Israel and U.S. Smashed Iran Nuclear Site That Grew After Trump Quit 2015 Accord

Israeli and American strikes appear to have created a major roadblock to Iran’s manufacture of atomic bombs, even if its cache of uranium fuel remains untouched, analysts say.

That’s because attacks on one of the sites, in Isfahan, shattered gear that Iran was preparing to use for the transformation of enriched uranium gas into dense metal. That process, known as metallization, is among the last steps in making the explosive core of an atomic bomb.

Some nuclear experts argue that the demolished gear might never have existed but for President Trump’s abandoning a restrictive nuclear deal in his first term that President Barack Obama had negotiated.

Mr. Trump and his allies faulted the 2015 Obama deal as preserving Iran’s ability to produce as much nuclear fuel as it wanted after 2030. But some experts see that criticism as ignoring a far more immediate threat. They note that Iran ramped up work at Isfahan only after Mr. Trump canceled the deal, and that now, in effect, he has been forced to neutralize a danger of his own making.

“It’s unlikely that we would have had to bomb uranium metal production facilities today if the first Trump administration had not pulled out of the Iran deal,” said Robert Einhorn, a former arms control official who worked on U.S. negotiations with Iran during the Obama administration and is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Michael S. Lubell, a professor of physics at the City College of New York who has held federal clearances that gave him access to government secrets on nuclear arms, agreed. President Trump “created this mess,” he said. “There’s no question that the Iran deal was working. He tore it up, created a mess and is now saying, ‘I’m the savior.’”