Claiming that Iran retaining enrichment capabilities is irrelevant is intellectually dishonest and unhelpful for accurate strategy.

• A week after the end of hostilities—at least in the short term—with Iran, and following the U.S. airstrikes against nuclear facilities in Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz, we still lack clarity on even an approximate level of the damage inflicted as a result of these strikes.

• We still don’t know the fate of the 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium (HEU) or where it is exactly.

• But we are starting to get more interpretations, statements from experts, and evidence as well.

• We do know that most of the HEU was stored at the facility in Isfahan, where the tunnels are actually even deeper than those at Fordow, which itself is buried into a mountain and ostensibly even harder to penetrate.

• So the tunnels at Isfahan were too deep to be reached by massive ordnance-penetrating bombs anyway, and that facility was bombed with Tomahawk cruise missiles (that are not used for bunker penetration missions).

• So it’s quite plausible that Iran left some or all of the highly enriched uranium at Isfahan.

• If so, it almost certainly survived, given that the tunnels there appear to be intact from all the satellite pictures and circumstantial evidence.

• Now, we also know that Iran has already dug out tunnels at Isfahan, where most of Iran’s HEU was stored prior to the attacks—and even perhaps during them.

• So, if this highly enriched uranium was stored at the tunnels at Isfahan mainly, versus Fordow, then it almost certainly survived.

• And if the U.S. attacked the entrances, they weren’t very effective, since they had been dug down.

• Consequently, that would make the issue of whether trucks moved it from Fordow or not moot.

• Then we also have an intercepted phone conversation leaked by the U.S. intelligence, in which several Iranian officials openly discussed how the damage done by the airstrikes turned out to be less than what was expected by them.

• Now, of course, the veracity of this claim is also under question.

• Having witnessed Mossad’s total penetration of their state, the Iranians do realize already that their actions are being monitored and their conversations are being recorded, so this could have just been brazen disinformation to throw off the scent of the Western intel officials—knowing that this would be picked up by those in the intelligence community who are happy to leak any information that harms the idea that the U.S. strikes were effective.

• With that said, we cannot completely discount these conversations as evidence either—just like how we wouldn’t discount it if they exaggerated the harm.

• (side note: because there could also be incentive in that direction, where they want to make sure that no further attacks take place, and that Americans and Israelis are lulled into complacency.)

• So we need to look at it as an overall picture.

• With all that said, the IAEA chief Rafael Grossi says that not only has there been significant damage to nuclear facilities, but crucially, also that Tehran could still resume uranium enrichment within months.

• He said this in an interview with CBS News’ Face the Nation.

• He said that the capacities they have are there, and that they can, in a matter of months or even less, use the few cascades of centrifuges spinning and producing enriched uranium.

• Now, Grossi did say that the IAEA didn’t see any evidence of weaponization, but also that—crucially—the Iranians are not answering many important pending questions that the IAEA would need answered to fully discount the possibility of weaponization.

• As such, if the IAEA was having trouble assessing Iranian intent before, things are going to be much harder now, given that the Iranian parliament has passed a bill to end its cooperation with the IAEA, which they now call a tool of “Zionist disinformation” that led to this attack.

• Now, one may ask whether Iran’s capacity for enrichment matters for weaponization.

• Surely most of their tech is destroyed, and just because there’s some remaining enrichment capability doesn’t mean they will actually be able to assemble a proper program again.

• But the answer to this question is: yes, of course it matters.

• Just think about the original rationale for the U.S. airstrikes.

• And what was the rationale for Trump insisting on zero enrichment?

• Because ability to enrich is a necessary (but an insufficient) condition to be able to weaponize one day.

• As long as Iran can enrich, Iran can enrich beyond the required limit—which the JCPOA or Iran Nuclear Deal of 2015 set at 3.67% (reactor level).

• But after Trump’s withdrawal, Iran started enriching at 60%.

• And now, just before the attack, America insisted on zero enrichment, which was a red line for Iran.

• Clearly then, the ability to enrich to begin with matters a lot.

• So to all those who want to protect Trump from any image of a failed military operation by denying that Iran retaining HEU and centrifuge components matters at all—that denial is ridiculous, and it’s completely contradictory to the administration’s own policy of insisting on zero enrichment.

• If the fate of HEU doesn’t matter, if the ability to enrich shortly or in a few months doesn’t matter, then why insist on zero enrichment to begin with?

• Why make such a big deal out of it?

• Why attack Iran right now?

• Because clearly they weren’t close to weaponization.

• There was no evidence of a particular plant that was building a nuclear bomb.

• The American attacks were attacks against enrichment capability, first and foremost.

• So denying the importance of Iran retaining its enrichment capacity is contradictory and unhelpful to this debate.

• It’s intellectually dishonest.

• With all that said, does it mean that if Iran can still enrich in a few months, as Rafael Grossi points out, that they will:

• A) do that;

• B) do that in secret, or in the open in a brazen fashion, and;

• C) will they simultaneously try to weaponize and dash for a bomb?

• This is something that we will discuss periodically, but to begin with, we will (in the upcoming post) unpack how just enrichment in itself isn’t enough, and that there are so many other bottlenecks and/or deterrents to Iran deciding to weaponize and even pursuing that path.