Cogito Ergo Non Serviam
Where is the Uranium?
Donald Trump likes to say that he does things no other president could do. Largely, that is untrue. Instead, he does things that other presidents would deem to be bad ideas. This is certainly the case in his bombing of Iranian nuclear research sites. Other presidents have had the military capacity to hit these places, but clearly, they chose not to do so. The MAGA crowd will say that only their Fearless Leader has the courage to have done it. This journal takes the view that Mr. Trump was more easily fooled. While his team cheers on the alleged success of the attack, one question that needs to be answered still remains. Where is the 400 kilos of 60% enriched U235?
Preventing the proliferation of nuclear power and weapons has proved easy (relatively speaking) because U235 (the fissile isotope of uranium, meaning the only kind that goes boom) is not easy to enrich or work with. One needs urainium ore, and one must turn that into yellowcake. Then it needs to become uranium hexafloride gas, which goes into a centrifuge for enrichment. One enriched, it needs to be shaped into an actual bomb. It is hard to do this.
However, the engineering problems are not insoluable. Centrifuges are not available at Wal-Mart, but they are easily acquired if one has the cash. Ore can become yellowcake at the minehead using rather common chemicals. All of that is easy to destroy with bombs, but it is also easy to replace.
Not so with the enriched uranium itself. It is the one thing that is not easily replaced. Any strike against a nuclear program has to make the U235 useless. If that does not happen, the attacked program does suffer a setback, but it is not ended. So again, the question is where is the Iranian uranium?
The best cast scenario is that the bombs penetrated the bunkers where they exploded and buried the U235 under a mountain or two of rubble. To borrow a phrase from Norther Irish peace talks, it would put the uranium beyond use. There is no real way of know this has happened without onsite human inspection. Only Iran has that kind of access, so outsiders will never be sure.
A not-as-good scenario is that the bombs hit and destroyed the storage facilities at the site. This certainly would put it beyond use, but it would leave a radioactive hotspot that would endure for millions of years (U235 has a half-life of 703.8 million years). The area would start to look like Chernobyl very soon. Satellites can detect this, so if this happened, the people with access to the satellites probably know if this occurred. That will eventually leak.
The worst-case scenario is that Iran moved the U235 from the attacked sites before the attacks. If this occurred, the Iranians have as much as 400 kg of U235 enriched to 60%. Taking it to 80% and building a nuke is not easy, but it is feaasible to do it in a year or two. It seems that this is what truly happened.
The Telegraph reported,
"Iran has hidden sites housing "hundreds if not thousands" of advanced centrifuges capable of producing weapons-grade uranium, an expert on Iran's nuclear programme said.
The regime also moved much of its highly enriched uranium to a secret location before the US was able to bomb the Islamic republic's three known nuclear facilities, they added.
"It means Tehran could have all the capabilities to build a nuclear bomb, said Sima Shine, an expert on Iran's nuclear programme who has worked within the Israeli military establishment for more than 30 years.
"I'm sure they have a hidden place somewhere with some hundreds, if not thousands of centrifuge[s] and they have material all there in several places all over Iran," Ms Shine told The Telegraph.
She added: "They cannot do anything now, tomorrow, but in the future, they have all the capabilities [to build a bomb]".
Some in the US are saying that Iran did not move anything. The presumption is the US got it all when Mr. Trump hit the 3 sites. That seems too hopeful to be true.
© Copyright 2025 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.
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