Tehran Committed to Rebuilding Nuclear Program Despite Heavy Damage, Experts Tell JNS

The Iranian nuclear program has not recovered from the devastating blows it absorbed during successive military campaigns by Israel and the United States. Yet, intelligence assessments indicate that Tehran remains deeply committed to clandestinely reconstituting its nuclear capabilities in the long term.

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Jonathan Ruhe, Fellow for American Strategy at the Washington-based Jewish Institute for National Security of America, told JNS that Iran has spent years preparing Pickaxe Mountain “as its main backup option for enrichment-related activities, long before Israel-U.S. airstrikes on Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan. Recent efforts to fortify the site only reinforce these concerns.”

Ruhe emphasized that Western defense planners must evaluate Tehran’s actions through the lens of decades-long patterns of deception.

“American and Israeli planners should assume Iran intends to reconstitute key activities clandestinely, including centrifuge manufacturing and storage, as well as uranium conversion, enrichment, stockpiling and metallurgy,” Ruhe argued. “This would be entirely in keeping with three decades of Iranian behavior, where its nuclear program always has covert subterranean dimensions.”

Notably, he added, International Atomic Energy Agency director Rafael Grossi has consistently said that his inspectors “cannot fully account for Iran’s uranium stockpiles, centrifuges, and related capabilities,” even before the two Iran wars.

“Two things are equally plausible right now. On one hand, Iran’s nuclear program has been set back significantly in three rounds of conflict since October 2024, and it likely cannot restore or salvage enrichment sites that were severely damaged in those conflicts,” Ruhe assessed. “But to borrow President Trump’s terms, the program has not been ‘obliterated,’ and securing the ‘nuclear dust’ at Isfahan does not solve this larger problem. Iran has spent decades building this program to survive military attacks.

“The real question is not, ‘Can Iran rebuild?’ but rather, ‘How quickly?’ and ‘Can we detect it in time?’” said Ruhe.

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