Israel’s race to kill Iran’s nuclear dream

ISRAEL’S fearsome bombing campaign has brought Iran to its knees militarily. It has killed lots of its most senior generals and wiped out much of its air defences. Israeli aircraft are now free to conduct daylight raids over Tehran, the capital. On June 16th the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said that it had destroyed more than 120 of Iran’s ballistic-missile launchers, about a third of the total. Iran is still firing ballistic missiles at Israel, and these are killing Israelis. But the salvoes, already less intense than those seen in clashes between Israel and Iran in April and October, have been getting smaller.

The damage to Iran’s nuclear-weapons programme, however, has not been as sweeping, even though hobbling it was ostensibly the main aim of the war, along with destroying Iran’s missile force. Israel has attacked facilities at Natanz, where Iran has an underground enrichment plant. This consists of centrifuges that spin uranium gas to separate out the particular isotope needed to build a nuclear bomb. On June 16th Rafael Grossi, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a UN watchdog, suggested that all 14,000 centrifuges at the site were “severely damaged if not destroyed altogether”.

Enriching uranium in centrifuges is just one part of building a nuclear weapon. First uranium needs to be turned into a gas (usually uranium hexafluoride) that can be enriched. After enrichment it has to be converted back into a solid that will be used in the core of a bomb. On the first day of the war Israel bombed two facilities in Isfahan involved in these last steps, a uranium-conversion facility and a plant making fuel-plates, which initiate the implosion of the core when a bomb explodes. Israel has also bombed a site at Parchin that was used to simulate implosions and on June 19th struck an inactive reactor at Arak.

Israel has also killed at least 14 scientists involved in its nuclear programme, as well as many of the senior officials who oversaw their work. It has bombed the headquarters of the SPND, the agency that led Iran’s nuclear work, in Tehran. And it has attacked several other sites in the capital, including those that allegedly made chemicals and “unique components” needed for a bomb.

All this is a significant setback to Iran’s nuclear programme. But there is a catch. Iran’s most important enrichment facility, buried under a mountain at Fordow, near the city of Qom, appears to be unscathed. Iranian officials have said it was attacked, but the IAEA says that there is no sign of damage. The facility is so deeply buried that Israel would struggle to destroy its underground halls with conventional bombs, though it might attempt to destroy it from within by putting troops on the ground if Iranian defences in the area could be softened up enough. On top of that, there is also no sign that Israel has attacked another, more recent, and perhaps even more deeply buried facility south of Natanz, known as Mt Kolang Gaz La.

Iran claims it had moved equipment and nuclear material out of Natanz before it was attacked. Mr Grossi said on June 18th that he could no longer say for sure whether Iran’s uranium stockpile remained at Isfahan. On June 14th Iran declared it had stopped co-operating with the IAEA “as before”, and would not tell the agency of “new and special measures to protect nuclear materials and equipment”.

Iran has enriched enough uranium to 60% purity to make ten bombs (see chart). Although this needs to be further enriched, to 90% purity, Iran in theory could do that in three days using the centrifuges at Fordow. If it judged that it was too risky to do this at a known site, it could attempt the process elsewhere. In fact, The Economist has learned, Israeli spies believe that Iran has some enriched uranium hidden away, unknown to the IAEA—one of the reasons it initiated its bombing campaign.

But Israeli officers remain sanguine. They say they know where the highly enriched uranium (HEU) stockpile is. Israel has demonstrated that it has remarkable intelligence about Iran’s armed forces, so moving centrifuges and nuclear material around the country would be risky for Iran.

Where does this leave Iran’s nuclear-weapons programme? Once the bombing stops—and assuming that the regime, or some version of it, remains standing—how long would it take to reconstitute? That depends in part on whether Israel (or America) ends up damaging Fordow, where Iran has a number of presumably undamaged centrifuges, and destroying the HEU stockpile, which is thought to be in Isfahan. If Iran could move those machines and the uranium to secret sites after the war, it could produce the fissile material for a bomb in short order.

The snag is that turning enriched uranium hexafluoride back into solid metal would require the sorts of facilities that Israel has destroyed. If Fordow and the HEU stocks do go up in smoke, and if Iran has not previously hidden away some centrifuges, then Iran will also have to build new machines to enrich uranium. But on June 18th Israel announced that it had also bombed facilities where centrifuge parts, such as rotors, are made.

In theory, building new plants would take months, not years. But many of the necessary components would have to be imported. Western intelligence agencies have often tracked and disrupted Iran’s nuclear programme by monitoring and intercepting such purchases. They are likely to redouble such efforts after the war. What is also unclear is how much nuclear know-how Iran has lost over the past week through the killing of scientists and the destruction of papers and laboratories. Training new personnel and repeating experiments would also take time; doing so in secret would be harder still. And there may not be so many enthusiastic recruits.

Israel’s military planners draw a distinction between stopping Iran from actually assembling a bomb, which they believe it was getting close to doing before their bombing campaign began, and setting back its nuclear-weapons programme by years, which is a much more complicated task. The first goal has largely been achieved, they believe, by the strikes they have carried out against nuclear facilities and SPND labs and offices, as well as the assassinations of scientists. The second will be possible only if Fordow and any other enrichment sites are destroyed, along with the stockpile of HEU. In short, although notable progress has been made, the main aim of Israel’s bombing campaign has yet to be achieved. ■