An Iranian security official in protective clothing walks through part of the Uranium Conversion Facility just outside the Iranian city of Isfahan on March 30, 2005. Vahid Salemi/AP
Donald Trump says he’s bombing Iran to prevent the regime from obtaining a nuclear weapon. But he may be providing with Tehran more incentive to sprint toward developing a nuclear bomb, which is now easier for Iran to make—thanks to Trump.
After Trump, during his first White House stint, ripped up the Iran nuclear deal that President Barack Obama and other world leaders had negotiated with Tehran in 2015, Iran responded by enriching its uranium to a much higher level than it had been doing under the agreement. Because of that move, it now possesses an estimated 970 pounds of highly enriched uranium that’s a lot closer to the level of refinement needed for bomb-grade material. And international nuclear inspectors—who were able to keep track of Iran’s uranium stockpile before Trump bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities in June—aren’t sure where this uranium is now.
“I see no sign that they knew what they were doing. It seemed to be just literally bomb, bomb, bomb. There didn’t seem to be a plan for how you were going to get that particular material. If there is one, it hasn’t emerged.”
In short, with his war in Iran, Trump has created a big, possibly catastrophic problem: A half-ton of highly enriched uranium, which can be made bomb-ready, is somewhere…out there—available for use by Iran’s new regime or perhaps not fully secured and susceptible to theft or expropriation.
I spoke to Joe Cirincione, a veteran nuclear policy expert, about this stockpile and the challenges it presents.
He notes that it would not take much for Iran to enrich this material—a gaseous form of uranium—from its present state of 60-percent enrichment to the 90-percent level necessary for a bomb. (Uranium at the 60-percent level can be used for a crude and large bomb that would be akin to the weapon dropped on Hiroshima but not a bomb that could be delivered by a missile.) He points out that under the Iran deal that Trump rejected, Iran had only been enriching uranium to the 4-percent level.
Once uranium is enriched to 90 percent, there are other critical steps required to manufacture a bomb that Cirincione estimates could take Iran nine months to a year, and this could happen perhaps even after the massive US-Israeli bombing campaign on the country.
So, Cirincione says, when Trump, to justify the war, proclaimed Iran was two weeks away from producing a nuclear weapon, he was misleading the public. And he was also wrong to have boasted of destroying Iran’s nuclear program last year. “This is the great fallacy of the June bombing, where Trump said he obliterated the program,” Cirincione remarks. “All of us knew at the time he hadn’t gotten that 60-percent enriched uranium. It was too deeply buried…So now it’s sitting there as literally a ticking time bomb.”
Then what ought to be done now about this treasure chest of uranium that is believed to be at a facility deep underground near the city of Isfahan? Cirincione says there are only two alternatives:
The United States either has to conduct some high-risk military maneuver where we would land people from the 82nd Airborne or an Israeli commando unit into the site at Isfahan and try to find the uranium, go down hundreds of meters underground, retrieve the uranium and pull it out or perhaps destroy it on site. That is a high risk proposition.
What you’re left with is really the only other solution where we started: a negotiated deal. You have to get Iran’s agreement to secure that material, declare it, allow inspectors, and then either secure it under inspection or downblend it—the process in reverse, bring it down to a 3-percent or 4-percent level. That’s the only two solutions to this problem.
As of now, it’s hard to envision productive negotiations between the United States and Iran—especially since Trump launched this war while nuclear talks were still underway. And the new supreme leader is said to be more of a hardliner than his father was.
Cirincione believes that eventually there will be some sort of negotiations:
Almost all wars end by some sort of negotiation. If you project forward several weeks, it’s going to have to end. Usually there’s some sort of arrangement that’s made to end a war. With Donald Trump, who seems to be flying by the seat of his pants and making this up as it goes along, we just don’t know. But it’s possible that Trump has put us into the worst of all possible worlds. He’s made it impossible for us to have a negotiated solution to this. And we can’t use any military means to solve the problem. So we’re left in this worst of all worlds, which is Iran is holding all the nuclear cards at the end of this war.
So did Trump and his advisers not think hard before the war about what to do about this stockpile of HEU? There have so far been no indications that Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and whoever else was involved prepared for this part of the mess. “This may be the worst planned war in history,” Cirincione says. “I see no sign that they knew what they were doing. It seemed to be just literally bomb, bomb, bomb. There didn’t seem to be a plan for how you were going to get at that particular material. If there is one, it hasn’t emerged.”
He adds: “As you know, the members of the Senate and the House that have emerged from classified briefings on the war are appalled at the lack of planning, not just for what they were going to do when they started the war, what the goals were, but there seems to be no plan for how to end this war.”
That ending, whatever it may be, has to take into account this half-ton of uranium, which exists because the Iran deal was dumped. It is a crisis of Trump’s own making.
