The 14 GBU-57 bombs dropped by B-2s on the Fordow and Natan enrichment plants and the more than twenty Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from an Ohio-class submarine against Isfahan have at most set back the Iranian nuclear program by a few months. Where are the 408 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60% that the International Atomic Energy Agency spoke about in its report of 31 May , which was stored in powder form in large cylinders at the three sites bombed by the United States and which according to some observers could be enriched to “weapon grade” (to 90%) in a few days if Tehran decided to do so, is now the urgent question to understand whether Tehran's plans have been compromised or simply postponed, and if so, for how long, perhaps with plants now distributed across smaller and still secret sites. “It all comes down to the material and where it is,” Richard Nephew, the leading sanctions expert on the Obama administration’s team that signed the JCPOA, the nuclear deal with Iran, told the Financial Times .
“Based on what we have been able to understand so far, we don’t know. We have no real evidence to say that we have the capabilities to find it soon. It would be foolish to say that the program has been delayed by more than a few months,” Nephew said. Ali Khamenei’s top adviser, Ali Shamkhani, said that the nuclear capabilities remained intact. “Even though the nuclear sites have been destroyed, the game is not over. The enriched materials, the knowledge we have developed and the political will remain intact.”
On June 19 and 20, hours before the attack, there was a lot of activity around the Fordow site. Maxar Technologies produced satellite images showing long lines of trucks moving along the roads adjacent to the plant. Several commentators have speculated that they may have been used to move the uranium stockpile before the bombing, a version also supported by the Iranian news agency Mehr. But finding direction among the narratives being propagated by the actors involved in the conflict is not easy. “No one will be able to say for days” whether Iran was able to move the highly enriched uranium, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio admitted, but expressed doubts that it could have been moved at this point. “The minute a truck starts moving something, the Israelis see it, target it and destroy it,” he added. In the face of these comments, however, other analysts consider that it would have been"very naive of the regime to have kept it in these sites. The uranium is now safe".
“The things we don’t know are starting to hurt,” Nephew says. “If they had a uranium conversion line in place and they were able to enrich it to 90 percent at Fordow before the attack, and they had eight or nine days, they would have had enough time, potentially, for two bombs,” Nephew says. “They have enough enriched uranium somewhere and they’ve taken some advanced centrifuges from somewhere else to eventually get a nuclear warhead. The program hasn’t been completely destroyed, no matter what Trump says,” says former Mossad Iran analyst Sima Shine. Although others point out that with 11 scientists involved in the program killed in Israeli strikes, it might be difficult to build them.
