Iran bomb damage intel suggests two nuclear sites not ‘obliterated’

The United States has assessed that only one of Iran’s three principal nuclear facilities was destroyed in U.S. strikes last month, officials and people familiar with ongoing assessments said, prompting renewed questions about President Donald Trump’s claim that Tehran’s nuclear program had been “totally obliterated.”

Of the three facilities targeted in a massive nighttime bombing run, the results of the damage at the Fordow site have been the clearest to assess, according to U.S. officials and a congressional aide familiar with briefings provided to lawmakers. Air Force B-2 stealth bombers dropped 12 huge ground-penetrating bombs through ventilation shafts into the underground facility.

There are ongoing analyses of how significant the damage was at the other sites, Natanz and Isfahan, but the current indication is they were not dealt a knockout blow, according to a U.S. official familiar with the intelligence assessments.

“We definitely can’t say it was obliterated,” the official said of Iran’s nuclear program. Like others in this report, the official and the aide spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive and ongoing assessments.

The objective to collapse the deeply buried infrastructure at Fordow “seems to have succeeded,” the aide said. Adding to the confidence, they said, was an intimate understanding of the facility by U.S. war planners, who developed the 30,000-pound bunker-buster program specifically in response to the Iranian effort to burrow the site into a mountain. Fordow is one of two main sites in Iran where thousands of fast-spinning centrifuges were installed to purify uranium.

But there are still significant unknowns, including whether the centrifuges at the deepest levels of Fordow were destroyed or rendered inoperable, or if they were moved before the bombing. If they were not present, “then they are back in business,” the aide said of Iran. “That is the key component to enriching the material.”

Much less is known about the efficacy of strikes at the other two facilities, the aide said.

The bunker-busting bombs were not used at the Isfahan site because the Pentagon had assessed it was “pretty much impenetrable,” the aide said. Isfahan, the country’s largest nuclear research complex, has bunkers that are even more deeply buried — and beneath harder rock — than the terrain at Fordow. Instead, a submarine fired a salvo of Tomahawk cruise missiles to destroy surface targets.

Likewise, buildings at Iran’s other major site — the nuclear enrichment facility at Natanz — were targeted by Israeli jets in the days before the U.S. strike. B-2 stealth bombers then hit Natanz with two Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs, destroying some underground rooms.

There is no reason to doubt the underground facilities at Natanz were destroyed, the aide said, but the subsequent intelligence picture there is also less robust than at Fordow.

Bomb damage assessments typically evolve over time as new information is acquired, and the fact that many of Iran’s nuclear facilities are deep underground complicates getting a full picture of their status.

Some elements of the latest U.S. assessment of the impact of the Iran strikes were reported earlier by NBC News.

Whether Iran now pursues a nuclear weapon depends on how Tehran and Washington respond in the coming weeks and months, the congressional aide said.

It is hard to imagine Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and others in the regime not seeing the attacks as evidence they need a credible nuclear deterrent. If senior leaders pursue a diplomatic solution after the embarrassment of seeing their defenses penetrated so decisively, Iran’s government risks political instability; if new rulers emerge, they may be even more hard-line.

“There’s no reason to believe they will not” seek a nuclear weapon now, said Sima Shine, an Iran expert and former official in Israel’s Mossad intelligence service. “They want the bomb … nuclear deterrence.” But the Iranians “know the price” they might pay for resumed nuclear activity, she said, referring to potential follow-on U.S. or Israeli strikes.

Shine noted that Israeli military and covert actions also killed numerous top Iranian nuclear scientists, eliminated up to half its ballistic missile launchers and destroyed other sites for constructing centrifuges to enrich uranium.

“What happened to Iran in this war is more than just the destruction of ‘X’ places,” said Shine, a senior researcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies.

The Iranians “believe they’re in a long war” with Israel and that the larger issue is “management of the Israeli threat,” including rebuilding air defenses and plugging intelligence holes, said Vali Nasr, professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

For Washington, he said, the issue should be “not just the result of the intelligence estimate — whether Iran’s nuclear program is finished off or not, but whether it’s worth going to the table with the Iranians to negotiate something that actually would make this ceasefire have legs.”

The Pentagon has remained sharply critical of media reports citing an initial, secret Defense Intelligence Agency assessment last month that the strikes set Tehran’s program back by months but did not eliminate it entirely.

“Iran’s nuclear facilities in Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz were completely and totally obliterated. There is no doubt about that,” chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement.

Iran’s program was degraded by “one to two years,” Parnell told reporters earlier this month.

The White House on Thursday continued to assert that the U.S. strikes, known as Operation “Midnight Hammer,” had eliminated Iran’s nuclear program as a threat.

“As the President has said and experts have verified, Operation Midnight Hammer totally obliterated Iran’s nuclear capabilities. America and the world are safer thanks to his decisive action,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said in a statement.

U.S. and Israeli officials, and nuclear experts, agree that the strikes on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure damaged the program considerably. But without more information, including on the fate of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium, it is unclear whether and how quickly Iran could resume its march toward a bomb, if its leaders so chose.

“It seems like an unforced error on the administration’s part to spike the football and claim victory when it didn’t need to,” the aide said.

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• Ellen Nakashima contributed.