The US-Israeli onslaught against Iran is intended to resolve a 24-year standoff over Tehran\u2019s nuclear programme, but it runs the risk of backfiring and driving the regime towards making a secret bomb, proliferation experts have warned.<\/p>\n
The regime in Tehran has long insisted that the programme is for civilian purposes and it has no intention of making a nuclear weapon. However, since two undeclared sites, for uranium enrichment and heavy water plutonium production, were discovered in 2002, the programme has been treated with intense suspicion.<\/p>\n
A nuclear deal in 2015<\/a> imposed severe limits and thorough inspections on Iran but when Donald Trump walked out of the agreement<\/a> in 2018, triggering its collapse, Iran ramped up its work on enrichment and other aspects of the programme.<\/p>\n Most worryingly for the international community, Iran had by last summer produced a stockpile of just over 440kg of highly enriched uranium<\/a> (HEU), of 60% purity. In terms of technical difficulty, once at 60%, it is a relatively easy step to reach 90% \u2013 weapons-grade uranium that can be used to make a compact warhead.<\/p>\n With further enrichment and conversion of the uranium from gas to metal form, Iran\u2019s 440kg stockpile would be enough to make more than 10 warheads.<\/p>\n The anxiety over this stockpile, accumulated since the torpedoing of the 2015 nuclear deal, was the motive for last June\u2019s US-Israeli strikes<\/a> on Iran. The US role, Operation Midnight Hammer, was focused on dropping bunker-busting bombs on Iran\u2019s nuclear sites.<\/p>\n Trump claimed the bombardment had \u201cobliterated\u201d the nuclear programme, but it soon became apparent this was not true<\/a>. The bombs had wreaked extensive damage, but deep underground sites, burrowed beneath mountains in two sites in particular, Isfahan and Natanz, could not be destroyed.<\/p>\n In response to the attacks, Iran excluded UN inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from those and other sensitive sites, with the result that the watchdog lost track of what became of the 440kg HEU stockpile, and of what was being done in the deep tunnels in Isfahan and Natanz.<\/p>\n In its latest report, the IAEA conceded it could not verify whether Iran had suspended all enrichment-related activities, or the size of its uranium stockpile at the affected nuclear facilities.<\/p>\n Despite that uncertainty, the IAEA director general, Rafael Grossi, said on Monday that \u201cwe don\u2019t see a structured programme to manufacture nuclear weapons\u201d.<\/p>\n