Satellite images undermine Trump’s claim that Iran’s atomic sites were destroyed

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump’s decision to order US forces to attack three key Iranian nuclear installations may have sabotaged the Islamic republic’s known atomic capabilities, but it has also created a monumental new challenge to work out what is left and where. 

Mr Trump said heavily fortified sites

were “totally obliterated”

late on June 21, but independent analysis has yet to verify that claim. Rather than yielding a quick win, the strikes have complicated the task of tracking uranium and ensuring Iran does not build a weapon, according to three people who follow the country’s nuclear programme.

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) monitors remain in Iran and were inspecting more than one site a day before Israel started the bombing campaign on June 13.

They are still trying to assess the extent of damage, and while military action might be able to destroy Iran’s declared facilities, it also provides an incentive for Tehran to take its programme underground.

Mr Trump dispatched B-2 stealth jets laden with Massive Ordnance Penetrators, known as GBU-57 bombs, to attempt to destroy Iran’s underground uranium-enrichment sites in Natanz and Fordow.

Satellite images taken on June 22 of Fordow and distributed by Maxar Technologies show new craters, possible collapsed tunnel entrances and holes on top of a mountain ridge.

They also show that a large support building on the Fordow site, which operators may use to control ventilation for the underground enrichment halls, remained undamaged. There were no radiation releases from the site, IAEA reported. 

New pictures of Natanz show a new crater about 5.5m in diameter. Maxar said in a statement that the new hole was visible in the dirt directly over a part of the underground enrichment facility.

The image does not offer conclusive evidence that the attack breached the site, buried 40m underground and reinforced with an 8m-thick concrete and steel shell.

The US Air Force’s General Dan Caine told a news conference earlier on June 22 that an assessment of “final battle damage will take some time”.

IAEA inspectors, meanwhile, have not been able to

verify the location of the Persian Gulf country’s stockpile of near-bomb-grade uranium

for more than a week. Iranian officials acknowledged breaking IAEA seals and moving it to an undisclosed location. 

Indeed, there is just a slim possibility that the US entering the war will convince Iran to increase IAEA cooperation, said Ms Darya Dolzikova, a senior research fellow at London-based think-tank Royal United Services Institute. 

“The more likely scenario is that they convince Iran that cooperation and transparency don’t work and that building deeper facilities and ones not declared openly is more sensible to avoid similar targeting in future,” she said.

IAEA

called for a cessation of hostilities

in order to address the situation. Its 35-nation board will convene on June 23 in Vienna, said director-general Rafael Grossi.

Before US intervention, images showed Israeli forces alone had met with limited success four days after the bombing began. Damage to the central facility in Natanz, located 300km south of Tehran, was primarily limited to electricity switch yards and transformers.

The US also joined in attacking the Isfahan Nuclear Technology Centre, located 450km south of Tehran. That was after IAEA re-assessed the level of damage Israel had dealt to the facility. Based on satellite images and communications with Iranian counterparts, Isfahan appeared “extensively damaged”, the agency wrote late on June 21.

IAEA’s central mission is to account for gram-levels of uranium around the world and to ensure that it is not used for nuclear weapons. The latest bombing now complicates tracking of Iranian uranium even further, said Dr Tariq Rauf, former head of IAEA’s nuclear-verification policy. 

“It will now be very difficult for the IAEA to establish a material balance for the nearly 9,000kg of enriched uranium, especially the nearly 410kg of 60 per cent enriched uranium,” he said. 

Last week, inspectors already acknowledged they had lost track of the location of Iran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile because

Israel’s ongoing military assaults

were preventing its inspectors from doing their work.

That uranium inventory – enough to make 10 nuclear warheads at a clandestine location – was seen at Isfahan by IAEA inspectors. But the material, which could fit in as few as 16 small containers, may have already been spirited off-site. 

Ms Dolzikova said: “Questions remain as to where Iran may be storing its already enriched stocks. These will have almost certainly been moved to hardened and undisclosed locations, out of the way of potential Israeli or US strikes.”

Far from being just static points on a map, Iran’s ambitions to make the fuel needed for nuclear power plants and weapons are embedded in a heavily fortified infrastructure nationwide. Thousands of scientists and engineers work at dozens of sites.

Even as military analysts await new satellite images before determining the success of Mr Trump’s mission, nuclear safeguards analysts have reached the conclusion that their work is about to become significantly harder.

By bombing Iran’s sites, Israel and the US have not just disrupted IAEA’s accountancy of Iran’s nuclear stockpile, they have also degraded the tools that monitors will be able to use, said Mr Robert Kelley, who led inspections of Iraq and Libya as an IAEA director. 

That includes the forensic method used to detect the potential diversion of uranium. “Now that sites have been bombed and all classes of materials have been scattered everywhere, the IAEA will never again be able to use environmental sampling,” he said.

“Particles of every isotopic description have infinite half-lives for forensic purposes, and it will be impossible to sort out their origin.” BLOOMBERG