Hailing the massive American strikes on Iran as a success, President Donald Trump said late Saturday that the Islamic Republic’s key nuclear sites were “completely and fully obliterated.”
But despite his bullish claims, the extent of the damage to the deeply buried facility at Fordo, as well as sites at Isfahan and Natanz, is unclear and almost 400 kilograms or 880 pounds of uranium enriched to 60% is publicly unaccounted for. Power plants only require the radioactive metal to be enriched to 3%-5%, whereas 90% is required to build a nuclear warhead. NBC
But while Trump is bragging about deeds he actually didn’t do, the Director General off the AIEA addressed the UN Security Council with the truth as it is known now. The meeting was held yesterday.
“The fundamental reality remains that military action alone can only roll back the programme by degrees, not eliminate it fully,” Darya Dolzikova, a senior research fellow at the London-based Royal United Services Institute think tank, said in an op-ed Sunday.
The success of the American attacks, particularly at the Fordo plant, “is not immediately apparent,” she wrote. “Imagery can’t show much about the damage down at the centrifuge enrichment hall, so the U.S. and Israel will be relying heavily on intelligence from inside the Iranian system.”
But even if the destruction was widespread, “Iran retains extensive expertise that will allow it to eventually reconstitute what aspects of the programme have been damaged or destroyed,” she said. “The Iranian nuclear programme is decades old and draws on extensive Iranian indigenous expertise. The physical elimination of the programme’s infrastructure — and even the assassination of Iranian scientists — will not be sufficient to destroy the latent knowledge that exists in the country.”
