Has the US busted Iran’s nuclear bomb plans?

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Hi, I'm not Matt Bevan.

He'll be here in a sec.

I'm Erin Park, and I just wanted to tell you about my brand new podcast called Expanse, Nowhere Man.

In 1999, a young American with everything to live for walked out alone into one of the deadliest deserts in Australia.

Why did he do it, and why do some people have to lose themselves in the wilderness in in order to feel found?

Subscribe to Expanse, Nowhere Man, on the ABC Listen app and all the usual places.

This podcast is recorded on the lands of the Awabakal, Darug and Iora people.

How much have you done in your career since 2009?

Hopefully quite a bit.

I mean back then I was still trying to score a permanent job at the ABC.

Hi, my name is Matt Bevan and I'm applying for the position of breakfast producer on Triple J.

Yes, that is real and no I did not get that job.

I have had quite an interesting and varied career at the ABC since then, though.

Meanwhile, at the Pentagon, there are two people who have been staring at the same bit of Iranian desert since 2009.

For more than 15 years, this officer and his teammate lived and breathed this single target, Ford, a critical element of Iran's covert nuclear weapons program.

15 years looking at one relatively small hillside.

He studied the geology.

He watched the Iranians dig it out.

He watched the construction, the weather, the discard material.

They literally dreamed about this target at night when they slept.

They weren't able to discuss this with their family, their wives, their kids, their friends.

I mean, it wouldn't be that interesting even if they wanted to.

Honey, you'll never guess what happened in my little patch of desert today.

We looked at the vent shaft, the exhaust shaft, the electrical systems, the environmental control systems, every nook, every crater, every piece of equipment going in and every piece of equipment going out.

Finally, something interesting happened.

On a day in June of 2025, more than 15 years after they started their life's work, the phone rang and the President of the United States ordered the B-2 force that you've supported to go strike and kill this target.

13-ton massive ordnance penetrators or bunker busters.

The heavily fortified Ford facility is hit first at 2.10 a.m.

local time.

13 tons is about the weight of a bus and almost all of that mass is in the metal casing, which allows it to rip through up to 60 meters of dirt, sand and rock.

Now if you take a look at the pictures, if you take a look how it's all blackened.

The President was very excited about what happened to the desert patch those men had been watching.

The whole area for 75 yards around, the whole where it hit is black with fire.

Donald Trump is convinced that the bombing of this enrichment facility on the 22nd of June was a total success.

Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.

Have they, though?

Does blackened sand mean that the facility underground was totally destroyed?

If you want to make an assessment of what happened at Ford, you better get a big shovel and go really deep.

In the days since the strike, more and more information has come out to cast doubt on that claim.

Some reports indicate it may only take three months for Iran to fix what was broken.

But in order to understand what happened here, we need to understand what was in those bunkers.

And that's what we're going to look at today.

Iran's nuclear program, the target of that bombing on the 22nd of June.

What was it exactly that the Americans were hoping to hit?

And how likely is it that the whole thing has been obliterated?

I'm Matt Bevan, and this is If You're Listening.

Believe it or not, there was once a time when speeches by U.S.

presidents were carefully thought out and took months to write.

At United Nations headquarters in New York, United States President Eisenhower arrives to make a proposal for the constructive use of atomic power.

Never before in history has so much hope for so many people

been gathered together in a single organization.

Hope.

Remember that?

This speech by Eisenhower in 1953 was meant to gently inform a terrified public about nuclear weapons.

People had good reason to be afraid after the way that World War II ended.

If the peoples of the world are to conduct an intelligent search for peace, they must be armed with the significant facts.

But during the months spent drafting the speech, its purpose changed.

The President had come up with an idea to convince people that nuclear research can also be peaceful.

To hasten the day when fear of the atom will begin to disappear from the minds of people and the governments of the East and West, there are certain steps that can be taken now.

Eisenhower called his idea Atoms for Peace.

Basically, he wanted to create an international atomic energy agency and give it nuclear fuel to distribute to anyone who wanted wanted to use it for peaceful research and energy production.

Experts would be mobilized to apply atomic energy to the needs of agriculture, medicine, and other peaceful activities.

A special purpose would be to provide abundant electrical energy in the power-starred areas of the world.

So, the U.S.

would provide enriched nuclear fuel from its stockpile to anyone who wanted it for those purposes.

The IAEA would monitor its usage through regular

Peacetime atomic energy has already brought the world great benefits.

Nuclear power in locomotives, ships,

and even very large airplanes.

Another example of progress and working with atoms for peace.

People were very excited.

It will protect your health, improve your food, bring you less costly living products.

and a greater measure of leisure and security.

Life in the young and growing growing nuclear age will become richer and more meaningful in all parts of the world.

Now, was Eisenhower doing all of this out of the goodness of his heart?

Did he really think that this would lead to world peace?

Well, there's reasonably strong evidence that he did have an ulterior motive.

It seems that he thought that talking about peaceful uses of nuclear technology would give the government the social license to keep stockpiling nuclear weapons.

Today, the United States stockpile of atomic weapons, which of course increases daily,

exceeds by many times the total equivalent of the total of all bombs and all shells that came from every plane and every gun in every theater of war in all of the years of World War II.

That was at the start of his term.

By the end, the stockpile grew from 1,000 warheads to 22,000 warheads.

Seems a bit sus.

But I think at its core, there was a desire to do good.

See, nuclear fuel exists at various levels of enrichment.

Only a small fraction of natural uranium is the U-235 isotope, which will fission in a chain reaction.

It's actually only 0.71%.

0.71% refers to the ratio of U-235 to U-238 atoms, and the process of enrichment is to increase the number of U-235 atoms.

Increase the U-235 atoms.

Have the sort of uranium that goes vom, vroom, vroom in a power station and kaboom in a bomb.

So how do you do that?

Well, it's not all that complicated.

It uses a gas centrifuge, which is basically like a blender.

If you fill a blender with stuff to make a shake and turn it on, the rotor at the bottom is going to fling everything onto the side of the container.

If you blend it for long enough, you'll find that the heavier ingredients start to stick to the outsides and the lighter ones stay closer to the center.

This is exactly how the gas centrifuge works.

You pump in natural uranium and run the centrifuge.

Then you scoop the lighter U-235 isotopes out of the center.

Feed comes in at 0.71%

natural uranium feed and it's enriched anywhere from 3 to 5 percent.

The thing is that process takes a lot of blending.

With old school gas centrifuges that they had in the 1970s it'd take roughly two centuries for one centrifuge to make one kilo of five percent enriched uranium.

So these days they have lots and lots of centrifuges set up working together.

That's how you make nuclear fuel for a power station.

The thing is though, the vum vum vum uranium and the boom uranium aren't different kinds of uranium.

Turning vum vum vum into kaboom just means blending it for a bit longer.

They could enrich to weapons grade uranium, which would be sufficient for producing a nuclear weapon.

It's the exact same process, using the same machines.

So Eisenhower thought if he gave away parts of America's stockpile and the IAEA could make sure it was only being used peacefully, he could prevent other countries from building enrichment plants and developing atomic bombs.

In Vienna, the first general conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency opens with 62 nations taking part.

This gathering brings closer to fruition President Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace proposal to the United Nations, carried through by delegation head Louis Strauss, who announced that the United States would supply 12,000 pounds of nuclear material to the international pool.

The US and the Soviet Union gave nuclear material to more than 50 countries, and none of those countries ever developed nuclear weapons.

These are the first pictures of India's nuclear tests.

Pakistan's move to conduct five nuclear tests.

Israel has a large number of ordinary nuclear weapons.

We'll talk about Israel in a future episode.

But the interesting thing about those those three countries there in particular is that they never signed up to the non-proliferation treaty, which guarantees the IAEA inspectors access to all nuclear facilities.

Iran did sign it.

So, let's see how that went.

It's only a few months, possibly a few weeks,

before they get enough enriched uranium.

for the first bomb.

Ah, right.

Sorry, President Eisenhower.

I mean, it was a nice idea.

According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, during the last year alone, Iran has doubled the number of centrifuges in its underground nuclear facility in Qom.

So how did it start to turn?

How did America go from giving Iran nuclear material to bombing their nuclear facilities?

It's a strike!

Bowling's fun, and AMF is the secret.

Yeah, so this part of the story weirdly involves the bowling alley company, AMF.

AMF automatic pin spotters, a true quality AMF ball and sure-footed AMF bowling shoes add up to the perfect combination.

AMF, or American Machine and Foundry, has been making the machines that run bowling alleys since the 1940s.

Once swept clear of the pin deck, pins are rolled on the AMF magic carpet to the pin elevator.

and gently lifted and circulated to another AMF development, the positive pin distribution system.

Once you've developed a machine this this complicated, building nuclear reactors must feel like a breeze, which is why in the 1960s, AMF was selected by the US government to build a five-megawatt light water research reactor in Tehran, beginning Iran's nuclear program.

They built Pakistan's first reactor as well.

They're an extremely diverse company.

AMF, we make Ben Hogan golf equipment, Sunfish sailboats, Voigt balls, Patterson yachts.

We make

They also make the US intercontinental ballistic missile launch silos.

I know it might be hard to imagine right now, but at the time, Iran was the closest American ally in the region.

Eisenhower had made sure of it, orchestrating a coup in 1953 to give the Shah, the King of Kings, absolute power over the country.

It was during this era that Iran first got its hands on uranium with the help of the US, under the watchful eye of the IAEA.

But of course, they didn't stay close to the US forever.

The Shah was overthrown in a revolution in 1979.

That's a fascinating story, by the way.

We've covered it in several episodes if you want to go back and check them out.

And once the Islamic Republic of Iran was established under the rule of fundamentalist cleric Ayatollah Khomeini, relations between the US and Iran became a little less friendly.

They're chanting death to Israel, death to America, by the way.

American support for their peaceful nuclear program ended.

As far as the world was concerned, that was the end of Iran's nuclear program, which is why it was a bit of an unpleasant surprise in 2002 when this happened.

Today I'm going to reveal to you two top secret sites of the Iran regime.

The building of this project began two years ago.

A group of expat Iranian dissidents revealed the construction of a secret nuclear enrichment facility near the city of Natans.

Now the main purpose of this project is the nuclear fuel production.

Iran and Russia were working together to complete construction of a nuclear power plant that had begun under the Shah and was abandoned after the revolution.

International sanctions were preventing Iran from importing any nuclear fuel.

So, look, giving them the benefit of the doubt, it was feasible that this facility being built eight meters underground near the city of Natans was just designed to fuel this plant, right?

Massive underground halls with space for 50,000 centrifuges doesn't look great,

but what they were building over in Fordo looked even worse.

This is the one that our friend from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and his offsider were watching for 15 years.

You do not build a multi-layered underground bunker complex with centrifuges and other equipment in a mountain for any peaceful purpose.

This project in Fordo was not like the one in Natan's.

It was more like a mine than a giant underground hall.

The centrifuges were set up in narrow tunnels deep inside the mountain.

President Barack Obama is bluntly confronting Iran, accusing the Islamic Republic of secretly building a hidden nuclear site.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has been building a covert uranium enrichment facility near Qom

for several years.

The size and configuration of this facility is inconsistent with a peaceful program.

So was this second secret site evidence that Iran was building a nuclear bomb?

Well, the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu certainly thought so.

He went to the United Nations General Assembly and stood on the exact same spot Eisenhower had when he announced Adams for Peace and gave a speech.

And he brought a prop.

Brought a diagram for you.

This is a bomb.

This is a fuse.

It's It's kind of like a clip art drawing of a bomb with two lines drawn across it.

By next spring, at most, by next summer, at current enrichment rates, they will have finished the medium enrichment

and move on to the final stage.

From there, it's only a few months, possibly a few weeks,

before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb.

Okay, pause it there.

This was back in 2012, and understandably, BB Netanyahu has been getting dunked on a lot lately because Iran still doesn't have a bomb.

But what Netanyahu said there wasn't wrong.

It was just phrased in a way that's deliberately very vague.

Just wind the tape back a little bit there.

What he's really saying is from the point where they have finished the medium enrichment.

Yeah, once they've done that, they could, if they wanted to, proceed to building a bomb in only a few months, possibly a few weeks.

Iran's whole plan was to get to that sweet spot where they didn't have a bomb, but could make one if they wanted to.

From their perspective, it was the perfect negotiating position.

When I was a kid, we had a cranky neighbour who didn't like it when we'd play backyard cricket and hit tennis balls onto her roof.

She'd come out and shout at us over the fence whenever it happened.

So let's say that she decided to stop us from ever playing cricket again by threatening to build a big shed in her yard which would block our house's view of the ocean.

She says that she doesn't really want a shed, but she will build one if we don't stop with the tennis balls on her roof.

She goes to the shop and she buys all the sheet metal, all the screws and all the concrete.

The president also announced thousands more centrifuges to help enrich uranium.

We say, okay, we won't play cricket, but we want to be able to peep over your fence every so often and make sure you're not doing any shed building.

It must grant unfentered access to IAEA inspectors.

The 20 years of negotiations have been over how frequently we can peep over the fence and whether she's allowed to do any preparation on the slab.

When tensions rise, she starts wheeling out the concrete mixer.

Iran is now set to breach limits on its uranium stockpile.

When they ease, she puts the mixer away.

Iran agreed to limit its disputed nuclear program in exchange for some relief from tough sanctions.

But all along, she theoretically could have built that shed at any time.

It wouldn't take long.

And that's the position that Iran wanted to be in.

It was the position that the US seemed okay with tolerating, but it was one that Bibi Netanyahu would not abide.

The red line must be drawn on Iran's nuclear enrichment program

because these enrichment facilities are the only nuclear installations that we can definitely see and credibly target.

At the time, the Ford O facility was not a credible target.

It was too deep underground.

It gave the Iranians a slight strategic edge, a small pocket of a few thousand centrifuges which were out of US and Israeli reach.

But at the Pentagon, that Defense Threat Reduction Agency officer was on the job, a job that he and his teammate took very seriously.

They literally dreamed about this target at night when they slept.

It was too deep, too hard to destroy.

So they began a journey to work with industry and other tacticians to develop the GBU-57.

The GBU-57, the bunker buster buster bomb, the massive ordnance penetrator.

It reached its final form in 2015, and Benjamin Netanyahu has been trying to get a US president to drop it ever since.

It took him 10 years to find one that would.

A short time ago, the US military carried out massive precision strikes on the three key nuclear facilities.

in the Iranian regime.

Your bold decision to target Iran's nuclear facilities with the awesome and righteous might of the United States will change history.

So, is this all Eisenhower's fault?

Did his Atoms for Peace proposal put nuclear technology in the hands of too many people?

Probably.

But in the case of Iran, the problem really emerged when Atoms for Peace was abandoned.

If the U.S.

had continued supplying nuclear material to Iran even after the revolution, they possibly would never have built nuclear enrichment facilities.

It would have been much harder for them to justify at least.

Instead, the US sanctioned them and blocked them from importing any uranium, giving them the perfect excuse.

We still don't know how much of Iran's nuclear program was gutted by the bunker buster bombs.

We'll have to wait a little bit longer to find out whether Iran will cobble together enough centrifuges to get their program up and running again.

If they do, Donald Trump's declaration that this war is over might end up being revised.

If you're listening is written by me, Matt Bevan.

This episode was produced by Jess O'Callaghan and Cinnamon Nipard with additional audio production by Adair Shepard.

Supervising producer is Cara Jensen-McKinnon.

This is our last new episode for a couple of weeks.

When we come back, we've got an incredible story to tell about the Israeli nuclear program, but interest in Iran is clearly very high.

So over the next couple of weeks we'll be rerunning our two part series on the Iranian revolution.

These episodes are getting massive traction on YouTube at the moment and they're extremely relevant to what's going on.

By the way, I hope you've been enjoying our Tuesday episodes.

We are planning to keep them going when we return.

If you've got some thoughts on what you'd like to hear more of during those unscripted episodes, let us know and we'll take it on board.

Our email address is if you're listening at abc.net.au.

We'll be back on the 24th of July.

Catch then.

It always starts small.

There's something here.

This is not right.

Then that small, innocuous thing starts to snowball.

We know they blow them up.

And quickly gathers pace.

At that point, I have no choice.

And before you know it, it's out of control.

And no one can contain it anymore.

Beef.

When small feuds take on a life of their own.

A new series by background briefing, available now on the ABC Listen app.