CNN
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Israel’s unprecedented attacks on Iran had at their core an elusive and high-risk goal: eradicating the country’s controversial nuclear program.
Israel targeted three key Iranian nuclear facilities – Natanz, Isfahan and Fordow – and a number of top scientists involved in nuclear research and development.
The extent of the damage is beginning to come into view, with satellite imagery and expert analysis hinting that the strikes had a significant impact in at least two of the locations.
But much remains unclear – not least because Iran’s most sensitive nuclear infrastructure is buried deep underground – and each side gave predictably contrasting assessments: An Israeli military official said at a briefing Saturday that strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites in Natanz and Isfahan were able to damage the sites “significantly,” while Iran claimed that damage to the facilities was limited.
“The whole (nuclear) supply chain has been disrupted,” Ali Vaez, the Iran Project Director at the International Crisis Group, told CNN on Sunday, as Israel and Iran continued to exchange fire. Vaez stressed the significance of each targeted nuclear site, which are all involved in the complex sequence of steps required to create a nuclear weapon.
“This chain is now broken, but it could be put back together in a matter of months, because Iran has both the knowhow and the material that is required for it,” he cautioned. “This is not a problem that will go away simply with aerial strikes.”
Initial assessments indicate that Israel’s strikes on Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility were extremely effective, going far beyond superficial damage to exterior structures and knocking out the electricity on the lower levels where the centrifuges used to enrich uranium are stored, two US officials told CNN.
“This was a full-spectrum blitz,” said another source familiar with the assessments.
The strikes destroyed the above-ground part of Natanz’s Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant, a sprawling site that has been operating since 2003 and where Iran had been enriching uranium up to 60% purity, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Weapons-grade uranium is enriched to 90%.
Satellite images, taken before and after the strikes, give a closer view of the impact.
The original image was taken by Maxar Technologies in January. The more recent photo, taken on Saturday after the attacks, shows at least two buildings seriously impacted. It’s not clear what they housed.
Electrical infrastructure at Natanz – including the main power supply building, plus emergency and back-up generators – was also destroyed, the IAEA said. That assessment is supported by the two US officials, who told CNN that electricity was knocked out on the lower levels where the centrifuges used to enrich uranium are stored.
That aspect of the operation is crucial, because much of the Natanz facility is heavily fortified and underground, so wiping out the power to those parts of the facility is the most effective way to impact underground equipment and machinery.
It does not appear that Israel damaged those underground parts of the plant directly, the IAEA said, but the loss of power to the underground cascade hall “may have damaged the centrifuges there.”
Centrifuges are machines that can enrich uranium by spinning the gas at high speeds. “These are machines that spin at the speed of light, and if they are suddenly turned off, some of them might explode or suffer unrecoverable damage,” Vaez told CNN.
Natanz has six above-ground buildings and three underground buildings, two of which can hold 50,000 centrifuges, according to the non-profit Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI).
There is no wider radiological impact. “The level of radioactivity outside the Natanz site has remained unchanged and at normal levels,” the IAEA said. “However, due to the impacts, there is radiological and chemical contamination inside the facilities in Natanz,” it added – though the levels would be manageable.
“There’s also a stockpile of highly enriched uranium in Natanz, in one of the buildings that Israel could strike, but hasn’t,” Vaez said. “The risk there is an explosion could basically turn that stockpile into a dirty nuclear bomb that would create radioactive contamination with disastrous environmental and humanitarian effects.”
The extent of damage at the Isfahan nuclear site in central Iran was more difficult to parse in the hours after it was struck, with conflicting claims over the attack’s impact emerging in Israel and Iran.
However, the IAEA said later Saturday that four critical buildings at the site were damaged.
That assessment seemed to contradict earlier claims from Behrouz Kamalvandi, the spokesperson for the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, who said Saturday that damage at the site – Iran’s largest nuclear research complex – was limited. A shed at the facility caught fire, he said.
Israel was more bullish; an IDF official said during a Saturday briefing that the site took significant damage.
Satellite imagery of the site on Saturday showed clear damage to three structures in the sprawling complex. The fourth cited by the IAEA was not immediately visible in the imagery.
But it is less obvious what material impact the damage had. Kamalvandi said equipment at two facilities – Natanz and Isfahan – had been moved in anticipation of the strikes, a claim that CNN cannot independently verify.
The facility was built with support from China and opened in 1984, the NTI says. According to the non-profit, 3,000 scientists are employed at Isfahan, and the site is “suspected of being the center” of Iran’s nuclear program.
It “operates three small Chinese-supplied research reactors,” as well as a “conversion facility, a fuel production plant, a zirconium cladding plant, and other facilities and laboratories,” the NTI says.
At a Saturday briefing, an IDF official said Israel had “concrete intelligence” that Iran was “moving forward to a nuclear bomb” at the Isfahan facility. Despite advancing its uranium enrichment significantly, Iran has repeatedly said that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes and denied that it was developing an atomic bomb.
The Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant is a far more difficult site to target. The plant is buried deep in the mountains near Qom, in northern Iran, and houses advanced centrifuges used to enrich uranium up to high grades of purity.
Israel targeted the site during its Friday attacks, but the IAEA said it was not impacted and the IDF has not claimed any significant damage there. Iranian air defenses shot down an Israeli drone in the vicinity of the plant, Iranian state media outlet Press TV reported Friday evening.
“The expectation has always been that Israel would not be able to reach (Fordow), because it would need the kind of bunker-buster, massive ordinance bombs that only the United States has,” Vaez said.
Satellite imagery appears to support that assessment. Little damage appears visible in the below image, taken by Maxar on Saturday.
Fordow’s fate could be pivotal to the overall success of Israel’s attacks.
In 2023, the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed that uranium particles enriched to 83.7% purity – which is close to the 90% enrichment levels needed to make a nuclear bomb – had been found in Fordow.
“If Fordow remains operational, Israel’s attacks may barely slow Iran’s path to the bomb,” James M. Acton, co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote on Friday.
Acton said Israel might be able to collapse the entrance to the facility, but noted that destroying much more of the Fordow site would be a difficult task for Israel.
The Arak nuclear facility in central Iran appeared to ride out the first wave of Israeli strikes unscathed. That site houses a heavy water nuclear reactor which has concerned the West, because heavy water (or deuterium oxide) can be used to produce plutonium – a second pathway to a potential nuclear bomb.
Attacking nuclear infrastructure was Israel’s main objective, but its strikes also targeted a number of other sites associated with Iran’s military and its secretive Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
A missile facility in Kermanshah, western Iran, took on heavy damage, according to imagery from Maxar.
In Piranshahr, near the Iraqi border in western Iran, overhead imagery shows a small military building largely flattened by strikes. The earlier image from Maxar Technologies was taken last month, and vehicles are visible for scale.
And in western Tehran, a large building at an IRGC facility appears significantly damaged, with much of its roof blown off.
The chief of the IRGC, Maj. Gen. Hossein Salami, was one of the key military figures killed in Israel’s strikes on Friday.
