This message has been brought to you by the demolition company FA & FO, Inc.
Iran spent decades attempting to build nuclear weapons, which it planned to use for both regime survival and the elimination of Israel. Over that period of time, multiple American administrations attempted to stop Iran's enrichment of uranium and development of WMDs, to little effect. Barack Obama and John Kerry claimed that their Iran Deal had solved the problem, when its only practical effect was to pour money into Iran's use of proxy armies for terrorism.
That, however, led Iran to attack Israel directly in Hamas' October 7 war. That decision had epic FAFO consequences, as Israel quickly eradicated Iran's air defenses and depantsed the IRGC. Donald Trump then decided to end the nuclear threat from Iran in one fell swoop, dropping bunker busters on Iran's nuclear-development facilities in Fordow, Isfhahan, and Natanz. Since that time, Iran has declared its right to continue to enrich uranium, and the IAEA could not verufy whether Iran has continued to do so.
The Iranians finally made that clear yesterday. Trump destroyed their enrichment operations, and his threat to strike any new effort has prevented them from picking up the pieces, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi admitted:
Answering a question from an Associated Press journalist visiting Iran, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi offered the most direct response yet from the Iranian government regarding its nuclear program following Israel and the United States’ bombing of its enrichment sites in June during a 12-day war.
“There is no undeclared nuclear enrichment in Iran. All of our facilities are under the safeguards and monitoring” of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Araghchi said. “There is no enrichment right now because our facilities — our enrichment facilities — have been attacked.”
Why haven't they attempted to restart enrichment? One reason, clearly, is that Iran's facilities for enrichment are no unusable, and likely so are the cascades on which they spent billions of dollars. Much if not all of their stockpiles are either buried or otherwise difficult to retrieve. However, the main disincentives are Donald Trump, B-2 bombers, and GBU-57s:
Mohammad Eslami, the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, also attended the summit and told the gathering that Tehran had been threatened over potentially accessing the bombed enrichment sites. Satellite pictures analyzed by the AP since the attack show that Iran has not done any major work at the sites at Fordo, Isfahan and Natanz.
“Our security situation hasn’t yet changed. If you watch the news, you see that every day we are being threatened with another attack,” Eslami said. “Every day we are told if you touch anything, you’ll be attacked.”
It turns out that the mullahs finally, if belatedly, have learned to take Trump both seriously and literally. After the destruction of their facilities, Trump publicly warned the Iranians days later that any attempt to restart nuclear enrichment would result in even more destruction:
President Trump responds to Iran’s FM at NATO:
— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) June 25, 2025
“The last thing they want to do is enrich anything right now, they want to recover.”
“They’re not going to have a bomb and they’re not going to enrich.” https://t.co/unZWAs8pMu pic.twitter.com/J4pgRZuoTm
As long as Trump remains in the White House, and as long as B-2s carry bunker busters, the Iranians now realize that the US has had enough of diplomacy in dealing with a military threat. They pushed it as long as they could, but their decision to directly enter the war Hamas started was catastrophically stupid for their own security. Like most if not all totalitarian regimes, they value fealty over reality and competence, and their military demonstrates the inevitable outcome.
Stephen Green casts a skeptical eye on Iran's admissions:
Yet there are still caveats.
Did the government quit enriching uranium because its enrichment facilities were either destroyed or rendered unusable/unreachable courtesy of Operation Midnight Hammer? Is Iran still enriching uranium in secret? Has Iran chosen to stop enriching uranium because the regime turned over a new leaf?
The first option strikes me as the most likely, although if the second option turned out to be correct, exactly nobody would be shocked. I only included the third option because I enjoy absurdities even more than I enjoy complete lists of options.
I suspect it's option one as well, but for more than just this admission and the clear destruction of the precision labs necessary to perform these functions. It will take years and hundreds of millions of dollars to reconstruct these facilities, and that would attract attention. However, the war proved repeatedly that both Israel and the US have a constant stream of actionable intelligence from Iran. One other proof of this was the precise targeting not just of the nuclear facilities but also the nuclear scientists Iran used to create and direct them.
So yeah, it's pretty easy to believe that Iran's mullahs learned a lessom from FA & FO, Inc. Ali Khamenei may well wonder whether the next round will include actionalble intelligence on the regime leadership ... starting with himself. The gloves are off now, and the Iranians know it.
