Iran’s Nuclear Program Has Survived

Michael Young

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Diwan, a blog from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Middle East Program and the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center, draws on Carnegie scholars to provide insight into and analysis of the region. Learn More Rosemary Kelanic is director of the Middle East Program at Defense Priorities, a think tank that promotes a foreign policy prioritizing restraint, diplomacy, and free trade to ensure U.S. security. Kelanic publishes widely on energy security, 

great power politics, and U.S. grand strategy in the Middle East. She is the author of Black Gold and Blackmail: Oil and Great Power Politics (Cornell University Press, 2020), and has co-edited, with Charles L. Glaser, Crude Strategy: Rethinking the U.S. Military Commitment to Defend Persian Gulf Oil (Georgetown University Press, 2016). Diwan interviewed Kelanic earlier this week to discuss her publicly expressed scepticism that the recent U.S. attacks against Iranian nuclear facilities did the damage that President Donald Trump and officials in his administration have claimed they did.

Michael Young: You have just been cited in a New York Times article suggesting that the U.S. bombing of nuclear facilities in Iran last month was more successful than initially believed. In your remarks, however, you sounded a cautionary note about this assessment. Can I ask you to explain your reasoning?Rosemary Kelanic: The assessments focus on the three big sites that the United States hit: Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. And while those sites are important, they are not the be-all and end-all of Iran’s nuclear program.

 Iran has been enriching uranium for over 20 years, and its capabilities are entirely indigenous, meaning that it manufactures its own centrifuges and other critical equipment. It has produced an entire generation of nuclear scientists and technicians, numbering in the thousands, that understands the technology and can rebuild what was damaged. The Iranian nuclear complex is sprawling and includes many additional sites beyond Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan that were not hit by airstrikes. Focusing too much on the fate of the big three risks being unable to distinguish the forest from the trees. And the forest is this: Iran has the knowledge to rebuild what was destroyed, probably within months.