From the start of Israel’s unprecedented strikes onIranian targetsearlier this month, the aims of the operation were made perfectly clear.
The intention, one Israeli military official carefully spelled out to CNN, was to permanently remove the Islamic Republic’s “existential” nuclear and ballistic missile threats.
After the United States joined in at the weekend, pounding Iranian nuclear facilities with powerful bunker-busting munitions, President Donald Trump insisted the strikes were a “spectacular military success” and that Iran’s nuclear facilities had been “totally obliterated.”
But with a ceasefire now in place, it’s far from clear that ambitious objective has been achieved.
Western military sources say it’s too early to fully assess thedamage wroughtby the US and Israeli strikes, although satellite images analyzed by CNN, reveal extensive destruction at the key nuclear installations of Isfahan, Natanz and Fordow.
Iran’s controversial uranium enrichment program, which uses sensitive centrifuges often installed deep underground in fortified bunkers, is likely to have been rendered inoperable or damaged, if not entirely destroyed.
Trump insists Iran will “never” be able to rebuild its nuclear program.
“That place is under rock, that place is demolished,” he told reporters in Washington on Tuesday before heading to the NATO summit in The Hague.
But if there is political will, Iran may have the capacity and the means to do revive its program, especially given that its technical know-how is likely to have survived, despite the targeting by Israel of multiple Iranian nuclear scientists.
Moreover, officials at the UN nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, confirm they are still uncertain of the whereabouts of the nuclear material Iran has already manufactured, including some 880 pounds of uranium-235 enriched to 60% purity, which is dangerously close to weapons-grade levels.
A top Iranian nuclear official, Mohammad Eslami, who is the head of the country’s atomic energy organization, insisted that Iran “planned ahead of time” to ensure there would be “no interruption to our nuclear program.”
Meanwhile, Iranian state media reported that nuclear sites were “evacuated” ahead of the US strikes, raising concerns that some or all of the enriched nuclear material has been preserved, possibly at a secret facility unknown to inspectors.
However, even if Iran was able to safely hide its enriched uranium, turning this into weapons-grade material “is not going to be a fast process,” since the US and Israeli bombing campaign has “done serious damage to Iran’s capability to build a nuclear weapon,” said David Albright, a former UN nuclear weapons inspector who is now the president of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) think tank. He assessed that it would take Iran “a good year or two” to build a nuclear weapon.
But capability is not the same as intent.
One key question remains whether Iran, which has always insisted its nuclear program is for strictly peaceful purposes, now changes its calculations and its strategy.
For years, hardline voices inside the Islamic Republic have been calling for a nuclear weapon as a deterrent against exactly the kind of overwhelming attack the nation has endured over the last 12 days. Inevitably, those calls may now have been bolstered.
Already, Iranian officials have been publicly hinting at pulling out of a key nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the NPT, designed to monitor and prevent the global spread of nuclear weapons.
“The NPT is not able to protect us, so why a country like Iran, or other countries interested to have a peaceful nuclear energy, should rely on NPT,” the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told a conference in Istanbul on Sunday.
Ominously, other Iranian lawmakers have called for the Islamic Republic to formally withdraw.
If that happens, it would almost certainly be interpreted as confirmation of an Iranian intent to build a bomb.
But it’s not certain that the highly volatile situation will develop in this way.
One other consideration that may slow any dash by the Islamic Republic to cross the nuclear threshold and build a weapon is the potential threat of regime change, actively sought by Israel and toyed with, in recent days, by Trump.
For the moment, with a ceasefire in place, that threat appears to have receded. And Trump has since told reporters he does not want to see regime change in Iran, saying such a move would create chaos.
But if there’s any further sign of Iran edging towards a nuclear breakout, that regime change option – however fraught with danger and unpredictability – may find its way back onto the table.
A comprehensive nuclear deal with Iran is also still an option.
Last week in Geneva, top European and Iranian diplomats explored ideas for a possible agreement, including a proposal for direct talks between Iran and the US.
Then, in the aftermath of the US strikes on Iran, one Western European diplomat told CNN that “real window of opportunity” had been “slammed shut” by the American action.
But now, if the fragile US-brokered ceasefire between Iran and Israel holds, it may have just opened up that window once again.