The US and Israel have launched attacks on Iran to destroy its military capabilities and eliminate the threat of it creating a nuclear weapon.
President Donald Trump said Iran’s ballistic missile capability would soon be able to reach beyond hitting US bases in the Middle East and Europe to strike “our beautiful America”. This, he said, would make it “extraordinarily difficult” for future airstrikes to halt the country’s nuclear weapons programme, which he claimed to have “obliterated” last June.
This claim has been called into question by the latest round of strikes launched on Saturday. According to Iran’s ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), airstrikes by the US and Israel targeted the Natanz enrichment facility over the weekend: a sign that Tehran’s nuclear programme remained intact.
A preliminary report issued by the US Defence Intelligence Agency following a joint US-Israeli bombing campaign last June found that strikes did significant damage to the Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan sites, but did not totally destroy the facilities.
Fears of an all-out war in the Middle East are now growing, as America and Israel continue to pound Iran. Tehran and its allies have hit back, with multiple nations in the Middle East struck in retaliatory attacks.
As the conflict escalates, concerns around Iran’s nuclear programme mount. Here, experts explain how close Iran really is to building a nuclear weapon.
How close is Iran to building a nuclear bomb?
Under its original 2015 nuclear deal agreed by the Obama administration, Iran was allowed to enrich uranium up to 3.67 per cent purity and to maintain a uranium stockpile of 300kg (661 pounds). The IAEA put Iran’s stockpile at 9,874.9kg (21,770.4 pounds) before the start of the 12-day Israel-Iran war last June, with 440.9kg (972 pounds) of uranium enriched up to 60 per cent.
That would allow Iran to build several nuclear weapons, if it chose to do so. Experts have suggested Iran had sufficient material to produce up to five nuclear weapons in under a week if it were to enrich material further, according to Darya Dolzikova, senior research fellow with RUSI’s (Royal United Services Institute) proliferation and nuclear policy programme.
Tehran has not let the IAEA return to its bombed facilities since they were attacked in June.
Ms Dolzikova said: “Since the attacks in June, the situation on the ground will have changed quite significantly, but we don’t actually have visibility of what it looks like, because the IAEA has not had access.”
She said the key questions include whether the enriched uranium survived, whether centrifuges – the machines used to enrich uranium – survived, and whether Iran has the capabilities to actually build a weapon. It is also not known whether Iran has warheads to put a weapon on.
How much damage has the US and Israel done to Iran's nuclear programme?
Ms Dolzikova said the majority of damage the US and Israel have done to Iran’s nuclear programme will have been done in June, with damage from recent attacks proving “limited” so far.
Dr Manuel Herrera, senior policy fellow and programme manager at BASIC (British American Security Information Council), said this will be because Iran has moved production underground. He said: “In this year’s offensive, there have been several attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, but they have not been severe, as Iran has moved almost all of its enriched uranium production to underground facilities that are difficult to access.”
Iran’s nuclear facility at Natanz, located some 220km southeast of Tehran, is the country’s main enrichment site and had already been targeted by Israeli airstrikes when the US attacked it in June. Uranium had been enriched to up to 60 per cent purity at the site – a short step away from weapons grade – before Israel destroyed the above-ground part of the facility, according to the IAEA.
Another part of the facility on Iran’s Central Plateau is underground to defend against airstrikes. It operates multiple “cascades”, groups of centrifuges that work together to more quickly enrich uranium.
The IAEA has said it believes that most, if not all, of these centrifuges were destroyed by an Israeli strike that cut off power to the site. The US also dropped so-called bunker-busting bombs on the site, likely heavily damaging it.
Iran’s nuclear enrichment facility at Fordow, located some 100km southwest of Tehran, also came under US bombardment with bunker-busting bombs. The US struck the Isfahan Nuclear Technology as well with smaller munitions.
Israel separately targeted other sites associated with the programme, including the Arak heavy water reactor.
Could the war force the nuclear programme underground?
Dr Herrera has warned that the war has already forced Iran’s nuclear programme underground.
Ms Dolzikova agreed. She said: “The state of the Iranian system at the moment is such that I expect they would prob struggle to advance very quickly towards a nuclear weapon, but in the longer term, definitely, they have every incentive to put the programme underground now and to hide it.”
A lack of oversight for Iran’s nuclear programme would be a disaster for both Israel and the Trump administration. As such, experts believe Washington may seek a deal that sets limits on the nuclear programme.
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