• IRAN’S NUKES What Damage Did the U.S. Do to Iran’s Nuclear Program? Why It’s So Hard to Know

    By Joshua Rovner

    Disagreements over the damage the U.S. bombing did to Iran’s nuclear facilities are unsurprising. Battle damage assessment –originally called bomb damage assessment –is notoriously difficult, and past wars have featured intense controversies among military and intelligence professionals.

  • IRAN’S NUKESWhy the U.S. Bombed a Bunch of Metal Tubes − a Nuclear Engineer Explains the Importance of Centrifuges to Iranian Efforts to Build Nuclear Weapons

    By Anna Erickson

    It’s not clear what the U.S. attack has accomplished, but destroying the facilities targeted in the attack and hindering Iran’s ability to continue enriching uranium might be a way to slow Iran’s move toward producing nuclear weapons. But history shows that a more reliable means of preventing Iran from achieving its nuclear aims would be for diplomacy and cooperation to prevail.

  • IRAN’S NUKESPost-Attack Assessment of the First 12 Days of Israeli and U.S. Strikes on Iranian Nuclear Facilities

    By David Albright and Spencer Faragasso, with the Good ISIS Team

    Israel’s historic Operation Rising Lion and the United States Operation Midnight Hammer have targeted many Iranian nuclear sites, causing massive damage to its nuclear program and setting it back significantly. 

  • IRAN’S NUKESThe Uncertainty in the Aftermath of the U.S. Bombing in Iran

    By Brian Michael Jenkins

    The U.S. bombing of Iranian nuclear sites Sunday had a concrete strategic objective: thwart Iran’s ability to enrich nuclear material and potentially build nuclear weapons. It was intended to make the world a safer place. At the moment, however, the world remains a dangerous place.

  • Quote of the Day

    One thing I think that this attack signals is that there’s a big distinction between nuclear and non-nuclear states in that you can do whatever you want to a non-nuclear state. It would be much harder if Iran actually had a nuclear program…. Once you get nuclear weapons, it’s really hard for anybody to come and overturn your regime…. And so there’s going to be all these long-run consequences that aren’t going to be necessarily so pretty, meaning that a lot of countries are going to see this as a signal that they need to get serious about their own separate nuclear deterrence.

    — Francis Fukuyama, interviewed by Yascha Mounk, Persuasion, 25 June 1925

  • QUICK TAKES // By Ben FrankelTargeting Nuclear Scientists

    The killing of Iranian nuclear scientists has been an integral part of Israel’s campaign, stretching back more than two decades, to disrupt and derail Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The 14 Iranian scientists killed on and since 13 June were all leading members of the Iran’s nuclear weaponization group.

  • CLOAK & DAGGERNuclear Scientists  Have Long Been Targets in Covert Ops – Israel Has Brought That Policy Out of the Shadows

    By Jenna Jordan and Rachel Whitlark

    Since 1944, there have been at least 100 instances of what researchers call nuclear “scientist targeting.” The most recent example are the 14 senior Iranian nuclear scientists Israel killed on 13 June as part of the opening move of its surprise attack on Iran, in which Israel has also decapitated the Iranian military, intelligence services, and Revolutionary Guard by killing practically all of these organizations’ leaders and senior officers – several dozen in all. In the week since the attack was launched, Israel has killed three more Iranian nuclear scientists.

  • ISRAEL-IRAN WARHow Might Israel Attack Iran’s Underground Nuclear Plant? A 2024 Raid in Syria Could e a Template

    By Clive Jones

    One of the key elements of Iran’s nuclear-weapons program is the uranium enrichment plant at Fordow, where about 5,000 centrifuges operate in an underground centrifuge farm 80 meters below ground. Israel may find it difficult to destroy the facility in an aerial attack — it does not have the U.S.-made 30,000lb GBU-57 MOP (massive ordnance penetrator) or the planes to carry this munition. But it may decide to destroy Fordow in a daring ground attack, similar to the one it conducted in Syria on 8 September 2024, in which Israeli commandoes destroyed an underground Syrian missile production facility.

  • IRAN’S NUKESAnalysis of the IAEA’s Comprehensive Iran NPT Safeguards Report May 2025

    By David Albright, Sarah Burkhard, and Andrea Stricker

    The Trump administration’s 2018 decision to unilaterally withdraw from the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran was a gift to Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions, freeing Iran from that deal’s tight restrictions on developing nuclear weapons – a freedom which Iran has used to accelerate, unhindered, its rush toward the bomb. But Iran is still a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which bars member states from developing nuclear weapons. The recent IAEA report notes that Iran is in egregious violation of its NPT obligations, and that it has been engaging in an elaborate, ongoing cover-up of its nuclear weapons-related activities.   

  • IRAN’S NUKESIranian Breakout Timelines Under JCPOA-Type Limits

    By David Albright

    The 2015 nuclear deal (JCPOA) made it impossible for Iran, if it withdrew from the deal, to produce enough weapon-grade uranium (WGU) for a nuclear weapon in less than 12 months. The U.S unilateral withdrawal from JCPOA in 2018 has changed the situation so fundamentally in favor of Iran and its nuclear weapons program, that new limits are needed, the most important of which is that Iran destroy centrifuges and related equipment, rather than store them. A focus on only limiting enriched uranium stocks will not provide sufficient breakout timelines.

  • IRAN’S NUKESOperation Opera Redux? Iran’s Nuclear Program and the Preventive War Paradox

    By Patrick Sullivan

    The 1981 Israeli destruction of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor was an operational success, but is regarded by many as a strategic failure. Scholars call this the preventive war paradox: compromising one’s security in the long term through military action that is operationally successful.

  • NUCLEAR SURVIVALWhat We’ve Learned from Survivors of the Atomic Bombs

    By Nancy Huddleston

    Q&A with Dr. Preetha Rajaraman, New Vice Chair for the Radiation Effects Research Foundation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.

  • IRAN’S NUKESShowdown in the Middle East

    By Lawrence Freedman

    In 2018, President Trump abandoned the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, claiming that Obama’s deal wasn’t good enough and that he would get a better one by imposing “maximum pressure.” As was predicted in 2018, the Iranian response to the U.S. campaign of maximum pressure was not to offer the Americans more, but instead to press ahead with enriching Uranium to the point where they are now close to having enough to build some nuclear weapons should they choose to do so. Can a new round of negotiations, or military action, stop Iran getting a nuclear weapon?

  • IRAN’S NUKESWhere the U.S.-Iran Nuclear Talks Are Headed

    By Ray Takeyh

    The Iranian position remains that the talks should focus on the nuclear issue and sanctions relief, with Iran repeatedly stating that its nuclear program is only intended for peaceful purposes. Trump has said that he only wants assurances that Iran does not produce nuclear weapons. Thus, issues such as Iran’s support for regional proxies and its missile program could be off the table.

  • NUCLEAR WASTEHow and Where Is Nuclear waste stored in the U.S.?

    By Gerald Frankel

    Around the U.S., about 90,000 tons of nuclear waste is stored at over 100 sites in 39 states, in a range of different structures and containers. For decades, the nation has been trying to send it all to one secure location. Perhaps there will be a temporary site whose location passes muster with the Supreme Court. But in the meantime, the waste will stay where it is.