The sabotage operation against Iran’s largest uranium enrichment facility in Natanz on April 11 was the latest apparent Israeli effort to set back Tehran’s nuclear work. In July 2020, an advanced centrifuge production plant in the same complex sustained a powerful blast using an explosive bomb that caused significant damage to the aboveground facility and prompted Iranian authorities to build an underground replacement. The explosion was followed by the high-profile assassination in November of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the chief architect of Iran’s atomic energy program.
Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, the chair of the Iranian parliamentary energy committee who himself survived an assassination attempt in 2010, described the recent attack as a “very pretty scheme” and a “complex feat” involving a blast that knocked out the enrichment facility’s standard power grid as well as its battery-based emergency system used to generate electricity for centrifuges. Echoing the indignant political mood among hard-liners in Tehran, Alireza Zakani, the conservative head of the Iranian parliament’s research center, espoused that an “appropriate response” would be “enrichment to above 60 percent purity”—usually intended for powering nuclear submarines and above any level Iran has enriched at before.
