However, Jeffrey Lewis, an American expert on nuclear non-proliferation and a professor at the California-based James Martin Research Center, said he was “not impressed” with both the US and Israel because both Iran and Israel “failed to target key elements of Iran’s nuclear material and production infrastructure.”
Iran’s highly enriched uranium was “largely stored in underground tunnels” near the Isfahan site, he said. But despite the massive US and Israel attacks on the facility, he “apparently no effort was made to destroy these tunnels or the materials within them,” he said.
He added, “There was no effort to hit a huge underground facility next to Natanz, where Iran could make more centrifuges and do other things.”
Satellite images taken two days before the strike at Fordo also showed 16 cargo trucks on the access road leading to the complex. Photos taken the day after the release of Maxar Technologies, a Colorado-based US defense contractor, show the truck has left the site.
Tehran also shows that their intention to achieve nuclear weapons is uninterrupted and perhaps even strengthened. “If the nuclear site is destroyed, the game isn’t over,” Ali Shamhani, top political, military and nuclear advisor to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, wrote to X on Sunday. “There is a wealth of material, indigenous knowledge and political will.”
An assessment by FilterLabs, which uses artificial intelligence and experts to monitor social media, also suggests that if Iranians had nuclear weapons they believed they were not attacked.
“What we’ve started to see in the last few days is that Iranians actually say this is why we should have nuclear weapons,” Jonathan Teubner, founder and CEO of Filterlabs, told NBC News on Monday. “If they had it, they would be more protected.”
“The fundamental reality remains that a fundamental reality alone cannot be completely eliminated by a program alone, and that cannot be completely eliminated,” said Darya Dorzikova, a senior researcher at the London-based Royal United Services Institute think tank.
The success of the American attack, especially at the Ford factory, was “not immediately clear,” she wrote. “The image cannot show much about damage in centrifugal enrichment holes, so the US and Israel rely heavily on intelligence from within the Iranian system.”
But even if the destruction spreads, “Iran holds extensive expertise that can ultimately reconfigure which aspect of the programme was damaged or destroyed,” she said.
“Iran’s nuclear program is decades old and is based on the expertise of Iranian indigenous peoples on a large scale. The physical exclusion of the program’s infrastructure, and even the assassination of Iranian scientists, is not sufficient to destroy the potential knowledge that exists within the country.”
