A New Baseline to Prevent a Nuclear Iran

America’s longstanding policy to prevent a nuclear Iran is no clearer today than when it began decades ago. President Donald Trump’s pledge to secure Iran’s “nuclear dust”—highly enriched uranium (HEU) at Isfahan—and his threats to strike its underground clandestine “Pickaxe” facility, are just the most recent examples of the United States focusing on a select few sites while failing to take full account of Iran’s sprawling and much-concealed nuclear enterprise. Whether through diplomacy, military action, or both, the United States needs a far more comprehensive and aggressive approach when it comes to inventorying, neutralizing, and monitoring Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Designing a diplomatic agreement that limits Iran to a genuinely peaceful and safeguarded nuclear program, which both sides proclaim as their intent, first requires a level of clarity and comprehensiveness that Tehran has never provided, nor Washington ever demanded. Capturing this whole picture of Iran’s nuclear program—the entire what, when, and where of its enrichment and weaponization work—will be exceedingly difficult but, for that exact reason, incredibly urgent and overdue. Creating an entirely new, all-inclusive baseline for Iran’s program must be the prerequisite, not the outcome, of any diplomatic solution. For any deal, getting IAEA inspectors into Iran is at least as important as getting the HEU out. All the same, such a settlement seems highly unlikely. Tehran insists that inspectors will never get access to much of this information, and it outright rejects the premise that it has ever pursued a nuclear weapon.

The most viable military alternative to diplomacy would combine the unique capabilities and reach of U.S. firepower with Israel’s much broader approach of targeting Iran’s uranium and plutonium fuel cycles, weaponization-related sites, and relevant scientific and military personnel. Hitting Pickaxe, as the president recently threatened, is not a silver bullet. Successful strikes there could eliminate, severely degrade, and/or limit access to Iran’s most likely hub for reconstituting enrichment-related activities, manufacturing centrifuges, storing nuclear material, and possibly working on a nuclear explosive device. Such operations also would need to target the logistical networks supporting Pickaxe, including any known or suspected sources for materials used at the site, as well as the electrical and transportation grids in which the facility is enmeshed. And while certainly impactful, by themselves these actions would not clarify or resolve other concerns about Iran’s enrichment infrastructure, most notably: the whereabouts of its uranium stockpiles writ large, the status of its new Isfahan enrichment plant, or the sources for its reported efforts—even after Midnight Hammer and Epic Fury—to relocate centrifuges to Pickaxe.

In this light, further strikes could reduce but not resolve the mass of uncertainty that inhibits a new baseline understanding of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Accordingly, military action would need to be paired with rigorous efforts to monitor, detect, and preempt Iran’s inevitable efforts to reconstitute its program and remove it even further from prying eyes. Israel’s peerless intelligence capabilities could provide crucial support here.

Vague talk of “high-level inspections” aside, however, American officials do not explain how they would achieve the clarity needed for a final deal, assure compliance with that deal, or assess with meaningful confidence that kinetic operations have closed Iran’s path to the ultimate weapon. They must bring to light the dark places where so much of this work is hidden, or provide much clearer proof that military action has ruined that work.