President Donald Trump’s decision to order American forces to attack three main Iranian nuclear installations may have sabotaged the known atomic capacities of the Islamic Republic, but this has also created a new monumental challenge to find what remains and where.
Trump said that highly fortified sites were “completely erased” on Saturday evening, but that the independent analysis has not yet verified this assertion. Rather than winning a rapid victory, strikes have complicated the task of following uranium and ensuring that Iran does not build a weapon, according to three people who follow the country’s nuclear program.
The monitors of the International Atomic Energy Agency remain in Iran and inspected more than one site per day before Israel began the bombing campaign on June 13. They always try to assess the extent of damage, and although military action can be able to destroy the declared installations of Iran, it also encourages Iran to take its program underground.
Indeed, there is just a thin possibility that the United States entering the war convinces Iran to increase the cooperation of the IAEA, said Darya Dolzikova, principal researcher at the Royal United Services Institute, a group of reflection based in London.
“The most likely scenario is that they convince Iran that cooperation and transparency do not work and that the construction of deeper installations and that those not declared openly is more sensible to avoid similar targeting in the future,” she said.
The IAEA inspectors could not check the location of the storage of the Persian Uranium Gulf of the nearby bomb for more than a week. Iranian officials admitted to having broken the seals of the AIEA and moving it to an unhappy place.
The IAEA called a cessation of hostilities in order to deal with the situation. Its board of directors of 35 countries will meet on Monday in Vienna, said director general Rafael Mariano Grossi.
Trump sent B-2 furtive jets full of massive ammunition penetrators, known as GBU-57 bombs, to try to destroy underground Uranium Uranium sites from Iran in Natanz and Fordow.
The satellite images taken Sunday from Fordow and distributed by Maxar Technologies show new craters, entries and possible collapsed tunnel holes at the top of a mountain crest.
No proof of damage to underground enrichment rooms can be observed, and IEA inspectors reported that there was no release of radiation on the site. The American Air Force General Dan Caine told a press conference on Sunday that an evaluation of “final battle damage would take some time”.
Before the American intervention, the images alone showed the Israeli forces had met four days after the start of the attack. Damage to the central installation of Natanz, located 300 kilometers (186 miles) south of Tehran, were mainly limited to the sites and processors of the electric switch.
Find out more: The satellite images reveal Trump’s dilemma on the Iranian nuclear complex
The United States has also joined the attack on the ISFAhan nuclear research center, 450 kilometers south of Tehran. It was after IAEA reassessed the level of damage that Israel had inflicted on the installation. Based on satellite images and communications with Iranian counterparts, Isfahan appeared “largely damaged”, wrote the agency late on Saturday.
The central mission of the IAEA is to take into account the gram levels of uranium worldwide and to ensure that it is not used for nuclear weapons. The last bombing now complicates the monitoring of Iranian uranium even more, said Tariq Rauf, the former chief of the AIAA nuclear verification policy.
“It will now be very difficult for the IAEA to establish a material balance for almost 9,000 kilograms of enriched uranium, in particular the almost 410 kilograms of uranium enriched 60%,” he said.
Last week, the inspectors had already admitted to having lost track of the location of highly enriched uranium stocks in Iran because the military assaults in Israel prevent its inspectors from doing their job.
This uranium inventory – enough to make 10 nuclear warheads in a clandestine location – was seen in Isfahan by IAEA inspectors. But the material, which could adapt to as little as 16 small containers, perhaps already made out of site stimulation.
“Questions remain as to the place where Iran can store its actions already enriched,” said Dozikova. “These will have almost certainly been moved to hardened and unknown places, away from the Israeli or American potential strikes.”
Far from being just static points on a map, Iran’s ambitions to make fuel necessary for nuclear power plants and weapons are integrated into a highly fortified infrastructure at the national level. Thousands of scientists and engineers work on dozens of sites.
Even if military analysts expect new satellite images before determining the success of Trump’s mission, nuclear guarantees analysts have reached the conclusion that their work is about to become much more difficult.
By bombing the Iranian sites, Israel and the United States have not simply disrupted IEA accounting of Iranian nuclear stocks, they have also degraded the tools that monitors will be able to use, said Robert Kelley, who managed Iraq and Libya inspections as director of IAEA.
This includes the medico-legal method used to detect the potential diversion of uranium. “Now that the sites have been bombed and that all the material classes have been dispersed wherever the IAEA will never be able to use environmental sampling again,” he said. “The particles of each isotopic description have endless half-people for medico-legal purposes and it will be impossible to settle their origin.”
