What’s next for Iran’s nuclear programme?

Iran refuses to dismantle its nuclear programme and it’s still impossible to verify the damage done by air strikes.

Barely 72 hours after United States President Donald Trump’s air strikes against Iran, a controversy erupted over the extent of the damage they had done to the country’s uranium enrichment facilities in Fordow and Natanz.

The New York Times and CNN leaked a preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assessment that the damage may have been “from moderate to severe”, noting it had “low confidence” in the findings because they were an early assessment.

Trump had claimed the sites were “obliterated”.

The difference in opinion mattered because it goes to the heart of whether the US and Israel had eliminated Iran’s ability to enrich uranium to levels that would allow it to make nuclear weapons, at least for years.

Israel has long claimed – without evidence – that Iran plans to build nuclear bombs. Iran has consistently insisted that its nuclear programme is purely of a civilian nature. And the US has been divided on the question – its intelligence community concluding as recently as March that Tehran was not building a nuclear bomb, but Trump claiming earlier in June that Iran was close to building such a weapon.

Yet amid the conflicting claims and assessments on the damage from the US strikes to Iranian nuclear facilities and whether the country wants atomic weapons, one thing is clear: Tehran says it has no intentions of giving up on its nuclear programme.

So what is the future of that programme? How much damage has it suffered? Will the US and Israel allow Iran to revive its nuclear programme? And can a 2015 diplomatic deal with Iran – that was working well until Trump walked out of it – be brought back to life?

Mohammad Eslami, the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, on Tuesday said that “preparations for recovery had already been anticipated, and our plan is to prevent any interruption in production or services”.

To be sure, even if they haven’t been destroyed, Natanz and Fordow – Iran’s only known enrichment sites – have suffered significant damage, according to satellite images. Israel has also assassinated several of Iran’s top nuclear scientists in its wave of strikes that began on June 13.

However, the DIA said in the initial assessment that the Trump administration has tried to dismiss, that the attacks had only set Iran’s nuclear programme back by months. It also said that Iran had moved uranium enriched at these facilities away from these sites prior to the strikes. Iranian officials have also made the same claim.

What Iran wants

The UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), had accused Iran of enriching up to 400kg of uranium to 60 percent – not far below the 90 percent enrichment that is needed to make weapons.

Asked on Wednesday whether he thought the enriched uranium had been smuggled out from the nuclear facilities before the strikes, Trump said, “We think everything nuclear is down there, they didn’t take it out.” Asked again later, he said, “We think we hit them so hard and so fast they didn’t get to move.”

But it’s important to remember that the DIA and CIA also disagreed on whether Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in 2003.

The DIA sided with the UN’s view that inspections had proven Hussein didn’t have such weapons. The CIA, on the other hand, provided intelligence that backed the position of then-president George W Bush in favour of an invasion – intelligence that was later debunked. In that instance, the CIA proved politically more malleable than the DIA.

Amid the current debate over whether Iranian nuclear sites were destroyed, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, has also weighed in favour of the president’s view.

“Iran’s nuclear facilities have been destroyed. If the Iranians chose to rebuild, they would have to rebuild all three facilities (Natanz, Fordow, Esfahan) entirely, which would likely take years to do,” she posted on Twitter/X.

But Gabbard has already demonstrably changed her public statements to suit Trump.

In March, she testified before a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon, and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorised the nuclear weapons programme that he suspended in 2003”.

On June 20, Trump was asked for his reaction to that assessment. “She’s wrong,” he said.

Gabbard later that day posted that her testimony had been misquoted by “the dishonest media” and that “America has intelligence that Iran is at the point that it can produce a nuclear weapon within weeks to months, if they decide to finalise the assembly”.

Gabbard’s clarification did not contradict her earlier view, that Iran was not actively trying to build a weapon.

Asked in an interview with a French radio network whether Iran’s nuclear programme had been destroyed, IAEA chief Rafael Grossi replied, “I think ‘destroyed’ is too much. But it suffered enormous damage.”

On Wednesday, Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission concurred with the CIA, saying Iran’s nuclear facilities had been rendered “totally inoperable” and had “set back Iran’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons for many years to come”.