In remarks to the New York Times on Sunday, one “senior U.S. official” acknowledged that U.S. airstrikes on Iran’s underground uranium enrichment facility at Fordow “did not destroy the heavily fortified facility,” confirming Israel’s assessment that the installation had not been “completely destroyed.” The American official noted, however, that the strikes on Fordow ensure that it is now “off the table.”
Did U.S. Bombs Destroy the Fordow Enrichment Facility?
It’s not clear if the distinction the Times was driving at matters much. Every nook and cranny of the sprawling underground complex may not have imploded, but early damage assessments indicate that the twelve 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs) dropped into it by seven B-2 strategic bombers found their targets.
David Albright, the president of the Institute for Science and International Security and an expert on Iran’s nuclear weapons program, told CNN that satellite imagery of the impacts at Fordow indicate that “a considerable amount of damage could have been done to the enrichment hall and adjacent halls that provide support to enrichment.” Indeed, he added, “Total destruction of the underground hall is quite possible.” That would confirm the U.S. assessment that, at least for now, the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant is out of commission.
Fordow wasn’t the only nuclear site U.S. warplanes targeted on Saturday night. In addition, “Operation Midnight Hammer” targeted the Natanz Enrichment Complex and nuclear facilities at Isfahan. The mission, which began with a savvy decoy deployment of strategic bombers over the Pacific Ocean — “a deception effort known only to an extremely small number of planners,” according to Joint Chiefs Chairman General Dan Cain — saw the use of 14 MOPs on Iran’s nuclear sites. In what officials are calling the “largest B-2 operational strike in U.S. history,” stealth bombers took off from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, refueled multiple times while maintaining as much radio silence as possible before linking up with the rest of the strike package. At the same time, a U.S. submarine in the region fired two dozen Tomahawk missiles at surface targets at Isfahan.
If there were Iranian attempts to retaliate against U.S. forces, Cain was “unaware” of them. “Iran’s fighters did not fly, and it appears that Iran’s surface to air missile systems did not see us throughout the mission,” he said. This was a “complex, tightly timed maneuver requiring exact synchronization across multiple platforms in a narrow piece of airspace, all done with minimal communications,” Cain observed. “This type of integration is exactly what our joint force does better than anyone else in the world.”
“No other military in the world could have done this,” Cain added. He’s right there — not of this scope and tactical finesse. We take for granted the U.S. military’s capacity to project sustained force half a world away, but operations like these are neither easy nor cheap. We spend so much time discussing the military’s flaws, the daunting challenges before it, and the failures of the political class to cement its battlefield successes into lasting geostrategic gains that we sometimes underrate the competence of America’s armed forces. This demonstration of U.S. military power will not go unstudied in Moscow and Beijing. Beyond the exhibition of it, the strikes also serve as a welcome signal that Donald Trump’s patience with America’s adversaries is not bottomless. That confirmation is likely to have a sobering effect on the revisionist powers that were content to keep “tapping us along,” in the president’s words.
But the goal of this operation was not to strike awe into the hearts of its spectators. It was to significantly degrade Iran’s nuclear program and foreclose on its capacity to build a fissionable device. Accurate damage assessments will take time to assemble and dispense for public consumption. But while the strikes are likely to have damaged Iran’s ability to enrich weapons-grade uranium, they may not have damaged Iran’s existing uranium stockpiles.
On Sunday, Vice President JD Vance indicated in an interview with ABC’s This Week that Iran’s weapons-grade uranium, enough for about ten atomic bombs, is likely still in the regime’s possession. In addition, he said, “We are going to work in the coming weeks to ensure that we do something with that fuel and that’s one of the things that we’re going to have conversations with the Iranians about.”
There were some indications ahead of the strikes that Iranian officials were moving sensitive materials away from high-profile targets like Fordow. Interestingly, though, Vance’s assessment conflicts with Marco Rubio’s. While “no one will know for sure for days,” the secretary of state told NBC’s Kristen Welker on Sunday, “I doubt they moved it.”
“They can’t move anything right now inside of Iran,” Rubio observed. “I mean, the minute a truck starts driving somewhere, the Israelis have seen it, and they’ve targeted it and taken it out. So, our assessment is, we have to assume that that’s a lot of 60 percent enriched uranium buried deep under the ground there in Isfahan.”
Rubio added that the U.S. goal now is to ensure that Iran not only gives up its capacity to enrich uranium but also that it surrenders whatever loose nuclear material is now buried beneath the rubble of Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz. Iran must “bring [the stockpile] out of the ground and turn it over,” he added. “Multiple countries around the world will take it and down blend it. That’s what they should do with that.” That suggests the U.S. has work yet to do in this campaign. For Vance, the mission is pretty much over. “Vance said Iran no longer has the capacity to turn the stockpile into weapons-grade uranium,” the Wall Street Journal reported. “‘And that was really the goal here,’ he said.”
That is a fine aspiration, but Iran gets a say in that outcome. For now, the Iranian regime is in disarray. The decapitation of its military leadership combined with indications that Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is in hiding, have hindered the efficacy of the Iranian response. But there will be a response. Even if the regime is looking to climb down off the escalatory ladder and signal a willingness to concede to America’s terms (if not exactly Israel’s), it is likely to mount at least a face-saving show of violence.
That’s the best-case scenario. Iranian action could be far more lethal. It could attempt to activate its proxies in the region, their notable foot-dragging notwithstanding. It could target U.S. positions in Iraq and Syria or activate terrorist elements inside the West. It could attempt to shut down commerce in the Strait of Hormuz. The United States has plenty of firepower in the region designed to deter Iran from overreaching, but miscalculations happen.
America’s objective now is to contain the Iranian response, support Israel in its ongoing strikes against Iranian regime and military targets, and convey in public and private that the way out of this conflict is to agree to the verifiable surrender of Iran’s nuclear material and enrichment capabilities. The way to ensure Iran’s compliance is to hold out the prospect of additional strikes on the regime’s military targets, which will give way to strikes on command-and-control targets, the terror apparatus that keeps its citizens in fear, and the highest echelons of its political cadres. Israel is already engaged in phased attacks on those very targets, and America’s participation in that campaign would present the regime with an existential challenge. The Islamic Republic must understand that it has no choice but to choose between regime stability and nuclear weapons.
The regime may see little distinction between the two, but that’s its problem — one it will have to work out with its abused and oppressed citizens. America’s goal is narrower. The mission is not accomplished yet. But when it is, Donald Trump will have eliminated a problem that vexed America’s strategic planners for 20 years. Maybe he deserves that Nobel Peace Prize after all.
