysts have reached the conclusion that their work is about to become significantly harder.
That includes the forensic method used to detect the potential diversion of uranium. “Now that sites have been bombed and all classes of materials have been scattered everywhere the IAEA will never again be able to use environmental sampling,” he said. “Particles of every isotopic description have infinite half-lives for forensic purposes and it will be impossible to sort out their origin.”
