Last Saturday, hours before two US B-2 bombers attacked the Fordow uranium enrichment plant that night, about 96 kilometers south of Tehran, a satellite photographed the entrance to that site, buried between 80 and 100 meters deep. The image showed a convoy of 16 heavy trucks. Heavy machinery was also present. Washington then bombed those and other key facilities—Natanz and Isfahan. With that attack, the United States guaranteed the"total destruction" of Iran's nuclear program, Donald Trump proclaimed. The president later reiterated this on social media, where he spoke of"monumental" damage to "all of Iran's nuclear facilities." "On target," he concluded with one of those lapidary phrases he likes so much.

Satellite images of those three bombed facilities show damage, but at least at Fordow, it's not as monumental, at least not in appearance. This is especially true because the type of bomb Washington used there—the powerful GBU-57 bunker buster—doesn't explode upon hitting the ground, but rather underground, leaving only a few holes on the surface that Jesús Pérez Triana, a security and defense expert, compares to a"snake bite." That's what can be seen in those images: six not excessively large entrance holes or craters, two at each of the plant's two main entrances and two more in the ventilation duct.

That's not to say that the damage to that crucial plant isn't"very significant," as Rafael Grossi, director of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), asserted Monday, but it does mean that, contrary to Trump's claims, those images aren't all that descriptive. As Grossi himself asserted, it's still too early to determine the extent to which that facility and the other two mentioned have been completely destroyed.

Without an independent damage assessment, the evaluation of the true impact of the US attack remains fraught with open questions. For example, the near-certainty, even implicitly confirmed by Vice President J. D. Vance himself, that—in preparation for an attack Trump had been threatening for days—Iran removed from its nuclear facilities the 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium (60%, just under the 90% required to make nuclear weapons) that the IAEA estimated it had in its possession in May, in a report that Israel used to justify the attack on Iran that began on June 13.

Those trucks that paraded past the entrance to the fortified Fordow plant could have carried not only that uranium, but also equipment such as the centrifuges used to enrich it, which are another of the declared targets of the Israeli and US attacks. On their way there, some of those vehicles, according to Iranian authorities quoted by the country's media, transported earth and other materials intended to seal the entrances and exits of the plant's underground tunnels and thus contain a possible explosion.

Native experience

Whether or not the centrifuges are removed from Fordow, Iran still has the know-how to build them, notes Daria Dolzikova, a senior fellow at the Nuclear Policy and Proliferation Program at the British think tank RUSI, in an analysis. The country's nuclear program"is decades old and based on extensive indigenous experience." Therefore, she emphasizes,"the physical elimination of the program's infrastructure, and even the assassination of Iranian scientists, will not be enough to destroy the latent knowledge that exists in the country."

"Iran has extensive experience that will allow it to eventually rebuild aspects of the program that have been damaged or destroyed," Dolzikova concludes.

Guillermo Pulido, an expert in Strategic Nuclear Deterrence Studies, believes that this attack was probably not"decisive." He cites the case of Fordow, a facility for which"the only option for complete destruction would be a bunker-busting atomic bomb," the researcher asserts.

In her document, the RUSI analyst alludes to another of those pending issues that Washington's attack has left up in the air: the secret and not-so-secret nuclear facilities that Iran still has and that have not yet been bombed. One is Kolang Gaz La, located very close to the Natanz enrichment plant, southeast of the capital. Natanz, southeast of Tehran, is considered Iran's main facility for enriching uranium. According to the IAEA, that plant was severely damaged in last week's Israeli attacks.

Little is known about Kolang Gaz La, which IAEA inspectors have yet to penetrate. Only that it is enormous, up to 10,000 square meters, and that its chambers are buried between 80 and 100 meters deep—even deeper than Fordow, according to an April analysis by the Institute for International Security Studies (ISIS).

Even Israeli authorities themselves have cooled Trump's triumphalist ardor. An initial analysis by the Israeli military, cited by The New York Times on Sunday, concluded that Fordow has suffered severe damage but is not completely destroyed. The American newspaper also cites two Israeli intelligence officials who confirmed that Iran had removed equipment and uranium from that and other nuclear plants in recent days. Specifically, those 400 kilograms of 60% enriched uranium, theoretically enough to make about nine nuclear bombs.

Without complete destruction

Both Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth have since expressed less enthusiasm than Trump, citing"severe damage and destruction," but not "complete destruction." Vance has even acknowledged that the fate of that uranium is one of the issues that would need to be addressed with Iranian authorities if they accept the US demand to return to the negotiating table regarding their nuclear program.

An analyst with good sources within the Iranian authorities who spoke to this newspaper from Tehran on condition of anonymity confirmed that"days ago" the Iranian authorities "removed all sensitive equipment from Fordow." He then emphasized that "if Iran decided to take the nuclear step," referring to the manufacture of atomic weapons,"it wouldn't do so in Fordow." This "was already clear before the attacks," he concluded.

Pérez Triana doesn't even believe that the Trump administration had these"definitive results" as a priority when launching an operation that, despite its spectacular nature, he describes as"a low-risk conservative attack." In his opinion, Washington intended"to push Iran to understand that the United States is serious."

“Trump's operation was limited, with the purpose of bringing Iran to a negotiating table where the US could build on a basis of strength,” this expert emphasizes. In his opinion, the message was that “Washington can strike again; Israel is a mad dog, and Iran's regional allies (Hezbollah and Hamas) are off the board.” This alludes to the phrase often attributed to Israeli military officer and politician Moshe Dayan: “Israel's enemies must perceive us as a mad dog: too dangerous to be bothered.”

Pulido doubts the"usefulness" of this attack, especially since it was already known in 2024 that Iran was"dispersing part of its nuclear program, its centrifuges, and other equipment." This attack, not as"decisive" for the future of the nuclear program as Trump claims,"could also unleash a rather dangerous regional dynamic."

US military action in the region, Daria Dolzikova noted in her analysis, has, on the contrary, been in the past"one of the factors driving Iran's advances in its nuclear program." The fact that Washington has directly attacked Iranian territory for the first time, even though Trump announced a truce between Israel and Iran on Monday,"could very well lead Tehran to decide that the only option left for effective nuclear deterrence is to develop a nuclear weapons capability."