EARLY IRAN BOMB DAMAGE SPIN FALLS APART. You know the basics of the story. After U.S. bombers hit Iranian nuclear sites, President Donald Trump quickly announced that the raid had “obliterated” the Iranian facilities. At that moment, some of Trump’s opponents in the Democratic Party, plus their allies in the media, said no, no, no. The U.S. bombing didn’t obliterate anything. Instead, it did minimal damage — so minimal that the Iranian program could be up and running again in a “handful of months.”
CNN, relying on leaks from people “briefed on” a super-early Defense Intelligence Agency assessment, was first to report that the bombing not only did not destroy the “core components” of Iran’s nuclear program, it likely “only set it back by months.” NBC, relying on leaks from the same DIA report, and perhaps the same people, reported the U.S. bunker-busting bombs “were not as effective as President Donald Trump said and that they set the program back by only three to six months.” And the New York Times’s version of the story said the early DIA report “estimated that the program had been delayed, but by less than six months.”
If that assessment is correct, then look at it this way: If it was true that Iran, not too long ago, was just a few months away from having a nuclear weapon, the assessment suggests that today, even after all the pounding by U.S. and Israeli forces, Iran is still just a few months away from having a nuclear weapon.
How can that be? It can’t. It appears the early reports had it wrong. Was it just a mistake? Too early to tell? Cherry-picking? Spin? It’s hard to say at this point, but it is possible to say that some of the media outlets that jumped on the story have a history of jumping on stories that appear to do political damage to Trump.
So what was wrong with the early reports? Some new analyses focus on one part of the bomb making process called metallization, that is, turning enriched uranium into a metal that becomes the explosive core of a nuclear weapon. If there’s no metallization, there’s no bomb. And it appears Israeli and U.S. attacks destroyed — you can say “obliterated,” if you like — Iran’s metallization capacity.
This is from the New York Times on Saturday:
Some early assessments of the war cast the Israeli and American strikes as setting Iran’s nuclear program back only a few months but apparently without specifying which part of its nuclear infrastructure could be quickly rebuilt. Now, however, nuclear experts say the destruction of Iran’s metallization plants has seemingly ended Tehran’s near-term ability to make a bomb’s explosive core. Rebuilding the crucial sites, they add, could take years. “It’s a bottleneck,” said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a private group in Washington that tracks nuclear proliferation. “They have to rebuild it.”
This might not be out-of-the-blue news to you if you listened to Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday. Rubio, who is also the acting national security adviser, was trying to counter the spin that the bombing had little effect. “He said the destruction of the conversion plants — an alternative name for the metallization sites — set the Iranians back for years, not a few months as claimed in a preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency report on the war’s impact,” the New York Times reported. “‘You can’t do a nuclear weapon without a conversion facility,’ said Mr. Rubio. ‘We can’t even find where it is, where it used to be on the map. The whole thing is blackened out. It’s wiped out.’”
You might also not be surprised if you read the words of David Albright, the expert mentioned above, in a report last Tuesday. “Overall, Israel’s and U.S. attacks have effectively destroyed Iran’s centrifuge enrichment program,” Albright wrote. “It will be a long time before Iran comes anywhere near the capability it had before the attack.”
Asked about that on PBS Thursday, Albright added: “Well, I think what we saw in satellite imagery, and we know a lot about the nuclear sites, is, you had thousands and thousands of centrifuges destroyed. And more importantly, you have the ability to make them was destroyed and to create the thing that is enriched.”
It is important to say that it is still too early for any sort of final assessment of the damage. But it might not be too early to say that the Defense Intelligence Agency report that got all the anti-Trump voices so excited perhaps did not specify “which part of [Iran’s] nuclear infrastructure could be quickly rebuilt,” in the words of the New York Times. Some reporters, eager to debunk Trump and pronounce Trump’s action a failure, paid a lot of attention to reports that Iran managed to keep some enriched uranium but failed to ask whether Iran could still manufacture a nuclear bomb.
Of course that didn’t stop the partisans from jumping into the story. “Listen, to me it still appears that we have only set back the Iranian nuclear program by a handful of months,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), perhaps one of the most aggressive of the second-term Trump antagonists. “There’s no doubt there was damage done to the program, but the allegations that we have obliterated their program just don’t seem to stand up to reason.”
Even as Murphy spoke, it was becoming clear that a variety of assessments and analyses, looking at the entire Iranian nuclear weapons program, suggested the damage was far, far more extensive than the Democrat said. Was the Iranian program “obliterated”? Argue about the word if you like. But the damage inflicted by the U.S. and Israeli attacks appears to have been devastating.