Centrifuges at the Fordo uranium enrichment plant in Iran are “no longer operational” after the US attacked the facility with bunker-busting bombs, Rafael Grossi, the head of the UN nuclear watchdog, said on French radio on Thursday.
Inspectors from the watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, have been unable to gain access to the nuclear sites since the strikes. Grossi told Radio France Internationale in an interview that while evaluating the damage from the strikes using satellite images alone is difficult, given the power of the bombs dropped on Fordo and the technical characteristics of the plant “we already know that these centrifuges are no longer operational”.
Centrifuges, which are spinning machines used to enrich uranium, require a high-degree of precision and are vulnerable to intense vibrations, he said. “There was no escaping significant physical damage,” Grossi added. “So we can come to a fairly accurate technical conclusion.”
He said, however, that it would be “too much” to assert that Iran’s nuclear programme had been “wiped out” after the Israeli and American bombing campaign. Grossi noted that not all of Iran’s nuclear sites had been struck, and said Iranian officials had told him that they would take “protective measures” for the uranium they had already enriched.
Still, he added, the programme has suffered “enormous damage”. The comments from Grossi, the director general of the IAEA, came amid questions over the effectiveness of the US strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites.
New York Times News Service