Could Be Worse

Trump and his administration are insisting that we've obliterated Iran's nuclear weapons program. They might be wrong, but let them keep thinking it.

Donald Trump, and others speaking for the administration, are dug in deep on the claim that Saturday’s bombing “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear weapons program. That’s probably for the best, to be honest.

Consider the alternative, as suggested by Ira Helfand writing two days before the attack at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

What if the United States attacks Fordow with a GBU-57 “bunker buster” bomb and the bomb does not take out the deeply buried site? Does the United States escalate up to the use of a nuclear weapon?

So the good news is that by locking himself into the claim that the bunker busters worked, Trump is effectively precluding the option of trying to finish the job by ordering a nuke dropped on the Fordow site, with all the literal and metaphorical fallout such a move would entail.

What the bombs really did accomplish is another matter, and one we can do little more than guess at. One of those guesses, reported Tuesday, comes from the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and says that the program has only been pushed back by just a few months. That gibes with some smart analysis I’ve seen elsewhere, but it’s preliminary, based on images from far above, and we don’t know what contradictory analysis may have been done by other intelligence analyses within and outside the U.S. government.

It might be revealing that the administration’s response to reports of the DIA analysis were vehement but non-specific. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt (echoed by others) criticized the reporter, CNN, and unknown leakers, and called the assessment “flat-out wrong,” but as positive proof would only say that “everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen 20,000 pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration.” Well, I’ll admit that I do not know what happens, especially when the target is a concrete-reinforced structure almost 100 meters underground, specifically designed to withstand aerial bombardment.

Israeli assessments reportedly agree with the DIA that not only the enriched uranium but also the centrifuges probably survived Saturday’s bombing—though it concludes that, in combination with Israel’s bombings over the prior two weeks, the setback is more like two years.

But, two years from what? Israel’s government claims that Iran was on the verge of having nuclear weapons. That might be true, although as every American official who has dealt with him eventually discovers, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a highly unreliable source. (Former Secretary of State John Kerry, in his 2018 autobiography, describes convincing a very skeptical Barack Obama to let him seek a Middle East peace deal, and coming away feeling completely burned by Netanyahu, who he had known since their days in Cambridge.)

U.S. intelligence, from what I can tell, was not convinced that Iran was that close, or even that Iran’s leaders had made the crucial decision to move forward with creating such weapons. Indeed, the U.S. had been knee-deep in negotiations with Iran on a deal to prevent that from happening. It certainly appears, from the outside, that the timing of the attack had more to do with Trump’s frustration over how those negotiations were going, combined with pressure from Netanyahu, rather than any sense of imminent threat being raised within his own government.

It is true that Iran had, apparently, enriched a quantity of uranium well above what’s needed for power plant usage—although not to weapons-grade level. That’s provocative, to be sure. But it could be consistent with the regime wanting to maintain a posture from which it could, if circumstances changed, develop a nuclear weapons arsenal in a relatively short time.

Well, circumstances might just have changed. As a number of experts are now saying, the incentives for Iran now seem to point clearly toward reviving, if not accelerating, their pursuit of nuclear weaponry. Iran’s leaders have to notice that nobody’s bombing any countries with nuclear weapons and talking about the need for regime change. For goodness’ sake, Kim Jong Un exchanges love letters with the U.S. President.

So we don’t know how close Iran was from having nuclear weapons, or how far they are from it now, but we can be pretty sure that it will be, sometime within the next couple of years, roughly as close as it was two weeks ago. At which point, presumably, Israel will conduct more attacks and pressure Trump to assist with more bunker busters. So, be ready to go through this all again.

It almost makes one nostalgic for that 10-year halt to Iran’s program, with verification, that Kerry negotiated and Trump withdrew from. To Trump and other critics, a 10-year stoppage was an outrage. It looks like a pipe dream now.