Netanyahu Lays Groundwork for Additional Strikes on Iran: ‘We Didn’t Deal With The Enriched Uranium’

By Chris Menahan – Information Liberation

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu laid the groundwork for additional strikes on Iran in an interview with Fox Business on Wednesday, saying “the one thing that we didn’t deal with” is Iran’s stockpiles of enriched uranium.

“The one thing that we didn’t deal with, and we know that we didn’t deal with, was the enriched uranium,” Netanyahu told Maria Bartiromo.

“What [we] did once, we can do twice, and thrice,” he said, threatening Iran with further strikes.

 

An anonymous “senior Israeli official” further underlined Netanyahu’s comments (which were largely ignored) in a statement to the media on Wednesday.

From The New York Times, “Some of Iran’s Enriched Uranium Survived Attacks, Israeli Official Says”:

Israel has concluded that some of Iran’s underground stockpile of near-bomb-grade enriched uranium survived American and Israeli attacks last month and may be accessible to Iranian nuclear engineers, according to a senior Israeli official.

The senior official also said that Israel had begun moving toward military action against Iran late last year after seeing what the official described as a race to build a bomb as part of a secret Iranian project. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information.

The official said Israeli intelligence picked up the nuclear weapons activity soon after the Israeli Air Force killed Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader of Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia in Lebanon. That observation prompted the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to prepare for an attack with or without U.S. help.

[…] In a briefing for reporters on Wednesday evening, the senior Israeli official did not express concern about the assessment that some of the stockpile of 60 percent enriched uranium, stored in casks, had survived the attack. The official, and other Israelis with access to the country’s intelligence findings, said any attempts by Iran to recover it would almost certainly be detected — and there would be time to attack the facilities again.

Western intelligence officials confirmed the Israeli assessment, saying that they believed much of the stockpile was buried under rubble in Iran’s nuclear laboratory at Isfahan and potentially other sites. One of the officials concurred that the United States or Israel would know if the Iranians tried to retrieve the enriched uranium. Such a move, the official said, would surely invite a renewed Israeli bombing attack.

Israel, the United States and now a growing number of outside experts agree that all of Iran’s working centrifuges at Natanz and Fordo — about 18,000 machines, which spin at supersonic speeds — were damaged or destroyed, probably beyond repair. The question they are now examining is how long it would take the Iranians to rebuild some or all of that capability, especially after the top scientists in their nuclear program were targeted and killed.

[…] The senior Israeli official contends that [no enriched uranium stockpiles were] moved [before the US’ strikes]. The storage site at Isfahan, the official said, was too deep for even the most powerful American weapons to destroy.

But the U.S. attack on Isfahan did close off many entrances, and appears to have wiped out laboratories that convert enriched uranium into a form that could be used in a weapon, and that would then fashion it into a metal that could be shaped into a missile warhead.

[…] But any effort to dig the fuel out from the rubble of Isfahan may be hard to hide from satellite surveillance. The Israeli official said he believed some additional stockpiles are still at Fordo and Natanz, the two major enrichment sites where the fuel is produced. Both were struck by the bunker-busting bombs, and Israel has assessed that recovering those supplies would be too difficult.

There’s no reason these comments should be off the record other than because making them vocally in public could distract the rubes from Netanyahu nominating Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize (while he’s actively planning and plotting to expand the war).

The Trump administration has repeatedly insisted Iran’s facilities were all destroyed, perhaps as an out to try to avoid participating in further strikes and a wider war, but Israel is preparing to drag us right back in. Seeing as how Trump went along with this first round of strikes, odds are he’s going to go along with the second and the third round as well.

Perhaps Trump can collect his Nobel while the bombs are flying.