Iran’s Missing Uranium Stockpile Is a Big Problem for Trump

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.

Saturday night’s airstrikes on Iran, though tactically very impressive, seem to have fallen short strategically—way short of what President Donald Trump and his top aides claimed shortly afterward.

The big questions that many raised at the time were How effective was the attack (did it destroy Iran’s nuclear program)? and How will the Iranians respond (will they fold or retaliate)?

The answers, which upon scrutiny appeared uncertain even then, now seem—less than 48 hours later—more discouraging still. Much of Iran’s enriched uranium might not have been struck by the massive bunker-busting bombs after all. And early Monday afternoon, Iran fired several missiles at the U.S. air base in Qatar, America’s largest military facility in the Middle East. If Trump makes good on his warning, he is likely to launch another strike on Iran, thus deepening U.S. involvement in the war.

Most of the B-2 bombers’ supersized bunker busters fired in Trump’s attack Saturday night—12 of the 14 dropped by the seven planes—were aimed at the Fordo uranium enrichment facility, which is buried at least 300 feet inside a mountain. Satellite data indicates that the bombs hit their target, some of them smashing through the site’s ventilation shafts. But there is doubt whether even a dozen of the bombs penetrated all the way down to destroy the site. On an even more daunting note, the New York Times quoted senior Israeli officials as saying Iran might have removed much of the highly enriched uranium before the attack, in anticipation of its possibility.

Officials now admit that the location of the uranium is not known. How Israeli or U.S. forces will go about finding it is unclear.

As for how Iran would react to the attack, Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had tried to ward off large-scale retaliation, saying that this had been a one-off measure, that Trump wanted to bring the war to a swift end, and that the only goal of the attack was thwarting Iran’s nuclear ambitions, not “regime change.”

Then, on Sunday, Trump posted this on social media:

It’s not politically correct to use the term, “Regime Change,” but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!

Was Trump just trying to be clever, or did this reflect his true goals? (It certainly reflects Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s.) Given the president’s shifts and feints the past couple of weeks, who can say? Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, already had little reason to trust Trump’s appeals to come back to the bargaining table for a negotiated settlement of the war. But to the extent he might have been considering the option, as an alternative to further destruction and despair, he has now likely dismissed the notion out of hand. If Trump’s words are to be taken seriously in this one instance, Khamenei must see that he and the other top mullahs have nothing left to lose. One might have predicted that the chance of Iranian retaliation—against U.S. bases as well as Israel—had measurably increased. And now Iran is doing just that.

The New York Times reported that Iran gave advance notice of the attack in an attempt to minimize casualties while making a show of force.

Still, the nation’s refusal to back down entirely makes the biggest mystery of the U.S. attack—the location of Iran’s enriched-uranium stockpile—a still more urgent matter. American and Israeli officials have told reporters that, before the attack, satellite imagery showed 16 cargo trucks pulled up in front of Fordo.

A question that congressional committees should ask in the coming days is whether Trump was told about the trucks. (Fordo is under constant surveillance, so these vehicles would have been observed almost in real time.) It could be that his intelligence chiefs, or even some of the analysts down in the agencies, drew ambiguous conclusions: Maybe the trucks were there to remove some highly enriched uranium or to evacuate personnel or to do maintenance. In that case, they might have decided—knowing that Trump doesn’t like bad news—to play down the interpretation that would have made it seem that an attack would be too late.

Or maybe Trump himself dismissed that view of things. He does have a tendency to let his gut decide such matters. (When a reporter told him that Tulsi Gabbard, his director of national intelligence, testified not long ago that Khamenei had not decided to pursue a nuclear arsenal, Trump said she was “wrong.” Since then, Gabbard has reversed her position and agreed with the boss, without citing any reason for the shift.)

Rafael Mariano Grossi, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which had until recently inspected Iran’s nuclear sites, told the New York Times that at the very least, the Iranian trucks might have been removing the uranium from Fordo. Trump should have been made aware of that fact, and if he was, it should have made him think twice about whether the bunker-buster bombs could accomplish their mission, even if they cratered the mountain. Certainly, Trump, Vance, and Hegseth should have refrained from claiming that the operation had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear ambitions. (Kudos to Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for noting, at the same Sunday-morning news conference at which the secretary of defense made the grand claim, that the goal of the attack was to “severely degrade” Iran’s nuclear capability and that it was “way too early to comment” on how much damage the bombs had inflicted.)

America’s military officers behaved with professionalism—out in the field, in the skies, and in the Pentagon. Their political superiors, including the commander in chief and the secretary of defense, did not. Before the attack, they minimized or ignored intelligence that might have compelled others to alter or perhaps postpone the attack until more facts were known. After the attack, they hyped expectations; even if their assessments had turned out to be accurate, it was, as Caine noted, way too early to make them. And their boosterism, congratulating the pilots, crews, Trump, and God in the same breath, may backfire in the end: It may put Americans and our allies in a riskier position than if they’d simply, for the moment, stayed quiet.

Sign up for Slate's evening newsletter.