Iran’s Ultra-Deep Nuclear Facility: A New Level of Threat

Could the potential new home of the Mullah's nuclear program be too deep to penetrate?

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

On Monday the Associated Press published a new, alarming report on Iran’s progress in “building a nuclear facility so deep in the earth that it is likely beyond the range of a last-ditch US weapon designed to destroy such sites, according to experts and satellite imagery.” 

The facility is in a mountain near the Natanz nuclear site about 140 miles south of Tehran. Centrifuges at Natanz have been spinning to enrich uranium for years, and the site has reportedly been sabotaged several times by the US and Israel.

The most famous of those cases occurred in 2011, when Stuxnet, a malicious computer worm believed to have been developed jointly by the US and Israel, was set loose in Natanz and seriously set back Iran’s nuclear program for a time; and in 2020, when an explosion and fire at Natanz—believed to have been set off by Israel—caused major damage to a centrifuge assembly there.

It makes sense, then, that Iran is now building a new facility deeper in the ground than Natanz—so deep it may be out of reach for spies, sabotage, or even the United States’ most powerful bunker-busting bomb.

AP was told by experts that the new facility is 80 meters (260 feet) to 100 meters (328 feet) deep. The US bunker-buster known as the Massive Ordinance Penetrator—each of which weighs 27,125 pounds—“can plow through at least 60 meters (200 feet) of earth before detonating.” AP says that US officials “reportedly have discussed using two such bombs in succession to ensure a site is destroyed.”

However, it’s “not clear that such a one-two punch would damage a facility as deep as the one at Natanz.”

With the bunker-busters potentially no longer adequate, sabotage could be the only option that remains for the US and its allies.

Yet experts say “disruptive actions” could lead Tehran to “put its program even deeper into the mountain where airstrikes, further sabotage, and spies may not be able to reach it.”

According to one expert, Iran’s completion of an ultra-deep facility “would be a nightmare scenario…. Given how close Iran is to a bomb, it has very little room to ratchet up its program without tripping US and Israeli red lines. So at this point, any further escalation increases the risk of conflict.”

This is a precarious situation in which the clock for effective military action against Iran’s nuclear program may be running out.

Illusions have played a key role in allowing such a situation to develop. One illusion was diplomacy—culminating in the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran, which didn’t address its ballistic-missile or centrifuge development, and granted a sunset clause that at best deferred an inevitable crisis to a later date.

The Trump administration, for its part, was right to be severely critical of the deal, but it substituted the diplomacy illusion with the sanctions illusion. Although, for a time, the administration’s sanctions appeared to be seriously setting back the ayatollah’s goals, by now it’s clear that Tehran has learned how to get around them and is plowing forward regardless.

Israel, for its part, has never had illusions about the ayatollah regime and its aims, but, in counteracting those ambitions, has mostly preferred to play a secondary role to the US. But the clock on that, too, may be running out.

The depressing feeling is that nothing—not even the latest development of an even deeper Iranian facility near Natanz—would prod the Biden administration to take military action.

Meaning Israel may have to go it alone. Whether that’s feasible is still debated; but there may be no other choice.

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