After engaging in months of talks earlier this year, Iranian leaders cut off nuclear talks with the U.S. indefinitely, and they have ended the country’s cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Officials from the IAEA, an intergovernmental organization that monitors the potential development of nuclear weapons, will travel to Washington this week to discuss next steps with the U.S., following a refusal by Iran to allow inspectors to resume the monitoring scheme that existed before the Iran-Israel war. Iran maintains that the sites of the strikes remain too dangerous to visit, but officials in Tehran have long expressed their distrust of the IAEA.
“We have not reached the point of cutting off cooperation with the Agency,” Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi claimed, referring to IAEA, “but future cooperation will certainly not resemble the past.”
“Our policy is clear: we do not seek nuclear weapons,” Araghchi said in a recent interview with Iranian state television. “But we do insist on our right to enrichment for peaceful purposes, as well as to preserve the scientific achievements we have made independently.” He claimed that recent U.S. strikes were driven by a belief that Iran should halt all uranium enrichment, rather than Israeli and U.S. intelligence indicating that Iran was nearing the ability to build a bomb.
Before the strikes by Israel and the United States, Iran had two primary uranium enrichment sites: Natanz, in the centrally located province of Isfahan, and Fordo, situated to the north outside of the city of Qom. Most experts agree that both sites were substantially damaged by the combination of Israeli strikes and U.S. follow-up attacks. Bombers also struck the Isfahan Nuclear Technology Center, which possessed the ability to convert yellowcake into gaseous uranium hexafluoride (UF6), which could then be enriched in centrifuges and converted into a metal for use in nuclear warheads.
Satellite imagery at all three sites shows that the Iranian government hasn’t made much of an effort to repair facilities or to resume operations, and the strikes were clearly a significant setback for the country’s nuclear ambitions. However, two big question marks hover over a mysterious facility located beneath the ominously named Pickaxe Mountain, near Natanz, and the possible existence of a new nuclear site in Isfahan.
Pickaxe Mountain was not targeted in the June strikes and remains active according to satellite imaging. Some experts believe that it may house not only centrifuges and the machinery for constructing them, but possibly Iran’s remaining stockpile of near-weapons-grade uranium.
Meanwhile, in June, IAEA Director Rafael Grossi said that Isfahan was the site for a new uranium enrichment facility. Days before the initial Israeli strikes, Iran had announced that it would be opening the new facility in retaliation for the IAEA declaring the country to be in breach of its non-proliferation obligations. It’s unclear whether Iran has brought this site online yet, or if it plans to do so soon.
But even if Iran has, at least temporarily, lost the ability to manufacture weapons-grade uranium, it likely still possesses nearly a thousand pounds of highly enriched uranium. Only a few days into the June war, the IAEA said it lost track of the 902 pounds of highly enriched uranium known to regulators, and though U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance told Fox News that this stockpile had been “buried” in the strikes, satellite images from before the attack seem to indicate that the material was rapidly moved ahead of time.
If that uranium remains accessible to Iran, it’s quite possible to turn it into nuclear warheads. “Getting from 60 to 90 percent enrichment is a lot easier than getting from zero to 60,” Joseph Rodgers, a deputy director and fellow for the Project on Nuclear Issues at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told TMD. “It only takes a few weeks with a decent centrifuge cascade.” If Iran is able to recover some centrifuges, and then pursue clandestine enrichment, it would have enough weapons-grade uranium to make roughly 10 nuclear bombs, Rodgers said.
However, even in the event of an all-out sprint for a bomb by the Iranian state, substantial obstacles, other than the ability to enrich enough uranium quickly enough, remain. First, Rodgers noted, nuclear bombs are more than enriched uranium. They also need to be delivered by missile or plane, and Iran does not clearly have the capability to construct large, accurate missiles that can penetrate air defenses.
Iran’s impotence in striking adversaries in recent months has demonstrated how relatively weak the country’s missile program is, Rodgers noted. “Iran needs to step up their missile program in order to effectively deliver a hypothetical nuclear weapon,” he argued. Of the more than 1,000 drones and hundreds of ballistic missiles launched at Israel by Iran during the 12-day war, Israel and the U.S. were able to intercept more than 90 percent of them, according to Israel. With its missile batteries severely damaged by U.S. and Israeli strikes, Iran’s ability to strike faraway targets is even more limited today.
Second, Israeli intelligence services were able to assassinate important members of the group of scientists underpinning Iran’s nuclear program. According to Israeli Ambassador to France Joshua Zarkas, at least 14 top scientists were killed by Israel during the country’s June strikes. “The fact that the whole group disappeared is basically throwing back the program by a number of years,” he declared. Replacing that technological know-how is certainly possible, but it will take time.
It will also take quite a bit of money. “Iran’s budget isn’t [an infinite] pie,” Michael Rubin, a Dispatch contributor and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told TMD. With the recent decline in the price of oil, exports of which make up roughly 35 percent of total revenue in Iran’s budget, the trade-offs are likely to become relatively stark. “The ayatollahs either can provide electricity, water, and a relatively stable currency, or they can invest in their enrichment and missile programs,” Rubin said. On Sunday, Khamenei called his country’s conflict with the U.S. over its nuclear program “unsolvable.”
We’ll have more clarity on whether Iran really has given up on complying with the West in the coming weeks. On Friday, Iran’s foreign minister spoke with Germany, France, and Britain as the three European nations threatened to impose “snapback” sanctions on Tehran by the end of the month. “We have just made an important call to our Iranian counterpart regarding the nuclear program and the sanctions against Iran that we are preparing to reapply,” French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said. “Time is running out.”
