(Bloomberg) — 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.
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Trump said heavily fortified sites were “totally obliterated” late Saturday, but independent analysis has yet to verify that claim. Rather than yielding a quick win, the strikes have complicated the task of tracking uranium and ensuring Iran doesn’t build a weapon, according to three people who follow the country’s nuclear program.
International Atomic Energy Agency monitors remain in Iran and were inspecting more than one site a day before Israel started the bombing campaign on June 13. They are still trying to assess the extent of damage, and while military action might be able to destroy Iran’s declared facilities, it also provides an incentive for Iran to take its program underground.
Trump dispatched B-2 stealth jets laden with Massive Ordnance Penetrators, known as GBU-57 bombs, to attempt to destroy Iran’s underground uranium-enrichment sites in Natanz and Fordow.
Satellite images taken on Sunday of Fordow and distributed by Maxar Technologies show new craters, possible collapsed tunnel entrances and holes on top of a mountain ridge.
They also show that a large support building on the Fordow site, which operators may use to control ventilation for the underground enrichment halls, remained undamaged. There were no radiation releases from the site, the IAEA reported.
New pictures of Natanz show a new crater about 5.5 meters (18 feet) in diameter. Maxar said in a statement that the new hole was visible in the dirt directly over a part of the underground enrichment facility. The image doesn’t offer conclusive evidence that the attack breached the underground site, buried 40 meters under ground and reinforced with an 8-meter think concrete and steel shell.
US Air Force General Dan Caine told a news conference earlier on Sunday that an assessment of “final battle damage will take some time.” IAEA inspectors, meanwhile, 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.
Indeed, there’s just a slim possibility that the US entering the war will convince Iran to increase IAEA cooperation, said Darya Dolzikova, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank.
“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.
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The IAEA called on a cessation of hostilities in order to address the situation. Its 35-nation board will convene on Monday in Vienna, Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said.
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 the facility. Based on satellite images and communications with Iranian counterparts Isfahan appeared “extensively damaged,” the agency wrote late on Saturday.
Images now show extensive new damage after the US bombing, including to a large cluster of industrial buildings identified by Bloomberg last week. The IAEA reported earlier that the destruction may result in “radioactive and chemical contamination within the facilities that were hit.”
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.
Last week, inspectors had already acknowledged they’d lost track of the location of Iran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile because Israel’s ongoing military assaults are preventing its inspectors from doing their work.
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.”
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 more 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.
By bombing Iran’s sites, Israel and the US haven’t just disrupted the IAEA’s accountancy of Iran’s nuclear stockpile, they’ve also degraded the tools that monitors will be able to use, said Robert Kelley, who led inspections of Iraq and Libya as an IAEA director.
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.”
(Updates with Natanz images in seventh paragraph.)
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