What Israel’s strike on an Iranian nuclear facility tells us – we are nearing the finish line

The news outlet Axios is reporting that the Israelis struck an Iranian nuclear facility in Parchin last month. Axios cited three U.S. officials, an Israeli official, and a former Israeli official. According to the report, the strike caused significant damage. Also according to the report, the facility was being used for work connected to the testing of the conventional explosives needed to detonate a nuclear weapon.

What does that tell us?

First, it tells us that the fiction that Iran abandoned nuclear weapons-related work in 2003 is just that – a fiction. Those focused on appeasing Tehran may find it convenient to trot out that canard from time to time, but it is nonetheless false. Iran is working on acquiring nuclear weapons.

Second, it tells us that the Iranians are well down the road to having a functioning device. There is no point in working on the fine points of how to detonate a device until you have the necessary fissile material and the means of delivering the weapon to its target. The Iranians are not playing with theories. They are finalizing the engineering of a weapon that can destroy Israel.

The device the Iranians are building is almost certainly an implosion device. Put very simply such a device works like this. You surround a core of fissile material with lenses of conventional explosive. When the conventional explosive is detonated it squeezes the core and you get a nuclear explosion. There are several other critical pieces of the puzzle like neutron generators missing from that crude description, but you get the idea.

The Iranians are down to the engineering of an atomic bomb. They are into the “nuts and bolts” of the thing.

A U.S. official speaking to Axios on the condition of anonymity, said that the Iranian government was using the facility for “scientific activity that could lay the ground for the production of a nuclear weapon.” That research was deliberately being disguised as research for civilian purposes.

The specific nuclear site hit by the Israelis is known as Taleghan 2. Based on information previously made public we know that the Taleghan 2 facility is roughly 40 meters long and built into a hillside. Prior to mid-2003, when Iran allegedly halted nuclear weapons work at this location the Iranians used a small test chamber inside Taleghan 2 to test high explosives. “These activities constituted part of Iran’s development of a so-called multi-point initiation system, which creates a shock wave that helps set off a nuclear weapon explosion. Iran’s early nuclear weapon design used an MPI.”

When you detonate the conventional explosives around the core of a nuclear device it is critical that those explosives all detonate simultaneously and that the shock wave generated arrives at the center of the core of fissile material at exactly the same moment from all directions. If not the device blows itself apart but no nuclear reaction occurs. You have a very expensive firecracker.

As of 2003 Taleghan 2 contained flash X-ray equipment powered by a Marx generator, which could “deliver fast pulses of energy” and “enable a rapid succession of images to be taken” of “high explosives compressing a core of natural uranium, simulating the initiation of a nuclear explosive.” This equipment could enable Tehran to test weapons components using natural uranium in lieu of weapons-grade uranium. That means the Iranians could finalize the design and construction of their weapon in advance of having the HEU to build one.

According to information released by the Israelis previously, Tehran also used a chamber at Parchin near Taleghan 2 to test a neutron initiator, another critical part of a nuclear weapon. Other information provided by the Israelis makes clear that when Iran shut down some aspects of its nuclear weapons work in 2003 all it really did was move that work to more secretive locations where it could escape detection.

So, where are we now?

All pretense that the Iranians do not have a nuclear weapons program needs to be discarded. They are working on a bomb. They have been for a very long time. They must be considered to either already have nuclear weapons or to be on the verge of acquiring them.

We should also admit that our intelligence is far from perfect and that hitting known nuclear sites does not mean there are no undiscovered nuclear sites about which we know nothing. One of the explanations for the Iranians restarting work at a well-known nuclear site after all would be that their activity there was designed to attract our attention while they conducted the actual assembly of functioning devices elsewhere. Deception is a basic element of all warfare.

The Iranians have been working on acquiring nuclear weapons for many years. We have allowed that work to proceed and, under the Biden administration, by failing to enforce sanctions, indirectly financed the Iranian efforts. We are about to pay the price for our ineptitude and our policy of appeasement. The Iranians are near the finish line, and the world will never be the same.