Trump’s Claims Misunderstand Iran’s Potential Pathways to a Nuclear Bomb

Immediately after the United States attacked Iranian nuclear facilities on June 21, president Donald Trump announced that the operation was “amazing military success.” Since then, his administration has been looking for ways to support this statement. It has settled on the argument, which apparently advanced through a new intelligence evaluation, that Iran will need “years” to rebuild facilities last month.

This claim has an advantage to be correct – but also a deception.

Immediately after the United States attacked Iranian nuclear facilities on June 21, President Donald Trump announced that the operation was “amazing military success.” Since then, his administration has been looking for ways to support this statement. It has settled on the argument, which apparently advanced through a new intelligence evaluation, that Iran will need “years” to rebuild facilities last month.

This claim has an advantage to be correct – but also a deception.

Iran does not need to rebuild its previous nuclear program to build a bomb. The United States and Israel, for a good reason, believe that most Iran’s highly enriched uranium stocks (HeU) have survived the attack. Tehran is also possible to reserve the ability to enrich this substance and then its weapon to produce a handful of nuclear weapons. If Tehran decides to move forward in this way, it is possible that he will make a first bomb in a year, although the Trump administration’s impact on the opposite.

Before the start of the Iran and Israel war, most Iranian Heu stocks, which included about 400 kilograms of fertilized Heu to 60 percent, were stored in tunnels under its nuclear complex in Asfahhan. There seems to be a dispute between intelligence agencies about whether Iran has moved some or all of these materials before Israeli strikes, although Israel and the United States seem increasingly confident that it did not do so.

The tunnels in Asfahhan are deep – so that the United States has not even tried to collapse with the warehouses that it dropped on Iran’s enrichment factories in Ford and Natanz. Cruise missiles may have fired against the tunnel entrances to try to close them. However, Iran is likely to reduce the humble benefits of this approach by proactively filling the tunnel entrance.

As a result, repeated claims by us and Israeli officials that the Iranian Heu is “buried under the rubble” is misleading. Assuming that the material has not been transferred, it is now sitting in a healthy tunnel. Inclusion in New York Times“The last reporting that Iran may be struggling to recover it (” even if the Iranians can dig [the HEU] Out … “) is almost comic. Drush is an appropriate level of technology to cancel the tunnel ban, although the bulldozers and excavators (owned by Iran) will definitely speed up. In fact, Iran has canceled the entrance ban to one tunnel in Esfahan within a week of the strike (although it is not possible to determine the open information if this tunnel is part of the store used in Heu).

In short, it is very likely that most Heu in Iran has survived and accessible strikes. According to Israel and the United States, Iran’s refurbing Iran is to remove it by threatening additional military measures – but there is no meaningful technical barrier to do so.

If Iran decides to build the bomb, its next step is to enrich this substance more. Unfortunately, the richest uranium, the more enrichment becomes. As a result, Iran can make the centrifugal attachment much smaller than the industrial plants that are now wandering in Fordow or Natanz (which are designed to accommodate thousands and tens of thousands of central sects, respectively). I appreciate that with less than 200 centrifugal devices and 60 percent of Heu as intermediate materials, Iran can produce 90 percent of Heu in only 10 to 20 days.

Iran may already have a enrichment factory, hidden in sight in an unknown industrial building, or probably, located in the underground depth outside the reach of American hidden ships. But even if it does not happen, it is possible that it prepares one in months using its large stock of centrifugal ingredients. These parts stopped monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2021, where the Iran deal gradually collapsed after the withdrawal of the United States.

According to American officials, none of this is now after the United States has deprived Iran of the capabilities necessary to turn Heu into a usable weapon. For example, Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued that the United States “has eliminated” a Iranian converting facility and “you cannot do a nuclear weapon without it.”

Rubio is fully right that the conversion – the production of uranium minerals from the uranium hexagon used in enrichment – is a necessary step in building a nuclear weapon. However, he is completely mistaken in his revival that the destruction of Esfahan’s conversion facilities (there were two of them, in fact) had dealt with the Iranian ability to build the bomb.

The conversion is not difficult, as the US experience shows. During the Manhattan project, the many technical challenges that scientists had to overcome did not include the production of uranium metal. The United States has developed the necessary process in the Department of Chemistry at Iowa State College of Ames (now Iowa State University) using equipment installed in the twenties of the twentieth century. Just eight months after the start of the search, scientists there were 50 kg of minerals per week – including, in principle, at least two nuclear weapons.

I say “in principle” because the materials produced in the state of Iowa were destined to be the fuel of the reactor; It was not enriched and was not enough enough to use it in a weapon. However, the Los Alamos team needs to make slight adjustments only for the Ames process to produce a very pure uranium metal that fed the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

For its part, Iran has had large -scale experiences already in this field and may have mastered a recipe for the production of pure uranium minerals. In the unlikely event, there is no single laboratory in the entire country equipped appropriately for this process, Iran can prepare one quickly and calmly. The necessary equipment (such as ovens) and materials (such as highly purity or magnesium) is widely available.

In addition to the production of Heu Metal, Iran will also end the design of nuclear weapons and the manufacture of components, nuclear and non -nuclear. This process is likely to be completed within a year – perhaps much less – and can work largely in parallel with enrichment and mineral production.

To say that Iran will need years to rebuild its previous nuclear program, such as asserting that the unlocked bank’s basement will be unpleasant of electronic attack; This is true, but this point lacks.

Certainly, we do not know whether Iran made the political decision to multiply. But the United States needs to struggle with the fact that its military operation has increased Iran’s incentives to build the bomb while it only restores its capabilities to do so.

It is unlikely to prove repeated military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities – “cutting the grass” as it is called appropriately – either political or effective sustainable. If the United States can destroy the Heu components and expel the Iranian centrifugal, then this would have done so. Instead, Washington has succeeded in doing Iran showing the limits of its ability to destroy the buried installations in depth.

The remainder is diplomacy, which is more promising than military action, although it will prove an exceptional challenge. By expelling the inspectors and threatening to withdraw from the Nuclear Non -Proliferation Treaty, Iran has succeeded in producing an uncomfortable amount of the leverage for itself. This means that the ideal deal will not be achieved, and Washington will be of wisdom to set clear priorities. The zero enrichment – the Trump Administration’s announced target – will be always nice. However, restoring the arrival of the inspector, including to potential secret nuclear facilities, is really vital. It is not clear whether Washington can achieve this minimum at the present time – but there is only one way to find out.