The most important question following the Israel-Iran war is how much the IDF, Mossad, and US Air Force succeeded in pushing off the Iranian nuclear threat.
According to top IDF sources, by the time the military attacked on June 13, the Islamic Republic, in a worst-case scenario, was only a few months from developing multiple usable nuclear weapons.
Now, with no political angle and based only on professional evaluations, top IDF sources are adamant – despite estimates by the US Defense Intelligence Agency (which may be a minority view in the US intelligence community of 17 agencies) and certain European intelligence agencies – that Iran’s nuclear program has, in fact, been pushed back by at least a couple years, maybe longer.
The diagnosis of the issue is highly complex but crucial as nuclear science does not correspond to the convenient politics of one side or another’s view of the Israel-Iran war.
It is also much more complicated than all of the media coverage of the issue implies, said top IDF sources.
For example, media coverage has centered around alleged reports of portions of enriched uranium at Fordow being moved by Iran before the war or portions of one or more of three main nuclear facilities being damaged but not destroyed.
According to top military officials, who will not at this stage reveal all they know about the locations of Iran’s enriched uranium, these are the wrong questions to be asking.
At this stage, the IDF will only state what it knows as a certainty, as, unlike some politicians, it does not want to later be accused of exaggerating.
It knows for certain that it has completely destroyed thousands of Iranian nuclear centrifuges.
That is the largest setback for any nuclear program in history.
The military also estimates with a high level of probability, though it cannot say with 100% certainty (an analogy would be that the IDF believed it was highly likely that it killed Hamas chiefs Mohammed Deif, Mohammed Sinwar, and others but waited for official confirmation for an extended period before it said so publicly), that it has likely substantially damaged or destroyed such a significant number of Iran’s centrifuge fleet that it could take Tehran multiple years to rebuild them.
But even this is only one small piece of data.
If Israel had only struck the three major sites of Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, maybe Iran could rebuild hundreds of centrifuges within several months or a year.
But Israel also destroyed almost all of Iran’s sites for constructing centrifuges.
For example, it struck a facility in Karaj that is almost never mentioned, and when it struck Isfahan, it did not hit one facility but at least seven, with the US hitting at least three more.
IN LIGHT of the Mossad penetrating Iran with literally hundreds of agents in every hallowed place that top Iranian officials and nuclear scientists moved or thought they were safe, it is unlikely that the Islamic Republic succeeded in moving a large amount of 60% enriched uranium from any facility with Israel completely missing this.
For example, Rafael Grossi, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that Tehran probably moved some of its highly enriched uranium to Isfahan before the war – the same Isfahan where, as we just said, at least 10 different facilities were struck.
But top IDF officials will not dismiss the possibility that, somewhere, Iran managed to hide some small amount of uranium from Israel during the war.
And there are probably some centrifuges somewhere that were not completely broken.
If Iran had a teleporter to easily move each “living” centrifuge located in disparate bombed nuclear sites under rubble and a small amount of “surviving” uranium, and if all of its nuclear scientists were still alive (their top dozen or so were killed by Israel), then maybe it could restart a program to try to make a nuclear weapon in a year.
Iran would also need its data to be secure and in one place (most of its data was bombed as the IDF struck dozens of small nuclear sites) and all of the other elements of its nuclear program to be teleported quickly to one site as well.
Iran will need to take time to rebuild
Instead, Iran will need to spend several months or longer trying to dig out what was not destroyed and then several more months or longer building new facilities to move these items into, and only then can it try to restart uranium enrichment or get existing uranium to higher, weaponized levels.
At that point, Tehran will hit another wall.
Part of the reason that Israel was so worried was because Tehran was finally advancing in making enriched uranium into uranium metal and working on neutron reactions and hemispheres for a nuclear warhead, all aspects required before a nuclear bomb can actually be used.
According to top IDF officials, all or nearly all of Iran’s weaponization activities just described were bombed as part of attacks on Isfahan and dozens of other sites.
That means the Islamic Republic would need to redo nearly all of those disparate activities from scratch, which on its own could take a couple of years.
This is without even getting into other precursors for nuclear facilities that Iran had, but Israel blew up, which no one is talking about, such as the production of Zirconium, an element needed to produce fuel rods for nuclear reactors, which are another crucial piece to the nuclear puzzle.
There are many other pieces of Iran’s nuclear program that Israel attacked that no one is talking about, such as mills for producing uranium ore and uranium conversion facilities for before the uranium even gets to the centrifuges for enrichment.
None of this means that Iran cannot seek and produce nuclear weapons in the future.
But top IDF officials have high confidence that the sheer number of areas in which they destroyed or substantially harmed Iran’s nuclear program makes it nearly impossible for the Islamic Republic to carry out all of the activities needed for producing a nuclear weapon in less than a couple of years.
They also believe that the destruction of so many nuclear processes may set back Iran even longer due to the inability to reconstitute all of these processes all at once, when they were originally done with many more living scientists over many more years and stages of work.