Iran working to assess damage at Fordow nuclear site, satellite images reveal

Analysts say they are assessing the damage wreaked by the American bunker-busting bombs more than initiating repairs as yet.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

New satellite photos show Iranians digging at the Fordow nuclear site, with analysts saying they are assessing the damage wreaked by the American attack of June 22 with bunker-busting bombs.

High-resolution imagery provided by Maxar Technologies showed excavators and other heavy machinery working around a ventilation shaft and crater in the mountain that had protected the uranium enrichment facility built deep underneath it.

“It appears that they’re evaluating the hole, evaluating how deep it went,” Joseph Bermudez, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told The New York Times on Monday.

After the airstrike, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine said that most of the bombs at Fordow “were tasked to enter the main shaft, move down into the complex at greater than 1,000 feet per second, and explode in the mission space.”

The images seemed to reveal a “process of investigating what happened” rather than an initiation of any serious reconstruction effort, Bermudez added.

David Albright, the founder of the Institute for Science and International Security, who has studied secret nuclear weapons efforts in Iran for decades and warned in October that the Islamic Republic was “on the cusp” of building such weapons, largely agreed with the assessment.

The Iranian activity, he said, “may include backfilling the craters, as well as conducting engineering damage assessments and likely radiological sampling. The craters above the main shafts remain open.”

Israel bombed access roads leading to Fordow a day after the American strike, perhaps to slow down repair efforts or prevent attempts to smuggle out any highly enriched uranium that could still be hidden at the site, but in a post on X, Albright said the Iranians had fixed the damage on the main access road within a few days.

“However,” he added, “there are yet no indications of any efforts to reopen any of the tunnel entrances.”

Immediately upon completion of the air force mission, U.S. President Donald Trump declared that the airstrike had been an unqualified success and “obliterated” the targeted sites, which included both Fordow and another key enrichment site at Natanz.

American ships simultaneously launched over a dozen Tomahawk missiles at the nuclear facility at Isfahan, which he said had also wreaked complete destruction there.

Three days later, on June 25, CIA Director John Ratcliffe said that his agency “can confirm that a body of credible evidence indicates Iran’s Nuclear Program has been severely damaged by the recent, targeted strikes.”

It would take “years,” he added, for the nuclear sites to be rebuilt.

Last Sunday, Caine was more cautious in his evaluation, telling reporters that while the military was sure that the three nuclear sites had “sustained extremely severe damage and destruction,” it would take time to measure the exact amount of damage caused.

A final “battle damage assessment” by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency could take weeks to complete, CNN reported on June 25.