Iran giving up on nuclear uranium enrichment shows Khamenei has gone off the deep end - analysis

Iran finally has come out and said it straight to the public: Five months after the June war with Israel, its fleet of 20,000 centrifuges, including several hundred advanced centrifuges, remains in ruins.

Lest readers scoff at the comment as a cover-up, this is no cover-up.

Israeli intelligence – which incredibly and skillfully took apart each aspect of Iran’s nuclear program in June – confirmed the statement.

There are certainly extensive efforts by Iran to build nuclear facilities and to place them farther underground so that a new nuclear program might be built in the future. Therefore, Israel cannot take its eye off the ball on this issue for even a second.

But the current state of play is that the Islamic Republic has made zero progress toward restoring its enrichment capabilities. Why?

Better to rebuild new facilities, even if they may not be operational for years, it thought.

This means that Iran’s 60%-enriched uranium is not and will not likely be a danger for the next year or two, if not longer; on its own, it cannot be used for much.

Not only that, but unless Tehran soon starts to invests billions of dollars more into a new fleet of centrifuges and a wide variety of weapons development – such as explosively driven neutron sources being integrated into scaled implosion systems, and constructing special hemispheres that would be placed on the top of a nuclear warhead – the 60%-enriched uranium will continue to remain useless for a long period of time.

There are multiple reasons.

First, it used to love taking pictures with its centrifuges, which enrich uranium; after five months with zero photos, it has been clear to most that the centrifuge fleet was destroyed, reducing the cost of admitting what is basically known.

Second, even though the Islamic Republic is resisting all entreaties to negotiate a new nuclear and ballistic-missile limitations deal, it still does not want to face a new Israeli or US attack.

Publicizing some of its known current nuclear obstacles could potentially hold off or delay such an attack.

And yet, the nuclear side of the equation is only one of the threats posed by Iran. Increasingly since early 2025, it may only be the secondary threat, compared with the ballistic-missile threat.

Just as Iranian public statements and Israeli intelligence have signaled similar understandings of the nuclear program being severely set back, they have mostly concurred that the ballistic-missile program is very much alive and expanding again fast.

Recall that one of the multiple reasons that Israel struck this past June, and not later, was that Iran had reached a new point in terms of capabilities for the pace at which it could produce new ballistic missiles.

These were numbers that Israeli intelligence feared could overwhelm the IDF’s missile-defense shield.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei seems to have gone off the deep end since the June war.

RATHER THAN rationally evaluating his options – recognizing that he is overmatched by Israel – and shifting his focus from fighting the Jewish state to a more manageable mission of competing only against Sunni Arab countries for influence in the region, he is ignoring diplomacy completely and signaling that he wants to continue the conflict with Israel at all costs.

If Khamenei simply dropped Israel – a country 1,500 kilometers away – from his list of active enemies and placed it on a list of countries that he may hate but will not try to confront, he would not need to worry about the possibility of Israeli or US attacks.

By building up his ballistic-missile supply again to numbers beyond what the country would need defensively against any countries it actually shares a border with, Khamenei is showing that he wants the ability to continue to threaten Israel.

What is utterly disconnected from reality about Khamenei’s moves is that his new game plan is to try to rebuild the same radars that Israeli F-35s blew up before, and to try to rebuild the same ballistic-missiles capabilities that the IAF destroyed before – except this time without a nuclear-weapons program as an additional massive primary target that Israel’s fighter jets would need to contend with.

Put differently, Khamenei is trying the same old plan “minus” – which just blew up in his face.

First, there have always been differences in how Westerners and Israelis view the world and how top Iranian clerics such as Khamenei view the world.

Second, Israel killed many of the top generals and advisers who were closest to him.

In addition, although Israel said it was not hunting him, he may have felt he was in the crosshairs.

Khamenei may be overcome with the need for revenge to have lost the capacity to think clearly, let alone rationally.

What were Egypt and Syria thinking when they provoked or initiated wars with Israel in 1967 and 1973 after getting beaten in 1948 and 1956, and especially in 1973 after getting completely walloped in 1967?

Part of it was the notion that keeping some pressure on Israel could lead to an eventual land-for-peace deal, such as what happened between Israel and Egypt with the Camp David Accords.

But part of it was some kind of an irrational instinct to return their sense of honor.

Egypt and Syria did not think they could beat Israel in 1973, and by the end of the war, they had been given a tremendous beating. But they thought they could have a better showing than what had happened in 1967, when Israel surprised their air forces on the ground.

In that sense, they were correct, and many Egyptians believe they regained their honor by routing Israeli forces in the Sinai in the war’s early days.

This may be Khamenei’s goal, along with some revenge for his close comrades in arms.

But Khamenei would do well to remember the end of the story – in which by the end of the war, the Egyptian and Syrian armies took as much of a beating, and in some ways more, in 1973 as they did in 1967.

It is possible that Iran may be able to draw some more blood from Israel with a surprise ballistic-missile attack in the coming years.

Yet, the ultimate price that Tehran would pay for such an attack would be far larger even than the price it paid this past June.