Photos show huge damage to Iran's nuclear facilities after US bomb strikes

7NEWS

5 days ago

Commercial satellite imagery indicates the US attack on Iran's Fordow nuclear plant severely damaged — and possibly destroyed — the deeply buried site and the uranium-enriching centrifuges it housed, but there has been no confirmation, experts say.
'They just punched through with these MOPs,' said David Albright, a former UN nuclear inspector who heads the Institute for Science and International Security, referring to the Massive Ordnance Penetrator bunker-busting bombs the US said it dropped.
'I would expect that the facility is probably toast.'
But confirmation of the below-ground destruction could not be determined, noted Decker Eveleth, an associate researcher with the CNA Corporation who specialises in satellite imagery.
The hall containing hundreds of centrifuges is 'too deeply buried for us to evaluate the level of damage based on satellite imagery', he said.
Operation Midnight Hammer also targeted Tehran's main uranium enrichment facility at Natanz and struck in Isfahan, the location of the nation's largest nuclear research centre.
US President Donald Trump described the hits as 'very successful attacks'.
To defend against attacks such as the one conducted by US forces early on Sunday Iranian time, Iran buried much of its nuclear program in fortified sites deep underground, including into the side of a mountain at Fordow.
Satellite images show six holes where the bunker-busting bombs appear to have penetrated the mountain, and then ground that looks disturbed and covered in dust.
The United States and Israel have said they intend to halt Tehran's nuclear program.
But a failure to completely destroy its facilities and equipment could mean Iran could more easily restart the weapons program that US intelligence and the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) say it shuttered in 2003.
Several experts also cautioned that Iran likely moved a stockpile of near weapons-grade highly enriched uranium out of Fordow before the strike and could be hiding it and other nuclear components in locations unknown to Israel, the US and UN nuclear inspectors.
They noted satellite imagery from Maxar Technologies showing 'unusual activity' at Fordow on Thursday and Friday, with a long line of vehicles waiting outside an entrance of the facility.
A senior Iranian source told Reuters on Sunday most of the near weapons-grade 60 per cent highly enriched uranium had been moved to an undisclosed location before the US attack.
'I don't think you can with great confidence do anything but set back their nuclear program by maybe a few years,' said Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.
'There's almost certainly facilities that we don't know about.'
Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat and member of the Senate intelligence committee who said he had been reviewing intelligence every day, expressed the same concern.
'My big fear right now is that they take this entire program underground, not physically underground, but under the radar,' he told NBC News.
'Where we tried to stop it, there is a possibility that this could accelerate it.'
General Dan Caine, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters that seven B-2 bombers dropped 14 Massive Ordnance Penetrators, 13,600kg precision-guided bombs designed to drive up to 60 metres into hardened underground facilities like Fordow, according to a 2012 congressional report.
Caine said initial assessments indicated the sites suffered extremely severe damage but declined to speculate about whether any nuclear facilities remained intact.
Eveleth said the Maxar imagery of Fordow and Caine's comments indicated the B-2s dropped an initial load of six MOPs on Fordow, followed by a 'double tap' of six more in the exact same spots.