Donald Trump was triumphalist. “Monumental Damage was done to all nuclear sites in Iran, as shown by satellite images. Obliteration is an accurate term!” he declared on Truth Social on June 22. The White House doubled down on his assessment after the Defence Intelligence Agency leaked an initial top-secret assessment suggesting the most sensitive areas of the Fordow nuclear site at least survived relatively intact.
For the first time since the Islamic Revolution, the White House website featured a quote from the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Esmail Baghaei, who declared: “Our nuclear installations have been badly damaged, that’s for sure.” How could the same nuclear program both be obliterated and its centrifuges almost intact, as those who saw the initial intelligence assessment related?
That someone at the DIA released it so quickly should counterintuitively undermine its conclusions as the leaker likely wanted to play politics and write the first draft of history because they knew the assessment would be challenged by their peers in the intelligence community.
In many ways, the current state of the Iranian nuclear program is the counterproliferation equivalent of Schroedinger’s cat. Everyone is describing the box, but no one has yet been able to peer beneath it.
Certainly the leaked intelligence report appears damning, but there is likely less there than meets the eye. Intelligence assessment is an ongoing process that will involve several agencies. That someone at the DIA released it so quickly should counterintuitively undermine its conclusions as the leaker likely wanted to play politics and write the first draft of history because they knew the assessment would be challenged by their peers in the intelligence community. Indeed, neither the leaker nor the journalists receiving the assessment acknowledged that the DIA had labelled its report “low confidence” and that it based its conclusion solely on satellite imagery.
While there is no love for the US President among intelligence community professionals or many non-proliferation specialists, assessments vary widely about the damage Trump did to known Iranian nuclear sites. Even Trump has started to admit some uncertainty.
Still, while Trump’s detractors appear correct that the bunker-buster bombs did not completely collapse the undergrounds halls at Fordow, they did seal tunnels and ventilation shafts and destroy electrical supplies. Enrichment cascades are delicate, however, which is why the Stuxnet computer worm was able to set Iran’s nuclear enrichment program back years by varying the speed of its centrifuges.
The bombs’ ability to penetrate rock might have fallen 30m short of the 100m of the Iranian chambers, but the vibrations caused by bunker-buster bombs were like Stuxnet on steroids. Centrifuge cascades do not require the same degree of sterility that biological warfare laboratories might, but foreign particles introduced into cascades will contaminate the final product.
Sealing tunnels and ventilation shafts with bombs not only set the program back months if not years, but this also raises dust clouds that transform the sterility of cascade halls from levels expected in hospital intensive care units to those found in a hoarder’s garage.
This is why many other analysts now push back on the DIA’s declarations. Trump has cited Israeli sources to suggest commandos near the sites confirmed the damage. International Atomic Energy Agency director-general Rafael Grossi, who will oversee inspections if the Islamic Republic allows their resumption, described Iran before and after the June 13 hostilities began as a “night and day” difference.
Physicist David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security, meanwhile, a former inspector on an IAEA team in Iraq, concluded that the US and Israeli strikes “effectively destroyed Iran’s centrifuge enrichment program”.
While the Israelis believe that much of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile is buried under rubble and collapsed tunnels, hundreds of kilograms nevertheless remain unaccounted for.
The greatest problem right now is not what happened to the facilities at Fordow but what escaped them. While the Israelis believe that much of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile is buried under rubble and collapsed tunnels, hundreds of kilograms nevertheless remain unaccounted for. Commercial satellite imagery shows lines of trucks parked outside one of Fordow’s tunnels before the US bombing. This points at a possible intelligence failure. Did the US intelligence community fail to find what commercially available satellite imagery detected? If those trucks removed Fordow’s enriched uranium, did US hand-wringing enable the Islamic Republic to remove its motherlode?
Washington often navel-gazes but, if true, seldom would its tendency to assume the world revolves around its timetable have been so dangerous.
Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile has always been problematic. While Iranian leaders justified their program in a desire to power their civilian nuclear power plant at Bushehr, the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran has acknowledged replacing reactor fuel 10 times, always with enriched uranium supplied by Russia and never by Iran, raising questions about the purpose of the Iranian enrichment program.
The US has long had plans to secure Pakistan’s nuclear weaponry should the South Asian country’s chaotic government collapse. Given Washington’s decades of enmity with Tehran, a failure to secure Iran’s nuclear motherlode would represent an intelligence failure on par with Iraq, especially given the possibility that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps could build dirty bombs or scatter its 60 percent highly enriched uranium stockpile to proxies to do so.
Not all scenarios are as dire. Against the backdrop of the Israeli air campaign against Iran, a flight landed in Tehran from China; it remains unclear what the Chinese cargo plane carried in or out, raising the possibility that China removed at least a portion of the enriched uranium stockpile for safekeeping, perhaps in exchange for Iran keeping open the Strait of Hormuz through which China gets 44 percent of its 11 million barrels of oil imports a day as well as a quarter of its liquefied natural gas.
As US and Israeli analysts assess the aftermath of the Fordow bombing and seek to confirm the whereabouts of Iran’s uranium, they may have exposed another intelligence failure. Some analysts now believe the Islamic Republic has built a third underground nuclear facility under Koh-e Kolang Gaz La, colloquially known as Pickaxe Mountain.
In 2022, the Institute for Science and International Security released commercial satellite imagery showing construction of parameter fencing around the site and speculated that it appeared to house a tunnel complex far deeper than Natanz and Fordow, especially as Kolang Gaz La is 650m higher. The IRGC retrenchment around the mountain confirms its importance. After all, why would security metaphorically guard a vacant building rather than a bank with a vault filled with gold? That the IAEA never inspected Pickaxe Mountain’s tunnel complexes reinforces how limited its inspections were.
The Israeli and American assault also bypassed several other nuclear sites to prevent radioactive leakage.
As Trump has commented on June 25 on the sidelines of the NATO summit in The Hague, the US is willing to bomb Iran’s program again should it seek to rebuild.
Not only did Israel and the US keep collateral damage and the civilian casualty toll an order of magnitude less than the death toll Iranian security forces exacted to put down the Islamic Republic’s 2019 economic unrest or the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, but the trade winds over Iran would push radiation out over the Persian Gulf and then up over Qatar, eastern Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq - in effect creating not only an environmental catastrophe but an economic one as well.
Trump may claim credit for ending what he deemed the “12-Day War”, but the reality is that an Israeli pause was inevitable. Culture matters: The Muslim month of Muharram began on June 26.
Ashura, a Shi’ite holiday commemorating the anniversary of the death of Imam Hussein at the Battle of Karbala in AD 680, is on the 10th of Muharram, which this year falls on July 5. It is a time of heightened religious passion as Shi’ites re-enact the battle in passion plays and self-flagellate to demonstrate their mourning.
To date, supreme leader Ali Khamenei has had trouble rallying the Iranian people around the flag. For Israel to continue its assault during the holiday, however, would give Khamenei a second opportunity to do so. That said, as Trump has commented on June 25 on the sidelines of the NATO summit in The Hague, the US is willing to bomb Iran’s program again should it seek to rebuild.
Ultimately, any campaign to address Iran’s nuclear program goes beyond military strikes to the complete removal of the program, including the dismantling of nuclear facilities that cannot safely be blown up.
There is precedent for this. In the 1970s, apartheid-era South Africa - a state whose ideology was not less odious than the Islamic Republic today - developed nuclear weapons.
Only in 1991 did South Africa agree to dismantle its program and open itself to inspections. It then took the IAEA almost two decades to certify South Africa compliance as complete.
Former Soviet states Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine likewise gave up the legacy nuclear weapons by allowing Russia to crate them up and transport them outside each country. In 2003, Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi agreed to give up his secret unconventional weapons program.
While revisionists perform intellectual somersaults to escape reality, the timeline is unequivocal: Gaddafi surrendered his program when he saw Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s ouster over such weapons. Fearful that the mercurial leader could change his mind, US and British intelligence specialists flooded into Libya to dismantle and physically cart out of the country not only the material but also the factories that produced it.
That some countries see Gaddafi’s subsequent ouster as a lesson that they must possess chemical, biological or nuclear weapons ignores that the Libyan people themselves turned on Gaddafi. Ending Libya’s program likely stopped the proliferation that would have occurred as the North African country fractured into factions.
Many Arab countries privately voice relief that Israel will eliminate a program that threatens them all and that the Trump administration stepped in to finish the job.
International planning about the day after Iran’s surrender has been deficient. The reason Trump so opposed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s suggestion that airstrikes target Khamenei himself is because of Trump’s belief that Khamenei’s signature on an unconditional surrender is necessary to end the nuclear program and prevent a vacuum of leadership.
If regime change will occur, those surrounding Trump believe it should occur with Khamenei transferring leadership to a provisional council.
That may address some questions about governance, but it ignores Iran’s core program.
One of the major problems of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is that it froze but did not eliminate the Islamic Republic’s industrial base. In effect, it was a deal offered to trade security for a Neville Chamberlain-like “peace in our time” photo opportunity. The sunset clauses to which president Barack Obama acquiesced would have lifted restrictions on the advanced centrifuge cascades’ operation beginning this year. Far from imposing rigorous controls, the nuclear deal lifted them and forced Israel to choose: eliminate the program militarily or face the existential threat of a nuclear Islamic Republic of Iran.
Israel chose the former. There is an irony that while some European leaders as well Anthony Albanese, Foreign Minister Penny Wong and their progressive support base condemn Israel, many Arab countries privately voice relief that Israel will eliminate a program that threatens them all and that the Trump administration stepped in to finish the job.
Too many in Europe and Australia fail to realise that the region views their virtue signalling and pro forma statements about diplomacy as naive and worthy of disdain. If Australia wants to be part of the solution rather than embrace diplomacy that would allow the Islamic Republic to rebuild its program, then it should recognise that any hope for peace in the Middle East requires a complete cessation of Iran’s nuclear program.
Alone among nuclear weapons states or aspirants, the Islamic Republic repeatedly declared its goal to be the eradication of another state, perhaps even with a first strike.
As former Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a so-called pragmatist, explained almost a quarter-century ago, “The use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam.” Trump will likely give Khamenei until the end of Muharram to surrender his program or he will resume bombing. As a lame duck who never needs to face the electorate again, Trump need not care about political opposition.
Eventually, Iran will surrender its program or targeted bombing will end the regime. Either way, Iran will lose its capability. To this end, then, Australia can contribute to discussions about how this occurs. Neither the US nor Israel trust the IAEA, especially given its failure to address Kolang Gaz La.
No matter who takes charge of the dismantlement of Iran’s remaining program, the end of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear fantasy has arrived. Iranians themselves will benefit.
The EU may volunteer, but rampant anti-Semitism and polemical accusations of genocide from European foreign ministries also erodes trust. India may provide a solution as it is the only country trusted by Washington, Jerusalem and Tehran.
No matter who takes charge of the dismantlement of Iran’s remaining program, the end of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear fantasy has arrived. Iranians themselves will benefit.
The civilian reactor at Bushehr produces electricity at twice the cost of the South Korean-built reactor in the United Arab Emirates, and the regime’s nuclear deceit and subsequent sanctions have cost the Iranian people hundreds of billions of dollars in lost revenue and potential.
Australia should not lose its moral clarity; helping the Iranian people requires ending a nuclear program that has brought nothing but disaster to them. Michael Rubin is director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum and is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Published originally on June 28, 2025.
