Israeli Official: Iran Enrichment Facilities ‘Gone’, There’s Some Uranium, Nuke Capability ‘Off the Table’ for ‘Many Years’
On Monday’s broadcast of Fox News Radio’s “Guy Benson Show,” Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Ambassador Ron Dermer stated that Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities “are gone” but there is some uranium that they can’t convert into a weapon that is still there, though it is “largely” at two sites where it’s buried or “blocked” and a deal must require a downgrading of this uranium and moving it out of Iran, but their nuclear capability is “off the table, for many, many years.”
Dermer said that President Donald Trump made “a decision to actually use this massive ordinance penetrator to take out the underground enrichment facility at Fordow, to finish the job — we may have done 85% or 90% of the job in Natanz — but to make sure it was 120% of that job. And then he also authorized the firing of cruise missiles to a third site, which wasn’t an enrichment site, but it did store a lot of the enriched nuclear material.”
He continued, “It’s important for your listeners to understand, while the enrichment facilities have been destroyed, the enriched nuclear material, the enriched uranium is still in Iran. We believe that it is largely in two sites…Fordow, and the other one is at Isfahan. And they have about nine bombs worth of 60% enriched uranium, they probably have a couple of bombs worth of 20% enriched uranium, and another seven or eight bombs worth of the lowest level of enriched uranium. And that’s not based on intelligence assessments, that’s — you can see that in IAEA reports, they admit that that’s what they have. So, they have this highly-enriched uranium, and one of the things that your listeners should be focused on now is what happens to that enriched material? Because, right now, it’s under rubble of Fordow and it’s blocked in Isfahan, at one of these sites, and it’s important to the United States, to Israel, to the whole world, to not allow them to take that enriched material out and then put it in all these places around Iran. Now, they can’t enrich it — or it would be very hard for them to enrich it, because the enrichment facilities are gone. They can’t convert it into a weapon, but you still don’t want 60% highly-enriched uranium floating around in a country like Iran, because you don’t want its government to get its hands on it, but you don’t want anyone else to get their hands on it, either.”
He added that any deal needs to get this uranium out of Iran and “downblend” it.
Dermer added that Trump “has basically taken the nuclear capability off the table, for many, many years.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
