Here’s how long US strikes may have set back Iran’s nuclear program

WASHINGTON — Saturday’s US strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities set back the Islamic Republic’s atomic weapons capabilities by roughly two years, American and Israeli officials and experts tell The Post – adding that Tehran remains “highly incentivized” to pursue a bomb.

While President Trump vowed Tuesday morning that Tehran will “never rebuild” its nuclear weapons program, Iran’s atomic chief claimed that arrangements are already being made to restore the bombed sites at Fordow, Isfahan and Natanz.

“The plan is to prevent interruptions in the process of production and services,” Mohammad Eslami of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran told Iran’s state-owned Mehr News, adding that Tehran had been prepared for airstrikes by the US and Israel to damage the sites.

Exact assessments of the damage — which require access to the sites that Iran is unwilling to grant — may never take place.

But multiple nuclear physicists and national security analysts said the strikes — paired with Israel’s “Operation Rising Lion” campaign targeting top Iranian scientists and military officials — were able to push back Tehran’s nuclear timeline to months to years away from making a weapon rather than days to weeks.

“Iran likely requires months, if not years, to restore an option to build nuclear weapons,” said Andrea Stricker, deputy director of the Foundation for Defending Democracies’ nonproliferation and biodefense program. “Still, Tehran is highly incentivized to cobble together a crash nuclear weapons effort using what it has.”

“The United States and Israel may need to conduct additional strikes to ensure that threat is eliminated,” Stricker added. “Alternatively, or alongside, Washington can insist Iran to agree to a deal for the full, verifiable, and permanent dismantlement of its nuclear weapons program and remaining assets.”

Where’s the uranium?

Israelis are highly concerned that Iran will reconstitute its program, though there is a general sense of relief that the threat has at least been temporarily eased, said Scott Feltman, the vice president of One Israel Fund, which raises money for Jews living in the West Bank.

“There is a very, very real fear, but [Israeli Prime Minister] Bibi Netanyahu has been on this bandwagon for 20 years. I don’t think he would have agreed to the cease-fire if he didn’t think that, at the very least, that it set them back a few years, if not more.

“But I don’t believe that he feels that Iran could ever be trusted in the current regime.”

Imagery from open-source satellite images taken Thursday and Friday showed more than a dozen cargo-style trucks lined up outside the gates of Fordow, leading some to express suspicion that Tehran evacuated the nuclear fuel prior to the US strikes. Others have suggested the trucks were being used to block tunnel entrances with earth in an attempt to mitigate the impact of US bunker bombs.

If Iran was able to remove its estimated 400kg — about 880 pounds — of uranium enriched to 60% purity, the countdown to a weapon could grow short once again, DC-based nuclear physicist Steve Nelson told The Post.

“The thing about being enriched beyond 20% is that it makes it way easier to enrich it to 93%, which is basically weapons grade,” Nelson said. “And then once you get to 90% to 93%, somewhere in that range, you can make a nuclear weapon out of uranium very easily.”

On Monday, the Iranian parliament’s national security committee indefinitely suspended its cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, preventing the United Nations organization from overseeing Tehran’s nuclear activities.

“The Iranian nuclear program has been set back significantly … We have to see what they want to do. Do they, are they going to reconstruct what they have?” IAEA chief Rafael Grossi told Fox News on Tuesday.

Regardless of whether the uranium was salvaged, Stricker said it remains unlikely that Iran would be capable of producing a nuclear weapon anytime soon, as Tehran would still need to reconstruct enrichment facilities damaged or destroyed in the US strikes to push the 60% uranium to the amount required for a bomb.

“While it may still have possession of some amount of highly enriched uranium, it likely lacks the capacity to weaponize it for nuclear bombs,” she said. “Prior to the US bombing, Israel carried out massive strikes on the regime’s weaponization headquarters, facilities, equipment, bomb components, documentation and key scientists.”

What remains?

Calls for additional strikes on Iranian nuclear strikes could grow louder after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt acknowledged Tuesday that at least one intelligence assessment indicated the US strikes had not completely destroyed Iran’s centrifuges.

Leavitt denied the accuracy of the assessment — which was leaked to CNN and the New York Times and claimed the strikes only set Tehran’s program back by a few months — and chastised its author as a “low-level loser.”

“The Israeli and American strikes on Iran’s nuclear program have set it back severely, but the question is just how far,” said Ilan Evyatar, author of the book “Target Tehran: How Israel Is Using Sabotage, Cyberwarfare, Assassination – and Secret Diplomacy – to Stop a Nuclear Iran and Create a New Middle East.”

“Israeli intelligence believes that Natanz has been completely destroyed, but the picture at Fordow is not yet completely clear. In any event however, even if the centrifuge halls — which are hundreds of meters below ground — have not been destroyed, the force of the blasts is likely to have destroyed the centrifuges,” he said.

Grossi, speaking before the initial intelligence assessment was reported, added to Fox News that the difference in Iran’s capabilities was “night and day” from before Israeli airstrikes began June 13.

Without centrifuges, some analysts have said Iran could give some of its uranium to a proxy group like Hezbollah or Yemen’s Houthi’s “to create a radiological dispersal device or RDD, known as a dirty bomb,” but that path is unlikely, according to Stricker.

“There is a real question of whether Tehran would do so, given that creating a mass panic and threatening use of an RDD would invite swift Israeli and US efforts to fully eliminate the supreme leader [Ayatollah Ali Khamenei], top leadership, and the regime’s proxies.

“Iran is taking more measured steps to ensure its survival and probably wants to preserve its remaining [highly-enriched uranium] to build back its own nuclear weapons option. “