The Current - Where does Iran’s nuclear program stand now?

Episode Date: June 26, 2025

A fragile ceasefire is in place between Israel and Iran — but where does this leave Iran’s nuclear program? U.S. President Donald Trump is confident the program is destroyed but some intelligence reports suggest only setbacks. We speak with nuclear policy expert James Acton about what happens now.

There are two kinds of Canadians. Those who feel something when they hear this music. And those who've been missing out so far. I'm Chris Howden. And I'm Nile Coxall. We are the co-hosts of As It Happens. And every day we speak with people at the center of the day's most hard hitting, heartbreaking, and sometimes hilarious news stories.

Also, we have puns. Here Why As It Happens is one of Canada's longest running and most beloved shows. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is the current podcast. A fragile ceasefire is holding between Iran and Israel, but debate over the effectiveness of US

strikes on Iran's nuclear sites is raging. US President Donald Trump says that Iran's nuclear sites were completely destroyed. But some US media, with CNN being the first, are reporting that a leaked early US intelligence assessment says the Iranian nuclear program may only have been set back by a few months. The Trump administration hit back with the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, saying the sites were indeed severely damaged and that the leaked report was based on early assessments that were already out of date. US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spoke at a press conference at the NATO meeting yesterday. Somebody, somewhere is trying to leak something to say, oh, with low confidence, we think

maybe it's moderate. Those that dropped the bombs precisely in the right place know exactly what happened when that exploded. And you know who else knows? Iran. That's why they came to the table right away, because their nuclear capabilities have been set back beyond what they thought were possible because of the courage of a commander in chief who led our troops, despite what the fake news wants to say.

James Acton is co-director of the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Good morning, James. Good morning. Wow. We are now into a war of words over how badly Iran's nuclear program was damaged. How much do we actually know so far? I think a pretty consistent picture is emerging. If the question you ask is how long would it take Iran to rebuild a nuclear program

of its former size, the answer is many years. And if you look at that as the question, then it's certainly the case that Iran's program has been set back very significantly. But I don't think that's the right question. I think the right question is how long would it take Iran to get the bomb? And it wouldn't need to build back a massive program in order to acquire a nuclear weapon. And that's something that it could do according to the Defense Intelligence Agency for the leaked reporting in the Times. That's something it could do in nine months, maybe a year. So, as I said, the issue, the disagreement

is based on what question people are asking, not what the answers to those questions are. That's very interesting. But before we get to that, can you help us understand what kind of tools people are using to try to assess the damage? So it's very difficult. You can use satellite imagery to detect holes in the rock where the United States attacked the Fordow enrichment plant, the Natanz enrichment plant. But you can't look into those holes to see what the damage is. The holes are much too small for that.

So satellite imagery, which is typically a key tool for so-called battle damage assessment, is not very useful for underground facilities. So then you're looking at other tools of espionage. You're looking at things like signals intelligence, conceivably human intelligence. But this kind of battle damage assessment for their facilities is very difficult. But as I said, you know, the key issue here is actually not what the United States destroyed. It's what we didn't target and we didn't destroy. And that leads to the question about what we knew before.

I mean, the justification for this war was the idea that Iran was on the verge of having nuclear weapons. And it's something that Tulsi Gabbard, Trump's director of national intelligence, had said was not the case back in March. So what do we make of the change from the Trump administration that they were in fact on the verge of building a bomb? So let's distinguish here between the time it would take Iran to build a nuclear weapon

if it made the decision to do so and whether it had actually made the political decision to do so. If you look at the question over timelines, you could argue Iran was very close to a nuclear weapon. There's different, by all the reporting we've had coming out, there's disagreement within that within the US government, between the US and the Israelis. But your one is still looking at months, if not a year or less. It wouldn't take Iran that long to build a nuclear weapon.

But the United States had already assessed for a long time that Iran had not made the political decision to do so. So, unquestionably, I think part of it is Trump saw the airstrikes appearing to be very effective on the news. He wanted a piece of it. He cut his own intelligence community loose. My big concern now is that having attacked Iran, Iran's incentives to acquire nuclear weapons now go up, even if their capability to do so hasn't been eroded that significantly. Tell me about that. Why would that be the consequence? OK, so the United States has attacked, as Israel, a number of big fixed facilities that

we know about. I have no doubt that, or I don't want to say that too strongly, I think it's very likely that those big fixed facilities have been rendered inoperable. In that sense, grievous damage was done. However, Iran also has highly enriched uranium, which I think has very likely survived the war, even if its exact location is unknown. It has a huge stockpile of centrifuge components, which not even the Israelis are claiming they hit.

And it has very roughly probably a thousand skilled scientists and technicians. When you put all of that together, this is the stuff that the United States and Israel didn't hit and didn't destroy. When you put that triad together of highly enriched uranium, of centrifuge components and expertise, I think Iran has quite a lot of capability.

MODERATOR James, just on that point about the enriched uranium, is it your belief that it was indeed moved before the US attack? So I don't know whether it was moved, but here's the key point. The tunnels where it was previously stored at Isfahan were too deep to be destroyed by US bunker busters. And indeed, while the United States attacked the entrances to these tunnels, it didn't attack the tunnels themselves.

So if Iran didn't move it, then it almost certainly survived the attack. And if Iran did move it, then it may have survived the attack just by being somewhere else by being mobile. So we don't know where that highly enriched uranium is, but I think there's pretty strong reasons to suppose that it survived the attack. I want to play a little bit of the US Defense Secretary again, Pete Hegseth, speaking back on Monday, which seems a long time ago now, about the US military action. Many presidents have dreamed of delivering the final blow to Iran's nuclear program,

and none could Until President Trump. The operation President Trump planned was bold and it was brilliant. Showing the world that American deterrence is back. When this president speaks, the world should listen. So what do you think about that idea that American deterrence is back? Well, let's be clear, attacking another country, even if you think it's fully justified, which I don't, is not deterrence. Deterrence is where you threaten to do something and the other country doesn't do it because it's worried that you're going to carry out that threat. If you actually attack another country, that's not deterrence, that's military action. And, you know, I, for me, the threat of military action was always much

better leverage to try to force Iran to negotiate than was the likely effects of military action. Yeah. I think that in a situation in which the Iranians were negotiating, we don't know whether that negotiation would have led to fruition. We don't know whether, frankly, either side was negotiating in good faith, but I think it would have been much wiser to have continued negotiations than to actually go to military action, which has not in any sense, even if you take the most optimistic statements coming out, been the final blow against Iran's nuclear program.

I want to ask you about a development this morning. Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made his first public statement since the end of the war on AXE and also on Iranian state television. He says Iran achieved victory, it broke through Israel's multilayered defense and it was a considerable achievement in quotes that Iran could potentially reach major US bases. What do you make of him coming out now and saying that? Well, look, I think your next guest is much more expert on Iranian domestic politics than I am.

But I would just say firstly that having there's been lots of rumors and suspicion that, you know, stemming from the fact he hasn't been seen or heard from publicly. So I think he had to fill the need to put out a statement. And it's obviously kind of very heavily propaganda. You know, putting the nuclear program aside, Israel's strikes have done enormous damage to Iran's conventional military capabilities. So, you know, I would take a lot of that statement with a huge grain of salt. Just one further question.

Just got a minute left. The IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Watchdog, is in the middle of this, of course, but Iran is now saying that they want to suspend all monitoring. How would that affect the future? In a very serious way. You know, the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors can weigh cylinders of highly enriched uranium, they can measure how much uranium is in them, they can provide the assurance that Iran has not diverted some of its nuclear materials to building nuclear weapons. Without the IAEA on the ground physically measuring Iran's nuclear program, it's going to be very, very hard to know

measuring Iran's nuclear program. It's going to be very, very hard to know whether the Iranians are trying to build a bomb. And if they aren't, for them to convince us they're not, I think this is a very, very deleterious development for international security. Indeed. Well, we feel very much in the middle of this still. Thank you so much, James. Thanks so much for having me. James Acton is co-director of the nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. There are two kinds of Canadians. Those who feel something when they hear this music. And those who've been missing out so far. I'm Chris Howden. And I'm Niel Kuxall. We are the co-hosts of As It Happens and every day we speak with people at the center of the day's most hard-hitting

Heartbreaking and sometimes hilarious news stories. Also, we have puns here Why as it happens is one of Canada's longest running in most beloved shows. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts Israel's war with Iran over the past two weeks is the latest dramatic shift in the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East Iran over the past two weeks is the latest dramatic shift in the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East. Paul Salem is a senior fellow and former president at the Middle East Institute and he's based in Beirut. Good morning. Good morning, Susan. Paul, how did this war between Israel and Iran affect the dynamics of this volatile region?

Well, the prelude to this war with Iran was what happened on October 7 and the aftermath of Israeli actions since then. In a sense, before October 7, Iran and its proxy allies around the region were kind of in a situation of kind of coexistence and mutual deterrence between Iran and its proxies on one end and Israel on the other. The acts of October 7, both from Hamas in the Gaza Strip and from Hezbollah in Lebanon, broke that status quo. The reaction of the Israeli government, of Prime Minister Netanyahu, was to then try

to alter the entire chessboard, obviously going after Hamas, devastating Gaza in a major way, but strategically and very importantly, decapitating Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hezbollah in Lebanon was Iran's main deterrent force against Israel in the United States. It was kind of the Iranian aircraft carrier parked in northern Israel. And Iran's missile system was the second line of defense. So, Israel had taken out the first line of defense and over the last 12 days, it felt able to attack the Iranian mainland directly. Yes, it suffered some losses from Iranian missiles, but effectively it and the US have

a free range of Iranian skies. They did what they did in terms of taking out leaders and so on. I just want to get on to what has happened with Benjamin Netanyahu's reputation now. He's claiming an historic victory. How much did he achieve in this war? Well, I mean a couple of things. One is a blow of some size to the nuclear program. Obviously, as James was mentioning the guest before me, they're still trying to assess how big the blow was to the nuclear program. But this is the first attack on Iran's nuclear program since this whole issue arose almost 30 years ago. So it is a major step. Netanyahu has also defeated Iran's anti-aircraft.

He has free range of Iranian skies. So for Israel and Israelis, this is a major achievement. The second achievement is he got a US president to bomb Iran. And Netanyahu has been trying to get numerous US presidents to do that, and he finally, in a sense, cornered Donald Trump to do it, and that will be seen as a major victory for him as well. And how has this elevated his status inside Israel? Obviously, there's been a lot of controversy and criticism of his leadership since the Hamas attack on Israel. R. Yeah, in a way, I think those two issues are, in a practical sense, separate. There's no doubt

that in terms of his strategic stature and his historic sort of achievements, defeating Hezbollah and launching a major attack, bringing in the US to attack Iran that Israel considers its major regional historic enemy. All of those are major achievements. But Netanyahu's fate is determined by a very fickle and unstable Israeli political system and Israeli knesset, elections when they are cold, and he's still at least, you know, I haven't seen polls since the US strike, but he is not a popular figure even though he's achieved these major strategic breakthroughs. So I'm not sure that

he's going to be able to translate these victories into necessarily a long-term political future. Yes, we understand there are some polls showing that his popularity has risen in the last week. But turning to the peace agreement between Israel and Iran, how likely is it that there will be a negotiated peace deal between these two players? I mean, what we have is a very shaky ceasefire between Israel and Iran. Any potential negotiation would be between Iran and the United States. I think there will be negotiations between Iran and the United States, but I don't think they'll get anywhere. So I think we will be pretty much where we are

today. From the Israeli point of view, they intervened at the time they did because they do not want a negotiated agreement between Iran and the United States. They don't trust the Iranians, they don't trust any agreement that they might come to, they don't want the U.S. to feel complacent that they might come to. They don't want the US to feel complacent about Iran. They want to drag the US into war. With Iran, they feel war, or Netanyahu at least, let's say, feels war is the only option with Iran, with the Islamic Republic. And you would have to consider that Israel is at war with Iran, even though they've accepted a temporary ceasefire, partly because they need to replenish their anti-missile defense systems, which were running low. Of course, we're hearing publicly many, many statements, including from the US, that this

war is over. You've just said it's definitely not over. Where does it leave the Iranian regime, which is also today claiming victory? Well, it's no surprise. They're all politicians. They all want to claim victory and spin this. Israel, I would stand by my assessment that Israel is at war with Iran. It wants to continue to prosecute this conflict.

It wants to continue to, on future dates dates press the US to come in on their side when necessary. Obviously they're going to be looking for what's left of the nuclear program. And since it's unlikely to be negotiated away, there will be future strikes to try to take out whatever they find as still surviving from the nuclear program. So I think this is open-ended. The Iranian regime itself, obviously it's going to spin it in a positive sense. They have no other option. But it's very clear that Iran has lost the ability to deter Israel or to deter the US. They've been trying to do that for 40 years. That has all collapsed. They have lost the ability to defend the Iranian homeland.

Israeli and American planes can do whatever they want. Clearly, the Mossad, Israeli intelligence is deeply infiltrated into Iran. So there's a lot of losses on the Iranian side, but on the positive side of the ledger, they're still there. They still have some nuclear program somewhere. They certainly have enough enriched uranium hiding somewhere, as James mentioned, to go for a bomb if they want to. So they have, you know, glass half full, glass half empty situation. We have 30 seconds left. Could you help our listeners understand in a word or two, is the region more volatile or less today? It's been volatile. I mean, it is, I would say, more volatile because I think this war is just at the beginning stages and I think there will be additional attacks on Iran and additional ways that Iran could retaliate. So the region is at war and that

is extremely worrisome. Indeed. Thank you so much, Paul. Thank you, Susan. Paul Sollum is a senior fellow and former president at the Middle East Institute. You've been listening to The Current Podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon.