Israel HASN

Iran has two known underground nuclear enrichment sites, which Israel attacked against the First day of your assault in Nathanzand another in Fordo. Both sit down southern Tehran in the center of Iran, but Fordo has long been the Iranian nuclear installation of most concerns for international monitors and experts.

Buried in a mountain, Fordo is where many analysts believe that Iran has hidden clandestine efforts to work towards a nuclear weapons capacity. No Israeli strikes have been reported at the Fordo Enrichment Center.

As recently as March, the US National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard said that US intelligence agencies did not believe that Iran was building a nuclear weapon, but Israel’s military stated hours after starting their attack against Iran last week that the information of the United States was outdated, claiming that I will be “running towards a nuclear bomb.”

The spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, Brigade General, Effie Defrin, said Friday that the country had intelligence that indicates that the Iranian regime “has established a secret program, within the framework of which high -ranking nuclear scientists in Iran secretly carried out the experiments required to build nuclear weapons.”

Speaking to journalists at dawn on Tuesday, President Trump seemed to have been influenced. When asked about the evaluation that Gabbard delivered in March, he said: “I don’t care what she said. I think they were very close to having them.”

Iran’s leaders have always denied any interest in building a nuclear weapon, insisting that the program is for civil purposes. But if that is obfuscation, as Israel insists, and the Iranians are close to a capacity of nuclear weapons, more than a decade of analysis of Iran’s nuclear facilities by experts around the world suggests that Fordo would be central to those efforts.

Why is Iran’s nuclear site so worrying?

Two experts told News themezone in 2012, the last time Netanyahu seemed close to attacking Iranian nuclear facilities, which fordo, buried almost 300 feet under a mountain and protected by important aerial defenses, was the most likely place for a hypothetical “rupture” nuclear weapons program.

Fordo is “obviously for the coverage of nuclear weapons, to preserve centrifuging in case of an attack” against other more vulnerable facilities, Mark Fitzpatrick, an expert in Iran’s nuclear program at the International Institute of Strategic Studies based in London, told News themezone in 2012.

Israel attacked the only other nuclear facilities known for housing important uranium enrichment facilities in Iran last week, causing damage to Natanz.

But the progress made in Fordo even at that stage, before the nuclear agreement negotiated by the United States with Iran brought the United Nations inspectors to the country, and since Trump took the United States out of that agreement during his first time, which caused an escalation of Iran’s efforts, has not been verified.

The UN Nuclear Surveillance Agency, the OIEA, declared that Iran does not confuse with its monitoring efforts for the first time in 20 years, only a few hours before Israel attacked. The lack of understanding of Iran’s work in the installation has long been a concern, but those concerns have increased in recent years, since the withdrawal of the United States of the nuclear agreement stimulated Iran to reduce cooperation with international inspectors and increase their enrichment.

At the end of 2023, Manuel Herrera, an expert in non -proliferation of weapons with two different European expert issues, said Fordo remained “One of the main concerns about Iran. “

“Fordo has always been an important concern due to its location and size,” Herrera said during an argument with his expert in Iran William Alberque, of the International Institute of Strategic Studies. We all knew from the beginning that Fordo was a site that aimed to enrich uranium for weapons purposes, due to its location, due to its size, due to its technical capacity. And … that the Iranians have been expanding that site and also expanding the enriched uranium reserve on that site, it should be a concern for us, because, in reality, we do not have much transparency in what is happening there. “

Herrera said that “in contrast to Natanz, which is on land, Fordo is underground, it is an installation that actually has a tunnel structure.”

In addition to its well fortified location and structure, Herrera said that Fordo “is always supposed to be an enrichment plant for military purposes” due to the machinery on the site.

He pointed out that the Iranian regime had boasted in 2019 to install advanced centrifugers “IR-6” in Fordo, capable of enriching uranium at higher purity levels much faster than most of its oldest equipment. At the beginning of 2023, the OIEA said that he had found uranium particles in Fordo enriched to almost 84% purity, which is incredibly close to the 90% purity uranium that would be required for a nuclear weapon.

“This tells us that Iranians are at least experiencing with this type of enriched level of uranium,” Herrera said.

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