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The US-Israeli onslaught against Iran is intended to resolve a 24-year standoff over Tehran’s nuclear programme, but it runs the risk of backfiring and driving the regime towards making a secret bomb, proliferation experts have warned.
The regime in Tehran has long insisted that the programme is for civilian purposes and it has no intention of making a nuclear weapon. However, since two undeclared sites, for uranium enrichment and heavy water plutonium production, were discovered in 2002, the programme has been treated with intense suspicion.
A nuclear deal in 2015 imposed severe limits and thorough inspections on Iran but when Donald Trump walked out of the agreement in 2018, triggering its collapse, Iran ramped up its work on enrichment and other aspects of the programme.
Most worryingly for the international community, Iran had by last summer produced a stockpile of just over 440kg of highly enriched uranium (HEU), of 60% purity. In terms of technical difficulty, once at 60%, it is a relatively easy step to reach 90% – weapons-grade uranium that can be used to make a compact warhead.
With further enrichment and conversion of the uranium from gas to metal form, Iran’s 440kg stockpile would be enough to make more than 10 warheads.
The anxiety over this stockpile, accumulated since the torpedoing of the 2015 nuclear deal, was the motive for last June’s US-Israeli strikes on Iran. The US role, Operation Midnight Hammer, was focused on dropping bunker-busting bombs on Iran’s nuclear sites.
Trump claimed the bombardment had “obliterated” the nuclear programme, but it soon became apparent this was not true. The bombs had wreaked extensive damage, but deep underground sites, burrowed beneath mountains in two sites in particular, Isfahan and Natanz, could not be destroyed.
In response to the attacks, Iran excluded UN inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from those and other sensitive sites, with the result that the watchdog lost track of what became of the 440kg HEU stockpile, and of what was being done in the deep tunnels in Isfahan and Natanz.
In its latest report, the IAEA conceded it could not verify whether Iran had suspended all enrichment-related activities, or the size of its uranium stockpile at the affected nuclear facilities.
Despite that uncertainty, the IAEA director general, Rafael Grossi, said on Monday that “we don’t see a structured programme to manufacture nuclear weapons”.
However, nuclear proliferation experts worry that might change in the aftermath of an attack aimed at destroying the regime that has ruled Iran for 47 years, and the killing of its supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, who had issued a religious edict, a fatwa, against the building of a bomb.
“That is what makes this such a tremendous roll of the dice,” said Jeffrey Lewis, a distinguished scholar of global security at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. “Because if the strike does not succeed in removing a regime, there remain thousands of people in Iran who are capable of reconstituting a programme like this.”
Lewis added: “The technology itself is decades old, and a vengeful Iran that survives this strike is likely to reach the same conclusion that North Korea reached, that it’s a dangerous world out there with the United States, and it’s better to go nuclear.”
Kelsey Davenport, the director for nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association, agreed that in the aftermath of the attack there would be greater motivation within the remnants of the regime “pushing Iran towards weaponisation no matter how this conflict ends, because of the nature in which it started”.
Davenport pointed out that if the regime collapsed or if a civil war broke out, the fate of Iran’s HEU stockpile would become a major global problem.
“If we end up in a scenario where we have regime implosion, where Iran becomes so internally destabilised that there is a real risk that material is diverted, that it is stolen … there’s going to be a lot of pressure on the United States to put boots on the ground,” Davenport said.
“There’s a real nuclear terrorism risk to Trump’s regime change objective that I have not heard the administration acknowledging.”
