On April 8, 2026, one day after President Trump announced a ceasefire with Iran, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a televised statement that left no room for ambiguity. “The enriched material that still remains will leave Iran,” he said. “It will leave either by agreement or through a renewal of the fighting.” He added that Israel and the United States “see eye to eye on this issue.” Hours later, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reinforced the message from the Pentagon: “We know exactly what they have, and they know that, and they will either give it to us voluntarily, or if we have to do something else ourselves, like we did in Midnight Hammer, we reserve that opportunity.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, asked at a congressional briefing whether Iran’s enriched uranium would be secured, was blunter: “People are going to have to go and get it.”

That promise remains unfulfilled. The Islamabad talks collapsed on April 12 without a deal. Iran refuses to terminate its nuclear program, refuses to relinquish its uranium, and refuses to reopen the Strait of Hormuz without conditions. The ceasefire expires in days. The diplomacy is dead. What Netanyahu described is not a hypothetical. It is the next phase of the war.

The uranium is in Isfahan

I wrote those exact words two weeks ago in these pages, outlining five criteria that pointed to the Isfahan nuclear complex as the primary repository for Iran’s 441 kilograms of highly enriched uranium. The evidence has only grown stronger since.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, working with the French newspaper Le Monde, analyzed a satellite image from June 9, 2025, three days before Israel attacked and thirteen days before Midnight Hammer. The image shows a flatbed truck loaded with 18 blue containers positioned at the south tunnel entrance of Isfahan’s underground complex. The Bulletin’s analysis concluded that Iran may have transferred a significant quantity of highly enriched uranium, possibly all of its inventory, to Isfahan on that date. IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi subsequently confirmed that Isfahan held “a bit more than 200 kilograms, maybe a little bit more than that” of 60% enriched uranium as of the last inspection, with additional quantities at Natanz and possibly Fordow.

The Bulletin’s technical analysis noted that the truck’s capacity was in the same order of magnitude as the full 441 kilograms of 60% material reported by the IAEA. If correct, the enrichment vaults at Natanz and Fordow may have been largely empty when the bombs fell. Isfahan was not a secondary storage site. It was the vault.

The barricades tell the story

On April 9, 2026, satellite imagery analyzed by the Institute for Science and International Security revealed that Iran had installed makeshift roadblocks outside all three tunnel entrances to the Isfahan underground complex. At the southern entrance: a two-meter-wide dirt embankment and a second barrier of unidentified material. At the middle entrance: a completed dirt pile and another under construction. At the northern entrance: additional barriers including possible fencing and a chicane structure.

The Institute assessed that the barriers are “apparently intended to further limit traffic towards the tunnel complex, and to add complexity to........

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