Israel believes that some of the enriched uranium stockpiles held in underground facilities in Iran survived the joint Israeli-American attacks, and could still be accessible to Iranian nuclear scientists, The New York Times reported Thursday, citing a senior Israeli security official.
The official said Israel detected nuclear activity immediately after the assassination of Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah. That detection, the official added, led Prime Minster Netanyahu to instruct Israeli officials to prepare for the possibility of a military strike against Iran, regardless of whether the US would participate.
However, according to The New York Times, the senior Israeli source did not express concern about the surviving uranium stockpiles. That official, along with other Israeli sources familiar with the relevant intelligence, told the paper that "any attempt by Iran to retrieve the material would almost certainly be detected," enabling Israel to launch a second strike on the nuclear sites.
The report focuses on the Isfahan site, home to one of Iran's largest nuclear complexes, where most of the uranium is believed to be stored. Despite an assessment by the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency that some material had been moved, echoed by Iranian statements suggesting the same, the Israeli official told the paper there had been no such transfer. However, he acknowledged that the storage location was too deep for US munitions to reach.
Still, the The New York Times noted that the strikes in the area managed to block parts of the underground tunnel network – where the material may be hidden, and caused severe damage to the site's uranium conversion facilities, a critical bottleneck in Iran's nuclear program because they convert enriched uranium into uranium metal cores that can be placed inside a nuclear warhead.
The report reiterates assessments that the vast majority of centrifuges at Iran's Fordo and Natanz nuclear sites were destroyed. The central question now, it says, is how long it will take Iran to restore some or all of that capability, especially in light of the fact that many of its top nuclear scientists were eliminated in Israeli operations.
The report adds that the Fordo facility proved "more vulnerable" than Iran had anticipated, and repeated the American account of how the strike was carried out: repeated hits on its ventilation shafts enabled US bunker-busting MOP bombs to penetrate deeper and closer to the control rooms and enrichment halls where centrifuges were housed.
The article raises the possibility that Iran will seek to utilize new underground facilities it has been building near Isfahan and Natanz – dug into the sides of mountains in a manner similar to Fordo. Transforming these into replacements for Fordo and Natanz, the report says, would be "an immense task" that would require rebuilding more than 18,000 centrifuges. While Iran's centrifuge production industry was likely hit hard, the report notes, Iranian scientists still possess the technical know-how.
The report describes a new emerging threat: the possibility that Iran will set up "small workshops" as the next phase of its nuclear program. Given that Tehran has severed monitoring ties with the International Atomic Energy Agency, such facilities could make American and Israeli intelligence the sole source of information about the Iranian program.
This would mark a significant shift in the nature of Iran's nuclear project – from massive, fortified enrichment facilities to low-signature sites. Iran is still believed to possess large reserves of enriched uranium (prior to the current war, the IAEA estimated the stockpile at more than 400 kilograms enriched to 60% purity – just short of weapons-grade), meaning these low-profile sites could potentially serve as launchpads for a rapid "breakout" toward a nuclear bomb. The New York Times likened this phase of Iran's nuclear efforts to a "game of hide and seek" between US and Israeli intelligence services and the Iranian regime.
