Military Action Will Be Needed as Iran Quietly Amps Up Its Nuclear Activity

The Islamic Republic is quietly reinstituting its nuclear program — and if President Trump is serious about ensuring it will not achieve making a bomb, he will at some point need to use military force, Iran watchers say. Mr. Trump has at least for now decided to forgo a major military assault in Iran, according to widespread reports. At the same time, though, the United States central command is conducting localized strikes near Hormuz, even as the Pentagon mostly declines to acknowledge. Similarly “you could have limited strikes on nuclear sites where reconstitution is happening, without necessarily having to escalate to a larger conflagration,” a non-proliferation watcher at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Andrea Stricker, tells The New York Sun. “We don’t know how far along the Iranians are, but they seem to have restarted some activities.”Addressing a Veterans Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery Wednesday, Mr. Trump said of Iran, “We stopped them from having a nuclear weapon.” Yet he added that “we need total victory, not 93 percent victory,” indicating that more will be needed. Under Russian pressure on Tehran, inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency visited Iran’s Bushehr facility last week for the first time since the start of the war. Bushehr, though, is widely believed to have been cleared of any incriminating evidence of weapons activities. Iran is barring inspectors’ entry to any other suspected nuclear site. Tehran’s half-hearted measure might encourage Washington proponents of a diplomatic solution to the nuclear crisis. Administration officials, though, are increasingly discouraged about that option. “The problem is the conditions they continue to place are absurd,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters at Paris on Wednesday. The IAEA has yet to account for 440.9 kg, or 972.23 pounds of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity. That level is far beyond what is needed for civilian use. It is also a short step towards weapon grade enrichment, and the missing uranium could fuel up to 12 nuclear bombs. “According to Israeli assessments, shared by other Western intelligence agencies, the location of Iran’s highly enriched uranium is known,” Y-net reported this week. One source tells the Sun that the enriched uranium is widely believed to have been “spread around” the country, rather than kept in a single facility. In recent days America has struck Qeshm Island, where the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps is launching assaults on Hormuz shipping. “These minor attacks are not a sign of the beginning of a war like the 40-day war,” a member of Iran’s Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, Esmail Kowsari, said this week. “In my view, the United States does not have the courage to wage such a war.”Known nuclear sites could similarly be struck without much Iranian response. Tehran would likely decline to even acknowledge such strikes, for fear its nuclear activity will be exposed, Ms. Stricke says. The same can’t be said, though, of a large facility, Kolang Gaz La, known as Pickaxe Mountain. Some of the missing enriched uranium stockpiles are believed to be held at Pickaxe Mountain. The facility is “large enough to also hold a centrifuge enrichment plant and likely large enough to also hold certain nuclear weaponization activities, such as making weapon-grade uranium metal and shaping it into nuclear weapon components,” the Institute for Science and International Security’s founder, David Albright, wrote on X recently.Although the buried Pickaxe Mountain facility is as deep as 320 feet underground under granite terrain, it can be struck, using its ventilation shafts, military officials say. Also, bombing the site’s two main entrances can render it non-operable. Unlike other, smaller facilities, though, Tehran will not be able to ignore such an attack. Iranian officials have warned they’d react to such an attack by leaving the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which could prevent any future inspections, and lead to an international confrontation between America and Tehran’s allies at Beijing and Moscow. Tehran could also escalate attacks on its neighbors in the Gulf and American targets in Europe, or even strike Israel, a move it has declined to take since June, fearing direct confrontation with the Israelis.Pickaxe Mountain was untouched in the American-Israeli strikes last June and this year. Yet if Mr. Trump is serious about denying a nuclear weapon to Iran, “it’s important for him to strike the facility before he leaves office, or at least to disable Iran’s access to it,” Ms. Stricker says. Israel certainly is urging military strikes. “In the near future we will face international pressures to come to terms with a nuclear Iran,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday during the Knesset swearing-in. The only way to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons for good, he added, is “to dismantle the Ayatollah regime.”

Military Action Will Be Needed as Iran Quietly Amps Up Its Nuclear Activity

Military Action Will Be Needed as Iran Quietly Amps Up Its Nuclear Activity

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