To the surprise of almost no one, all sides declared victory as they formally accepted Donald Trump’s announcement of a ceasefire on Tuesday morning, but the long-term winners – if any – and losers will take some time to emerge.
By midday in the Middle East, the dust had not even settled. More than two hours after the ceasefire was supposed to have started, at 05:00 GMT, Israel said it had intercepted at least two missiles coming from Iran heading for the north of the country. Iran denied having launched anything, but Israel vowed devastating retaliation.
Waking up to the news, a furious Trump blamed both sides but reserved particular wrath for Israel, telling it to bring its pilots home and warning that if they dropped their bombs, it would be a “major violation”.
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was reported to be trying to calm the US president down. It is politically damaging for him to be on the wrong side of Trump, and the pressure on him will be intense to return to compliance with the ceasefire.
For its part, Iran had couched the truce as something it had “imposed on the enemy”, an instantly suspect appraisal, given the very small number of its missiles that pierced its enemies’ defensive shield and the very limited damage it managed to inflict.
Even if Trump manages to get the ceasefire back on the rails, his bold claim overnight to have secured an enduring peace has been disproved with humiliating speed.
“I think the ceasefire is unlimited. It’s going to go for ever,” Trump told NBC News on Monday night. He had predicted that Israel and Iran would never “be shooting at each other again”.
The president’s other sweeping assessment, that Iran’s nuclear programme had been “obliterated”, never to be rebuilt, has been echoed by Netanyahu, albeit a little less emphatically.
A satellite image showing damage caused by US strikes on Iran’s Fordow nuclear site
A satellite image showing damage caused by US strikes on Iran’s Fordow nuclear site
Acknowledging the ceasefire, Netanyahu’s office issued a statement declaring it had removed “a double existential threat, on both the nuclear issue and regarding ballistic missiles”.
There is no question that the Israeli and US bombers achieved a huge amount of demolition work. Satellite imagery has circulated showing Iranian nuclear sites in ruins, and craters in the ground where underground facilities are presumed to be located.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has confirmed significant damage to above-ground and subterranean chambers at Iran’s primary uranium enrichment plant in Natanz, and at the better protected plant in Fordow, which had been built into a mountain. The IAEA’s director general, Rafael Grossi, pointed out that even if US bunker-busting bombs did not penetrate as far as the enrichment halls, they are expected to have caused “very significant damage” given the “the extreme vibration-sensitive nature of centrifuges”.
A number of other facilities in a sprawling nuclear complex in Isfahan have also been left in ruins, and others around the country have been severely damaged.
Grossi made clear, however, that the IAEA could no longer account for Iran’s stockpile of 400kg of uranium enriched to 60% purity. This highly-enriched uranium (HEU) is one the crown jewels of the Iranian nuclear programme. If further enriched to 90%, it would be enough for about 10 warheads.
Before Israel’s surprise attack, the IAEA had the material under remote surveillance in a storage site deep under the Isfahan complex. Since the attack, the agency has lost track of it.
As the HEU can be stored and transported in containers the size of scuba tanks, they can easily be moved around the country in nondescript passenger cars.
Iranian officials publicly suggested that the HEU hoard had been moved before the country came under attack.
A satellite image showing damage caused by US strikes on Iran’s Natanz nuclear site
A satellite image showing damage caused by US strikes on Iran’s Natanz nuclear site
The US vice-president, JD Vance, admitted Washington did not know where the HEU was, promising ABC’s This Week programme “we are going to work in the coming weeks to ensure that we do something with that fuel”.
“That’s one of the things that we’re going to have conversations with the Iranians about,” he said.
Ian Stewart, the executive director of the Washington office of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS), wrote on Bluesky: “There are 10 nuclear weapons’ worth of material (60% HEU) out of control and the IAEA doesn’t know where it is. It should be the major concern.”
James Acton, the co-director of the nuclear policy programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said: “It’s difficult to overstate what a big deal this is … this war could prove a disaster for nonproliferation.
“Let me put it this way. If a nuclear deal had allowed Iran to keep several bombs worth of HIGHLY ENRICHED URANIUM out of IAEA safeguards, we’d say (correctly) that was a really bad deal,” he wrote on X. “Yet, that’s the outcome of military force.”
Nuclear experts said that Iran could turn its 60% HEU stock into weapons-grade material relatively easily. Since Trump walked out of a multilateral nuclear deal in 2018, the IAEA has not been able to account for all Iran’s centrifuge components.
The final stage of enrichment could be performed at a second site in Natanz which Iran has been excavating under a mountain for some years, and which has not been bombed, or it could be done at some anonymous industrial building.
Jeffrey Lewis, a CNS professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, said that if Iran did decide to make a dash for a bomb it would take about five months to make enough fissile material for a small nuclear arsenal.
US intelligence agencies and the IAEA agree that before the Israeli attack, there was no sign that the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had ordered the construction of a warhead. The risk posed by the Israeli and US bombing campaign is that it could now change his mind, finally persuading him that only a nuclear weapon can deter Iran’s enemies.
If that decision were made, the other parts of the jigsaw could fall into a place. Construction of a workable nuclear warhead would probably take several months too, but it could be done in a small space. Israel has killed about 15 Iranian nuclear scientists, but after more than a quarter of a century the country’s reservoir of nuclear knowhow is likely to be far deeper. About a half of Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal, estimated at about 2,500 warheads, is unaccounted for.
The former US secretary of state Antony Blinken said the Biden administration had conducted simulations of an attack on Iran’s nuclear programme, but the war games had served to underline the danger that the regime would disperse and hide its assets, and then decide to “sprint toward a bomb”.
“Thus, Mr Trump’s strike has risked precipitating what we want to prevent,” he wrote in the New York Times.
Israel and the US may be counting on their powerful intelligence capabilities and military dominance to destroy any nuclear work Iran tries to reconstitute, with repeated attacks in the years to come. But that is a much more violent and risky form of nonproliferation than a deal such as the one agreed under Barack Obama’s presidency, which was verified and monitored by the IAEA.
There would be greater certainty if the current Iranian government were to be replaced by a more compliant alternative aligned with the west. Regime change was an increasingly overt war aim expressed by Trump and Netanyahu’s government over the course of the war. So far, the Iranian theocratic establishment is bloodied, but shows no signs of internal fractures.
It is detested by much of the population, but it retains the monopoly of violence that has kept it in power so far. For now at least, Iranian popular outrage at being bombed overshadows their disgust for their rulers. In fact, those who rallied to the cry of resistance of “Woman, life, freedom” in recent years may be among the short-term losers.
Over time, the regime’s impotence in the face of external assault may prove to be a fatal crack in the whole edifice, but there is no sign of that so far.
“We ought to judge this strike by its real purpose, not the legal camouflage of pre-emptive self-defense,” Lewis said on X. “If the strike leaves the current regime, or something very much like it, in power with a nuclear option then it will have been a strategic failure.”
