The Uranium Is in Isfahan |
In my previous article on this blog, I argued that the 440 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60% purity are the only variable that determines who wins this war. Not the generals killed. Not the bases destroyed. Not the Strait of Hormuz. Not the price of oil. The uranium. Everything else is secondary.
Today I answer the question that article left open: where is it?
The answer is not classified. It does not require satellite imagery with centimeter resolution or intercepted IRGC communications or Mossad assets inside Iran’s nuclear establishment. It requires only the public record, deductive reasoning, and a willingness to follow the evidence wherever it leads.
What They Destroyed and What They Did Not
On June 22, 2025, seven B-2 Spirit stealth bombers dropped fourteen GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs on Fordow and Natanz in what the Pentagon called Operation Midnight Hammer. Each bomb weighed 30,000 pounds. Each was designed to penetrate up to 200 feet of earth or 60 feet of reinforced concrete before detonating. At Fordow, the first bomb removed a defensive concrete cap over a ventilation shaft. The next four entered the shaft and detonated inside the enrichment hall at over 1,000 feet per second. Fordow and Natanz were severely damaged. Centrifuges were destroyed. Enrichment halls collapsed.
Isfahan was different.
The United States struck Isfahan with Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from a submarine instead of bunker busters. According to CNN, citing a source familiar with the operation, there was an understanding that the GBU-57 would likely not penetrate Isfahan’s lower levels, which are buried even deeper than Fordow. In a classified briefing to Congress after the strikes, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine said the underground storage areas at Isfahan are too deeply buried for even the Massive Ordnance Penetrator to destroy. The United States did not try. It targeted the tunnel entrances instead.
On March 29, 2026, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, working with the French newspaper Le Monde, published analysis of a previously unreported satellite image taken by an Airbus Pléiades Neo satellite on June 9, 2025. The image shows a flatbed truck loaded with 18 blue containers positioned at the south tunnel entrance of Isfahan’s underground complex. Four days before Israel attacked. Thirteen days before Midnight Hammer.
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. The analysts noted that in early June 2025, as the prospect of U.S. airstrikes was growing, Iran would have had no interest in removing sensitive materials from a facility that was allegedly out of reach of America’s most powerful bombs.
If correct, the enrichment vaults at Natanz and Fordow were probably empty when the bombs fell.
The IAEA corroborates the direction. Director General Rafael Grossi stated that Isfahan held “a bit more than 200 kilograms” of 60% uranium as of the last inspection. The agency tracked a convoy removing what was thought to be a substantial quantity from Fordow shortly before the war. Nine months after the strikes, the IAEA still does not know the precise location of Iran’s full stockpile. No one does. But the evidence points in one direction.
The Silence That Confirms Everything
Three things did not happen after the June 2025 strikes. Each absence tells a story louder than any press conference.
First, no significant radiation was detected outside the bombed sites. The IAEA, the Iranian government, and neighboring countries all confirmed normal background levels. The Atomic Energy Organization of Iran stated that radiation monitoring and field assessments showed no signs of contamination or risk to residents. Uranium enriched to 60% stored in sealed cylinders deep underground does not leave a radiological signature on the surface. The absence of contamination is consistent with material that was either not there when the bombs hit or so deep and well contained that the explosions never reached it.
Second, Iran did not cry contamination. This matters enormously. If the strikes had dispersed enriched uranium and caused radiological harm to civilians, Tehran would have held the most powerful diplomatic argument of the modern era. Russia would have convened emergency sessions at the Security Council with photographs of contaminated Iranians. China would have consolidated its narrative that the Western order is criminal and hypocritical. The IAEA would have been forced to declare an unprecedented radiological event caused by a nuclear power against a Non-Proliferation Treaty signatory. None of that happened. Because reporting contamination would mean admitting the uranium was there when the bombs fell. And that would destroy Iran’s most valuable negotiating card: ambiguity about the location of the material.
Third, Iran did not rebuild its enrichment capability. U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified before the Senate in March 2026 that Iran’s nuclear enrichment program was “obliterated” in June 2025 and that “there have been no efforts since then to rebuild their enrichment capability.” CIA Director John Ratcliffe corroborated that assessment. A country that loses the product of decades of nuclear work enters existential emergency mode. Iran did not. Because it did not lose its most valuable asset. It simply stopped needing the infrastructure that was destroyed. The uranium was already enriched.
The question is not merely where the uranium is. It is why it is there.
Hiding 440 kilograms of enriched uranium in an unmarked mountain in the Zagros range or a warehouse in the Dasht-e Kavir desert would be playing hide and seek against the most sophisticated intelligence apparatus on Earth. Israel stole Iran’s entire nuclear archive from a Tehran warehouse in 2018. It assassinated Mohsen Fakhrizadeh on an Iranian highway in 2020. It sabotaged centrifuges at Natanz with the Stuxnet virus by infiltrating industrial control systems. Each of those operations required human eyes inside Iran. A convoy moving nuclear material to an unknown, unfortified site would have been detected. And once found, a location without deep fortification would be vulnerable to a pair of GBU-57s or a special operations raid.
Iran did not choose secrecy. It chose inaccessibility. It moved the uranium to a place the enemy can know about but cannot reach. Security by depth, not by concealment. The same logic Switzerland applied during the Cold War with its gold reserves: not hidden in an Alpine cabin, but stored inside a mountain fortress that everyone knew existed and no one could penetrate.
The Equation of Five Criteria
Where would a rational state hide the most consequential asset in its possession? Five criteria must be met simultaneously: the most fortified and deepest site in the country, the highest concentration of military forces to defend it, a massive civilian population that makes nuclear strikes unthinkable, urban infrastructure that provides logistical supply and camouflage, and depth that defeats any existing conventional munition.
Isfahan meets all five.
The underground complex exceeds 20,000 square meters. Its depth surpasses Fordow’s 80 to 90 meters, confirmed not by speculation but by the operational logic of Midnight Hammer itself: the United States chose not to drop its most powerful bunker busters on it because they would not reach. At least six military bases ring the city’s southern flank, including the Badr airbase, IRGC ground forces installations, artillery facilities, and what analysts have described as an underground “missile city.” The metropolis holds 2.3 million people. It is Iran’s third largest urban economy, with heavy industry and defense manufacturing that camouflage any logistical movement within normal commercial traffic. And by February 2026, Iran had sealed all three tunnel entrances with massive piles of earth using trucks, bulldozers, and cement mixers, making the middle and southern entrances completely unrecognizable from satellite imagery.
Fordow is deep but Qom is smaller. Natanz sits in semi-rural terrain. Pickaxe Mountain, the deeply buried facility under construction near Natanz, is not yet operational. Isfahan is the only location in Iran that satisfies every criterion simultaneously.
The Shield of 2.3 Million
And then there is the defense system that no missile can penetrate.
A tactical nuclear weapon detonated over a deserted mountain would vaporize the uranium with relatively containable fallout. Isfahan makes that calculus impossible. A nuclear strike on a metropolis of 2.3 million, home to UNESCO World Heritage sites including Naqsh-e Jahan Square, would be the worst war crime since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No American president would survive it politically. No Western alliance would withstand it. The 80-year nuclear taboo would shatter.
And the physics would be even worse than the politics. A nuclear detonation over a depot of uranium enriched to 60% would not merely destroy the material. It would disperse it across a city. The Arms Control Association has noted that even conventional strikes on the storage area were deemed too risky, in part because blowing up enough 60% enriched uranium could theoretically produce a fission reaction.
The city is the defense system. Every family, every mosque, every Safavid palace is a more effective shield than any S-400. Iran converted the ethics of its enemies into the most impenetrable armor on Earth.
The Movie That Cannot Be Filmed
If nuclear weapons are off the table, extraction requires boots on the ground. The former commander of the Mossad’s Counterterrorism Division, Oded Ailam, described what that looks like: “To reach the uranium, forces would not only need rifles. They would need hydraulic excavators, diamond drills, and engineering teams working for weeks.” He added that the nuclear facilities at Isfahan “are no longer production halls. They are concrete tombs.”
The uranium is believed to be stored in 40 to 50 specialized cylinders, distributed across multiple chambers in a tunnel complex with no electricity and possibly booby-trapped. Handling the material requires teams in radiological protection suits, transport in accident-rated casks, and a makeshift airfield to fly the material out on C-17 Globemasters. Retired General Joseph Votel, former commander of U.S. Central Command, summarized: “This is not a quick in and out kind of deal.” Former NATO commander James Stavridis told the Wall Street Journal it could be “the largest special operations forces in history.”
“I Don’t Even Think About It”
On March 31, 2026, after a massive overnight bombardment of Isfahan with 2,000-pound bunker buster bombs targeting what was described as an ammunition depot, President Trump told CBS News: “I don’t even think about it. I just know that it’s so deeply buried it’s going to be very hard for anybody to reach it. It’s down there deep. Even without a war, they haven’t been able to do it. So it’s pretty safe.”
Hours later, Prime Minister Netanyahu released a video statement declaring that Israel had “smashed” Iran’s industrial capability to produce nuclear weapons, listing “ten plagues” delivered to the Iranian regime and its axis.
Analysis of the overnight Isfahan strike assessed with “reasonable confidence” that the United States had chosen to bury the material rather than attempt extraction, targeting surrounding infrastructure to seal off tunnels and access routes while taking care not to directly hit the enriched uranium.
Both leaders appear to be setting the stage for declaring victory and concluding the war. The narrative is clean: the enrichment infrastructure is destroyed, the uranium is inaccessible, the threat is neutralized. But the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warned that if the United States cannot secure or safely destroy the material, Iran may retain a residual nuclear capability that its future leadership could retrieve and weaponize.
Why Not Isfahan Then. Why Isfahan Now.
A question that has received insufficient attention: why did President Trump end the June 2025 war on day 12?
By that point, the classified briefing had already told him what the GBU-57 could not do. The intelligence community had already assessed that the damage to Natanz and Fordow was less extensive than claimed. The uranium was likely intact. And yet Trump declared victory and stopped.
The answer may be that the June war was never designed to solve the uranium problem. It could not. An air campaign alone, no matter how devastating, cannot extract or destroy material buried beyond the reach of the heaviest conventional bomb in the American arsenal. Solving the uranium problem required a fundamentally different kind of intervention: aircraft carriers, tens of thousands of ground troops, weeks of systematic degradation of Iran’s military infrastructure, total air superiority, and the isolation of Isfahan from every defensive asset surrounding it. None of that was in place in June 2025.
The current war did not begin with Isfahan. For 30 days, the United States and Israel systematically dismantled Iran’s capacity to defend it. The navy was destroyed. More than two thirds of ballistic missile production was eliminated. Air defenses were neutralized. Senior commanders were killed. Five of the six military bases on Isfahan’s southern flank were struck. Only after all of that, on day 31, did the massive overnight bombardment of Isfahan occur. The sequencing is not coincidental. It is textbook battlefield shaping: you do not assault the objective until you have eliminated everything that can defend it.
And it coincides with the arrival of additional troops. The USS Tripoli with 3,500 Marines. The 82nd Airborne on deployment orders. Hundreds of special operators without assigned missions. The Pentagon requesting 10,000 more. The force package is converging on the theater at the same moment Isfahan becomes operationally accessible for the first time in this war.
Is Trump telling the truth when he says he does not think about the uranium? Or is that precisely what you say before the operation no one is supposed to see coming?
What the Pentagon Already Knows
You do not mobilize 17,000 troops, the 82nd Airborne Division, Army Rangers, Navy SEALs, 3,500 Marines aboard the USS Tripoli, and request 10,000 additional ground forces for an exploratory mission. That is a force package configured against a defined objective with specific coordinates. The United States and Israel know where the uranium is. What this article presents is not intelligence. It is open-source analysis connecting publicly available dots: the Bulletin’s satellite imagery, IAEA verification reports, Grossi’s statements, General Caine’s classified admission, the topography, and deductive reasoning.
If open-source analysis connecting publicly available dots leads to this conclusion, consider what the Pentagon reaches with classified satellite imagery of centimeter resolution, signals intelligence intercepting IRGC communications, Mossad human assets inside Iran, seismic sensors detecting underground excavation, and its own artificial intelligence systems processing it all simultaneously.
The public debate about ground operations has focused almost entirely on Kharg Island, Iran’s oil export hub in the Persian Gulf. The logic is straightforward: seize the island, control 90% of Iran’s oil revenue, pressure Tehran into concessions. It is an operation that can be explained on television in thirty seconds. Isfahan has barely been mentioned. One might ask whether that silence is incidental or deliberate. Hundreds of special operations forces, including Army Rangers and Navy SEALs, have arrived in the region without assigned missions. Marines take islands. Special operators do something else.
Whether what follows is a negotiated handover, a permanent burial declared as victory, or a Battle of Isfahan that enters the annals of military history alongside Entebbe and Abbottabad, I do not know. Perhaps it will. Perhaps it will not. Only time will tell.
The Limits of the Diagnosis
This analysis is a diagnostic workup based on open sources. Every piece of publicly available evidence converges on a single conclusion: the uranium has to be in Isfahan.
Beyond that, no one can go. Not I. Not any open-source analyst. There are operations classified in extremis whose existence we can deduce but whose content we cannot know. We do not know whether Iranian informants have told Israel and the United States the exact location of the uranium: which chamber, which tunnel, guarded by how many men.
But we know those informants have to exist.
Israel did not steal the nuclear archive from a Tehran warehouse in 2018 with satellites. It did not assassinate Fakhrizadeh on an Iranian highway in 2020 with signals intelligence alone. It did not sabotage Natanz with Stuxnet by guessing centrifuge configurations. Each of those operations required human eyes inside. Someone who opened a door. Who gave a coordinate. Who confirmed a schedule.
And then there is what Trump said this morning. That sentence cuts two ways. If he said it because someone inside Isfahan confirmed the uranium is sealed and inaccessible, then human intelligence has already validated the diagnosis. They know where it is. They know they cannot get to it. And they have settled for burying it deeper.
But if he said it as a distraction, so that Iran believes Washington has given up and lowers its guard, then it is the prelude to something we cannot see. An operation that requires precisely that: for Iran to relax its vigilance over the complex. And that operation would need someone inside who knows whether there is an entrance that does not appear on satellite imagery, a ventilation shaft off every map, a guard rotation with a gap.
In both scenarios the conclusion is the same: there are informants inside the Isfahan complex. There is no other way to have the level of certainty that both Trump and military commanders have demonstrated they possess. Open-source analysis has a ceiling. Below that ceiling lies a world of classified intelligence we cannot see but whose existence we can infer with the same logic that brought us here.
What I cannot predict is what comes next. Whether there will be extraction under fire, negotiation, permanent burial, or a covert operation already underway as I write these lines. No one can. The classified variables exceed the public ones.
What I can affirm, at the end of this diagnostic workup, is this:
440 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60%, enough for eleven nuclear weapons, sit beneath a city of 2.3 million people, at a depth no existing conventional munition can reach, protected by the 80-year nuclear taboo and by the enemy’s own ethics converted into a shield.
The Mossad knows this. The CIA knows this. This article does not pretend to tell Western intelligence anything new. It pretends to tell the reader.
The uranium is in Isfahan.
Buried or not, it is there. But is that its final destination?