Two weeks after the United States launched air strikes on three of Iran’s key nuclear sites, mounting evidence is puncturing President Donald Trump’s boasts that the facilities were “obliterated”.
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From the head of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog to leading American non-proliferation experts, scepticism is growing over Washington’s assertions that the strikes set back Tehran’s nuclear weapons ambitions “by years”.
Trump “appears to have already lost interest”, according to Barbara Slavin, a distinguished Middle East fellow at the Washington-based Stimson Centre think tank – apparently believing that a public declaration of victory renders negotiations with Iran unnecessary.
But nuclear experts agree: no one outside Iran can say with any certainty what has become of the country’s 900lb (409kg) stockpile of 60 per cent-enriched uranium. While this enrichment level falls one step short of weapons-grade, it is – by the UN’s reckoning – enough to produce as many as nine nuclear warheads were Tehran to take that final leap.
Instead of halting Iran’s progress, the US and Israeli attacks have triggered a retaliatory ban on International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors, cutting off the UN Security Council’s oversight of the country’s nuclear sites and, crucially, its cache of highly enriched uranium (HEU).
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Before the strikes, the IAEA had what it described as a “comprehensive” picture of Iran’s HEU reserves and the centrifuges spinning to enrich uranium. But now, as Director General Rafael Grossi told US news network CBS last Sunday, “there is nothing”.
