Israel is expanding strikes at the nuclear facilities of Iran

As part of a broad strike on Iran, Israel has attacked several of the most important nuclear facilities in the country.

The first and most visible attack took place in the opening hours of the Israeli air campaign, which started on Thursday at night. In a statement, the Israeli army said that fighter jets had struck Iran’s greatest enrichment facility in Natanz. “As part of the strikes, the underground area of ​​the site was damaged. This area contains an enrichment room with multiple floors with centrifuges, electrical rooms and extra supportive infrastructure,” the explanation seemed partially.

Video that was placed online and verified by NPR showed Black Smoke wavy of the Natanz site early Friday morning local time. A set of images of the commercial satellite company Airbus showed damage to the most important electrical substation in the facility and buildings used to mount and rotate centrifuges.

By Friday afternoon there were Additional reports of Israeli strikes near the other most important enrichment facility of Iran at Fordow, and and IsfahanThat the home base is also of a nuclear research complex. Until now, little has been known about those strikes, which took place in the second night of fighting.

In An explanationIran’s atomic energy organization said that the attack caused damage in the Natanz factory, but that no radioactive or chemical contamination had leaked outside the site.

Rafael Mariano Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, condemned the attack.

“I repeatedly stated that nuclear facilities should never be attacked, regardless of the context or circumstances,” said Grossi during a meeting of the Board of Directors of the Agency.

The Natanz facility has been central for decades in Iran’s nuclear program. According to the IAEA, which has been followed on the site on the site in recent years, Iran recently used thousands of centrifuges to enrich uranium up to 60%, far above the levels that are normally used in civil nuclear reactors. The agency says that Iran has stored more than 400 kilograms of the highly enriched material, enough due to some estimates to quickly build around 10 nuclear weapons.

It is unclear how fast that material can be practically converted into bombs. The uranium is stored as a gas during the enrichment process. It must be separated and converted into metal, which in turn must be formed in components for a nuclear device. Iran had a secret program to investigate such a weapon in the early 2000s, but it has never built a nuclear weapon and has said publicly that it is not planning to follow one.

In a statement shortly after the strike, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel believed that Iran had recently restarted his program to build a nuclear weapon. “If it is not stopped, Iran could produce a weapon in a very short time,” he said in prepared comments shortly after the strike. The aim of the operation, Netanyahu explained, was to ‘hit the heart of the nuclear enrichment program of Iran’.

Provisional analysis of satellite images on the site suggests that the damage due to the first wave of attacks was actually limited, according to Jeffrey Lewis, a professor of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies that the Iran program has followed.

Images of satellite company Airbus showed damage to various buildings on the Natanz site that are used to mount centrifuges. The images also showed damage to supporting equipment, including an electric substation and buildings that can offer electricity and access to the underground structures on the site.

“That will probably disrupt the activities in the factory, but crucial, which they did not do was find a way to destroy the thousands of centrifuges that are buried underground,” says Lewis.

Lewis also saw no evidence that Israel was beaten on tunnels deep under a nearby mountain. Iran reportedly digged those tunnels to create a more reinforced facility for his centrifuges. In the past few days it had promised that it would accelerate the development of a third centrifugesite, possibly in the mountain facility.

Lewis says he wonders whether military power can really eliminate the nuclear program of Iran. Ultimately, he says, there is not a single facility or scientist who has the key to the entire nuclear company in Iran.

“Unless the Israelis can continue to bomb them indefinitely,” he says, “they will always have the opportunity to reconstruct the program technically if they make a decision.”