VIENNA: US military strikes on Iran will put to the test the widely held view that such attacks can delay a nuclear programme, but not kill a determined push for atom bombs.
Many officials and nuclear experts have warned: You can destroy or disable a nuclear programme’s physical infrastructure but it is very hard or impossible to eliminate the knowledge a country has acquired.
On Sunday, Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation expressed a similar sentiment: knowledge in nuclear energy “cannot be destroyed”.
IAEO spokesperson Behrouz Kamalvandi said the nuclear industry has roots in Iran and “these roots cannot be destroyed”, BBC News reported.
Most of the highly enriched uranium at Fordow was relocated before the US attack
“Military strikes alone cannot destroy Iran’s extensive nuclear knowledge,” the Washington-based Arms Control Association said in a statement after the US strikes with massive bunker-busting bombs on sites including Iran’s two main underground enrichment plants at Natanz and Fordow.
“The strikes will set Iran’s programme back, but at the cost of strengthening Tehran’s resolve to reconstitute its sensitive nuclear activities, possibly prompting it to consider withdrawing from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and possibly proceeding to weaponisation.”
It is pertinent to mention here that despite possessing nuclear weapons, Israel is not a signatory to the NPT and has never submitted to IAEA inspections.
Israel has also said it has killed Iranian nuclear scientists but, while little is known about the personnel side of Iran’s nuclear programme, officials have said they are sceptical about that having a serious impact on Iran’s nuclear knowledge, even if it might slow progress in the near term.
At least until Israel’s first strikes against its enrichment installations on June 13, Iran was refining uranium to up to 60pc purity, a short step from the roughly 90pc that is bomb-grade, and far higher than the 3.67pc cap imposed by the 2015 deal, which Iran respected until the year after Trump pulled out.
The last report on May 31 by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN nuclear watchdog that inspects Iran’s nuclear facilities, showed Iran had enough uranium enriched to up to 60pc, if enriched further, for nine nuclear weapons, according to an IAEA yardstick. It has more at lower levels like 20pc and 5pc.
One important open question is how much highly enriched uranium Iran still has and whether it is all accounted for. A senior Iranian source told Reuters on Sunday most of the highly enriched uranium at Fordow, the site producing the bulk of Iran’s uranium refined to up to 60pc, had been moved to an undisclosed location before the US attack there.
Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi told state TV last weekend Iran would take measures to protect nuclear materials and equipment that would not be reported to the IAEA, and it would no longer cooperate with the IAEA as before.
What Iran will do next in terms of its nuclear programme is also unclear. Its threat to pull out of the NPT hints at a race for nuclear weapons, but Iran has maintained it has no intention of doing so.
But even if inspections continue, because of Trump’s withdrawal in 2018 Iran had already scrapped extra IAEA oversight provided for by the 2015 deal. That means the agency no longer knows how many centrifuges Iran has at undeclared locations.
Published in Dawn, June 23rd, 2025
