By Asad Mirza
It has been almost one week since US bombers conducted “Operation Midnight Hammer” against Iran and its nuclear development sites. However, it is still not clear whether Iran’s’ capabilities have been damaged; if yes, then to what extent? Further, it also puzzles one with Iran’s obsession with continuing a nuclear program.
US President Donald Trump has repeatedly said the US attack on Iran obliterated its nuclear program and prompted the ceasefire. However, a US official briefed on the Defence Intelligence Agency’s initial assessment told USA TODAY the core components of Iran’s nuclear program appeared to remain intact.
An outraged Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday (June 26) countered by calling the bombings a “resounding success” and accusing some media outlets of “trying to make the president look bad.”
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei maintained that the bombings “failed to achieve anything significant,” forcing Israel and the US to abandon their attacks. “They could not accomplish anything,” he said. “They failed to achieve their goal. They exaggerate to conceal and suppress the truth.”
Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), took a middle path, saying the Iranian program suffered “enormous damage.” He said three primary sites – Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan – were hit hard but that other locations were not affected at all. The nuclear program can be rebuilt, he said, but he declined to put a timeline on it.
As far as Iran’s response to the Israeli attacks were concerned, R Swaminathan, Governor of India to the IAEA, Vienna, in his article for the Indian Express has rightly summed it up by saying that the most striking feature of Iran’s response was not what it did, but what it deliberately avoided — it did not withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and refrained from activating its regional proxies or disrupting the Strait of Hormuz. Further, the Supreme National Security Council has not yet endorsed the decision of Iran’s Parliament to suspend its cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Meanwhile, Times of Israel’s report on the issue, based on a The Times’ report assessed that Iran’s ability to store enriched uranium remains intact, with most of Iran’s estimated stockpile of some 400 kilogrammes (900 pounds) of nearly bomb-grade Uranium were likely moved before its facilities were bombed, according to one preliminary classified US intelligence report.
The US administration has rejected such assertions, saying the Uranium is thought to have been buried by the strikes. But, on the other hand Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz has said Israel does not know the whereabouts of all of Iran’s enriched Uranium.
Iran’s ability to convert enriched uranium into solid metal form, which is necessary for assembling a nuclear warhead, was possibly destroyed, as the facility where that process occurs was in Isfahan, reported The Times.
Still, one expert told The Times that Iran may possess the capability at other secret locations, as it has converted Uranium to solid metal at other locations in the past.
While Israel said it severely damaged Iran’s ballistic missile infrastructure during the campaign, The Times assessed it is unlikely Iran no longer has missiles capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.
Meanwhile, there is a bigger question why a country with large oil reserves feels such a need to have home-grown civil nuclear energy?
A persuasive new account by Vali Nasr, entitled Iran’s Grand Strategy, helps unlock the key to that question by placing the answer in Iran’s colonial exploitation and its search for independence, reports The Guardian.
Nasr wrote, “Before the revolution itself, before the hostage crisis or US sanctions, before the Iran-Iraq war or efforts to export the revolution, as well as the sordid legacy of Iran’s confrontations with the west, the future supreme religious guide and leader of Iran valued independence from foreign influence as equal to the enshrining principles of Islam in the state”. Khamenei was indeed asked once what was the benefit of the revolution, and he replied “now all decisions are made in Tehran.”
Nasr argues that while many of the lofty ideals of the revolution such as democracy and Islam have been eroded or distorted, the principle of Iranian independence has endured.
The quest for sovereignty, he argues, arose from Iran’s benighted history. In the 19th century, Iran was squeezed between the British and Russian imperial powers. In the 20thcentury its oil resources were exploited by British oil companies. Twice its leaders – in 1941 and 1953 – were removed from office by the British and Americans.
The popular prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was removed in a CIA-engineered coup in 1953 due to his demand to control Iran’s oil resources. No event in contemporary Iranian history is more scarring than Mosaddegh’s toppling. For Khomeini it confirmed Iran still did not control its destiny, or its energy resources.
Although civil nuclear power and the right to enrich became a symbol of independence and sovereignty after the revolution, Ellie Geranmayeh from the European Council on Foreign Relations points out it was the British and the Americans, themselves who introduced nuclear power to Iran in what was named an “atoms for peace” programme.
The Shah of Iran, with US approval, embarked on a plan to build 23 civil nuclear power stations, making it possible for Iran to export electricity to neighbouring countries and achieve the status of a modern state.
In an interview with the Washington Post, Henry Kissinger later admitted that as US secretary of state he raised no objections to the plants being built. “I don’t think the issue of proliferation came up,” he said.
However, the shah recognised the dual use for nuclear power, and in June 1974 even told an American journalist that “Iran would have nuclear weapons without a doubt sooner than you think”, a remark he later denied. Gradually the US became more nervous that the shah’s obsession with weaponry might mean Iran’s civil programme turning military.
Before the strikes, all believed Iran had developed a large stockpile, and at a sufficiently enriched level, to sustain a nuclear reaction that could be used in a bomb if it decided to. But how quickly Iran would have been able to “sprint to a nuclear weapon” as General Michael E Kurilla, Commander of the CENTCOM put it on June 10, is also a matter of dispute, and estimates ranged from one week to one year.
While military confrontation has paused for now, the geopolitical stakes remain high. Iran still retains a significant portion of its long-range missile arsenal, and airstrikes alone cannot permanently dismantle a nuclear program.
But it also forces us to question, who gave the right to Israel, itself a nuclear power, the right to act as the big daddy and strike Iran. Perhaps Bibi needed this more for to ensure his win in the next polls and divert the global attention from Gaza. (IPA Service)
