Three months have passed since ‘Operation Midnight Hammer’ saw seven American B2 bombers drop 14 ‘bunker-buster’ 14,000kg Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs on Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities. But where is the highly enriched uranium that was theoretically the key objective for this operation?
“Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated,” US President Donald Trump exulted on June 21. It was a “spectacular military success, the likes of which the world has not seen in many, many decades”. But he always talks in superlatives. It means nothing.
The fact is that the stuff you could actually make nuclear weapons with is still missing. Iran had 408kg of highly-enriched uranium (HEU), enough for 9-10 atomic bombs if the regime chose to go that route, and that is probably hidden safely away.
Iran has about 8,400kg of uranium enriched to 3.67 per cent purity. That’s the normal level for use in commercial nuclear reactors, and in 2015 Iran signed an international agreement promising not to exceed it. Even when Trump unilaterally pulled the US out of that deal three years later, he didn’t claim that Iran was actually breaking that promise.
Why did Trump do it? Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu certainly pushed him very hard, but the key reason was probably that Trump hates Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States. That deal with Iran was Obama’s proudest diplomatic achievement, so wreck it. It’s childish, but that’s Trump.
He reimposed sanctions on Iran in 2018, including secondary sanctions forcing other countries not to trade with Iran. The country’s economy shrank, so did popular tolerance for the regime, and Ayatollah Khamenei’s regime searched desperately for a way to bring counter-pressure on the countries that had abandoned it to Trump’s tender mercies.
Since Iran hadn’t been breaking any rules, it couldn’t win the other parties back to the deal simply by mending its ways. Maybe it could frighten them into ending the sanctions instead. Starting in 2021, therefore, Iran began enriching its uranium beyond the permitted level of 3.67pc.
The Iranians thought they were just ‘sending a message’. They were only enriching a few hundred kilos of uranium, and they carefully informed the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of every baby step they took up the enrichment ladder: 5pc, 20pc, 60pc. They even showed the IAEA inspectors where and how they were doing it.
This was obviously a form of blackmail, not a mad dash for nuclear weapons, but the Iranians overestimated their audience. The dimmer members of the audience just assumed that Iran really was trying to get nuclear weapons. Others knew better but pretended they believed that, because it gave them a pretext for attacking Iran.
‘Bibi’ Netanyahu was in the latter category, and he can almost always get Trump to do what he wants. The American bombers went in, and so did lots of Israeli strike aircraft. Iran’s centrifuges, the heart of the enrichment process, were largely destroyed. So were the lives of 1,190 Iranians and 28 Israelis (but no Americans).
However, the 408kg of HEU that Iran had produced as a bluff was not destroyed. It was all removed before the American strikes arrived.
Some of it, fresh out of the centrifuges, would have been under a hundred metres of rock at Fordow or Natanz. Most would have been in Isfahan in shallower tunnels where it was stored. But it was all easily portable.
Eight days passed between the first Israeli strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities (which would not have harmed the HEU) and the US strikes on June 22 (which could have). During those days, Trump emitted a stream of social media posts threatening to kill Iran’s Supreme Leader and demanding Iran’s “unconditional surrender”. The Iranians had plenty of warning.
The HEU is stored in canisters about the size of a scuba tank, so they are easy to move and the whole 408kg could be loaded into a few small trucks in a matter of moments. Hide them in garages all over the country, and Iran’s bluff is still as good as ever – which isn’t very good.
Or, if you are crazy, start making nuclear weapons. You could turn the HEU into a couple of big, heavy bombs without enriching it further (60pcU-235 will do at a pinch). Enrich it to 90pc if you still have some centrifuges tucked away somewhere and it will give you 9-10 better, more compact bombs.
Why have the Iranians not done that already? Because they have all known since childhood that Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons and the US has thousands. They’re all crazy, but that makes the Iranians a bit less crazy than the Israelis and the Americans.
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