Here is a primer of the three sites in Iran that are in the crosshairs of Israel’s attack.
[Map from Washington Post online]
The Atomic Energy Organization of Iran confirmed that the Israeli attacks had damaged Natanz and that chemical and radiation pollution had been detected inside the facility. Though the extent of the destruction remains unclear, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, said Tuesday that the underground portion of Natanz, which contains the centrifuges, had been directly struck. The Natanz centrifuges were “severely damaged if not destroyed altogether,” IAEA head Rafael Grossi told the BBC on Monday.
The existence of Iran’s second nuclear enrichment site, Fordow, was publicly confirmed in 2009 after Iran constructed it in secret. Fordow is ostensibly designed to produce uranium enriched to 20 percent purity, but IAEA inspectors found samples of uranium enriched to 83.7 percent purity in the facility in March 2023.
A former Iranian missile base about 100 miles south of Tehran near the city of Qom, Fordow is dug into a mountainside hundreds of feet belowground. Though Fordow houses fewer centrifuges than Natanz, the facility’s subterranean design renders it far less vulnerable to airstrikes.
Israel did not include Fordow in its initial round of attacks but launched airstrikes in the vicinity of the site hours after it hit Natanz, Iranian authorities told the IAEA. The IAEA has not detected signs of damage at Fordow, Grossi said Monday.
Analysts say that Fordow could be destroyed by multiple GBU-57 A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs, known as “bunker busters,” which use massive force to destroy targets deep underground. Israel has neither the bombs nor the planes needed to lift the heavy explosives. The United States possesses both*.
Isfahan houses the plant where natural uranium is converted into the uranium hexafluoride gas that is fed into centrifuges at Natanz and Fordow, according to the Washington-based Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI). Israel struck Isfahan on Friday, and Grossi confirmed Sunday that the attack had damaged four buildings, including the uranium conversion facility.
Iran’s nuclear program also includes the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant, a commercial nuclear reactor in the south near the Persian Gulf, and the Tehran Nuclear Research Center, which contains a small research reactor supplied by the U.S. to the previous Iranian regime in 1967.
*WASHINGTON, June 17 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday repudiated Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s assessment that Iran has not been building a nuclear weapon, publicly contradicting his spy chief for the first time during his second term.
In rejecting his top spy’s judgment, Trump appeared to embrace Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s justification for launching airstrikes last week on Iranian nuclear and military targets, saying he believed Tehran was on the verge of having a warhead.