Was the attack successful? President Trump said that “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.” The
Washington Post reports on Iranian officials saying that “the facilities that were struck had been evacuated and that nuclear material was moved elsewhere.” The
New York Post reports Iranian officials saying that “only a part of the area was attacked.” The
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said “initial battle damage assessments indicate that all three sites sustained extremely severe damage and destruction,” but that “final battle damage [assessments] will take some time.”
At least
one report indicates the presence of trucks at Fordow just before the strike, raising the possibility that key items and/or materials may have been removed in anticipation. Relocating a substantial amount of heavy machinery (e.g., centrifuges) would be a time-intensive activity that could not realistically have been done in such a short time frame.
Actual battle damage assessment will be difficult; the attack sought to destroy equipment and facilities that are underground and thus invisible to overhead reconnaissance. Those outside Iran are unlikely to be given access to damaged facilities to see the results. That is, we won’t know precisely how effective the attack was in destroying a deeply buried facility, and the Iranians won’t be letting anyone in to examine it.
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So what is the real impact of these attacks? In the short term, assuming the attacks were militarily successful, the Iran nuclear program has clearly been set back by amounts of time ranging from several months to several years, depending on the assumptions made about how far along Iran had been in its progress towards building a nuclear weapon.
But whether the Iranian nuclear program has been permanently crippled is a different question, the answer to which involves a most important uncertainty: Will there be regime change in Iran? If there is no regime change, it’s hard to believe that the current rulers of Iran will accept this setback as establishing a permanent (new) status quo, and in the future, it’s hard to see what incentive Iran has in accepting a diplomatic constraint on its nuclear ambitions. That is: Future political or diplomatic arrangements with Iran on its nuclear program will be most unlikely. Thus, without regime change, the US attack last week is likely to be just the first of many such attacks in the future—a periodic mowing of Iran’s nuclear lawn, so to speak.
The US strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities have likely inflicted significant damage in the short term. But the technical challenges of destroying deeply buried sites, the possibility of relocated materials, the impossibility of destroying Iranian expertise about uranium enrichment and weapons...
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