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Top Nuclear Expert Describes What the Iran War Accomplished
(Washington Post) Marc A. Thiessen - President Trump went to war to stop Iran from acquiring a game-changing nuclear weapon, the regime's project for imposing its will on the region and making the American people less safe. So is Iran stronger now than it was on Jan. 1? "You'd have to be delirious to think that's the case," said nuclear weapons expert David Albright, founder of the Institute for Science and International Security. "When we look at it strictly technically, this war was...very successful in seriously setting back Iran's ability to make a nuclear weapon." Assessing the damage done to Iran's nuclear program, Albright said the "gas centrifuge program, the enrichment program, the secret program to turn weapon-grade uranium into a nuclear weapon...is severely damaged." "The centrifuge program as it was no longer exists. And what we're essentially discussing are remnants." Those remnants "are dangerous, but nonetheless this is an enrichment program - it's not enriching, it's not making centrifuges, and it's going to have a very hard time reconstituting anything close to what it had for years." Not only did the U.S. and Israel strike Iran's known nuclear sites at Fordow, Isfahan and Natanz, he said. "Israel revealed sites that it struck that were not known publicly that they said were related to making the nuclear weapon itself." You have "roughly 10 nuclear-weapons-related sites destroyed" - including Iran's storage, conversion, and research and development facilities - and "many scientists and engineers killed." Albright said that before Trump launched Operation Midnight Hammer in June 2025, Iran had "a program that had 22,000 centrifuges, many of which were operating, enriching all the way up to 60%. Now they're not enriching at all and most of those centrifuges are destroyed." The writer is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.