Hardline Iranian commanders have urged Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to stop procrastinating and just build a nuclear bomb -

Sometimes, just not being killed is a victory.

After 12 days being bombed by everything Israel and the United States could throw at it, the Islamic Republic still stands.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is still alive, and still in power. And as far as the rest of the world knows, he still has some 400kg of highly enriched uranium to play with. Indeed, an initial Pentagon intelligence assessment concluded that recent raids have only set Iran’s nuclear programme back by a matter of months.

So while Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed a “historic victory”, some Israeli experts have cautioned against premature euphoria.

“In Israel we are sure we have won,” says Danny Citrinowicz, a former Israeli military intelligence officer focused on Iran. “But in every sense, the Iranians will think they managed to stay for 12 days, bravely. They will say they withstood Israel and America, and they managed to hurt Israel too. So they were not defeated and that, in a sense, is a victory.”

One-and-a-half out of three

Israel had two – possibly three – military objectives. The destruction of Iran’s nuclear programme; the degrading of its military; and the collapse of its regime.

The last, and grandest, has clearly failed – at least for now.

Iranians did not take to the streets in an uprising, and nor did Khamenei’s inner circle mount a coup to force the old man into retirement in the interests of preserving the regime.

If anything, he may be more secure. The hunt for possible traitors has already begun. If previous crackdowns are any guide, the purge will be both ruthless and bloody.

The second objective – degrading Iran’s military – looks to have been a roaring tactical success, although both the Iranians and Israelis will keep the details of the destruction secret. But it is clear Iran’s military has taken a mauling.

But the first and most important objective – and the only one shared by the US – is shrouded in uncertainty.

The Defense Intelligence Agency evaluation leaked to American media is only an initial, “low confidence”, assessment of the outcome of attacks on Iranian nuclear sites based on immediately available data. It found the strikes did not succeed in collapsing key underground infrastructure, although they had effectively sealed off the entrances to two target facilities.

Meanwhile, anonymous sources familiar with the report told US media that Iran’s 400kg of 60-per-cent-enriched uranium – thought to be enough for 10 bombs – appeared to have been moved and was not destroyed.

Those claims have been disputed by President Donald Trump, who insisted the US strikes had “completely destroyed” Iran’s nuclear facilities and set the Islamic Republic’s programme back by “decades”.

But some in Israel’s intelligence community share the concerns flagged by the Pentagon’s report, and worry Iran may have secret facilities untouched by the recent strikes.

“I’m sure they have a hidden place somewhere with some hundreds, if not thousands of centrifuge[s], and they have material all there in several places all over Iran,” says Sima Shine, a former head of Mossad, Israel’s overseas intelligence service.

“They cannot do anything now, tomorrow, but in the future, they have all the capabilities [to build a bomb],” she adds.

More important of all is political calculus.

بهت گفته بودم – or ‘I told you so’ in Farsi

For years, hardline Iranian commanders have urged Khamenei to stop procrastinating and just build a damned bomb. No other deterrent, they argued, could protect the regime from American or Israeli attack.

Until now, Khamenei has resisted those calls, instead hoping that just the ability to build a bomb could provide the deterrent, but avoid the costs of actually doing so.

With the 12-day war proving that theory useless, the weaponeers will now feel vindicated, and will push their views even harder in Tehran.

“It’s exactly the kind of debate that [they will] have at the Supreme National Security Council in Iran, and the Supreme Leader will have to decide about it,” says Citrinowicz.

“If you had asked me before this, I would say Khamenei will not during his lifetime instruct the scientists to build a nuclear bomb, because he understands that the price is too grave. But now they have already paid the price. Do they want to continue to pay future prices? They don’t want to be exposed to the mercy of the West.”

The backlash

In Iran, a backlash against nuclear co-operation with the international community is already underway.

Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, announced on Tuesday that MPs were “seeking to pass a bill that will suspend Iran’s co-operation with the [International Atomic Energy] Agency, IAEA, until we receive concrete assurances of its professional conduct as an international organisation”.

Previously, such rhetoric might have been seen as largely theatrical, rather than evidence of imminent intent to weaponise.

But “everything we thought we knew about Iran has been changed by this war,” says Citrinowicz.

“Until the current war, Iran preferred to do everything by its own capabilities,” he says. “But if they understand that they need something quick, they might change their nuclear strategy regarding that, and prefer to buy a bomb. For example, from North Korea.”

The North Korean model

North Korea may provide inspiration in other ways.

After the US invaded Iraq in 2003, Iran shelved its nuclear weapons programme to avoid a similar fate. Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi did the same.

But North Korea, the third member of George W Bush’s “axis of evil” after Iran and Iraq, instead doubled down, and in 2006 tested its first nuclear weapon. The subsequent fates of those regimes have been very different.

Gaddafi was killed by an uprising backed by Nato in 2011. Iran has just been bombed comprehensively by Israel and America.

From the point of view of regime survival, perhaps Kim Jong-il and his son, Kim Jong-un, made the right choice. But can Iran replicate its nuclear dash?

In many ways, Iran is – or was – well ahead of the North Korean starting point.

It has already mastered domestic uranium enrichment and has studied weaponisation. It has a large domestic resource of scientists trained in nuclear physics. And it already has a chunk of highly enriched material to start working with.

The North Koreans, by contrast, began by building a plutonium bomb with material bred in an ordinary nuclear reactor – a technology they learnt from the Soviets.

That is a complicated, painstaking process that limited them to building one bomb a year.

It was only later, with information bought from a corrupt Pakistani scientist, that they mastered uranium enrichment and were able to churn out simpler and quicker-to-build uranium-based bombs.

If Sima Shine is right that the Iranians have managed to preserve some centrifuges, they could spin up their 400kg of 60-per-cent-enriched material to weapons-grade 90 per cent in just a couple of days.

The tricky bit is moulding the fissile material into the right shape and fitting it with explosive charge and a neutron initiator designed to provoke a chain reaction at just the right moment.

Once the mechanism is built, it must be fitted onto a warhead and mounted on a delivery system – in Iran’s case, a Shabab-3 liquid-fuelled ballistic missile.

Those are fiddly engineering problems, but ones that Iran is known to have already made progress on, says David Albright, a former weapons inspector.

“They have some challenges in finishing up the design and other development steps. So I think six months is what they would need from start to finish” to make the actual weapon, and maybe “several more months” to mount it on a missile, he told The Telegraph before the American attack on Fordow.

“The weapons-grade uranium part could be done very quickly and probably would be done toward the end of that six months,” he adds.

There is another lesson from Korea, he says.

“The Iranians designed their bomb so that it wouldn’t need a nuclear test in order to have assurance it would work. But they may indeed test one if they wanted to assert their nuclear status.

“North Korea did that same kind of programme and it fired at one tenth of the expected yield. So you can make a mistake. In the North Korean case, they then saw their mistake and corrected it. The same thing could happen to Iran. That’s why I think it takes longer than a couple months from start to finish on the design. I mean, they have to be careful, because things can misfire.”

Iran’s missile forces have also been decimated by Israeli strikes, so it is unclear how many Shahabs it still has, or how quickly it could build more.

Of course, Iran’s newly promoted military chiefs may not want to wait to rebuild their nuclear and missile industries, especially if they think a bomb is their only chance of escaping the fate of their predecessors. In that case, they might seek an off-the-shelf option.

North Korea is believed to have sold nuclear weapons technology in the past. Specifically, it provided the technology for the Syrian reactor at Al Kibar that Israel destroyed in 2007.

It is the only country known to have done so, says Citrinowicz, making it the logical candidate for the Iranians to approach, especially given both countries’ alliance with Russia in Ukraine.

Rule nothing out

But there is a big problem. All of this would depend on the Iranian nuclear programme remaining so secret that neither Israel nor the US could discover it and destroy it. Given the level of intelligence penetration Iran suffered over the past two weeks, there is no guarantee of that.

“I’m not saying this is going to happen, but I’m saying that we have to look outside the box. We have to be ready for the unexpected,” says Citrinowicz.

“Everything that we knew about Iran changed dramatically after our attack. In this situation right now, we cannot rule out anything.”

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Iran turns to internal crackdown in wake of 12-day war

Iranian authorities are pivoting from a ceasefire with Israel to intensify an internal security crackdown across the country with mass arrests, executions and military deployments, particularly in the restive Kurdish region, officials and activists said.

Within days of Israel's airstrikes beginning on June 13, Iranian security forces started a campaign of widespread arrests accompanied by an intensified street presence based around checkpoints, the officials and activists said.

Some in Israel and exiled opposition groups had hoped the military campaign, which targeted Revolutionary Guards and internal security forces as well as nuclear sites, would spark a mass uprising and the overthrow of the Islamic Republic.

While Reuters has spoken to numerous Iranians angry at the government for policies they believed had led to the Israeli attack, there has been no sign yet of any significant protests against the authorities.

However, one senior Iranian security official and two other senior officials briefed on internal security issues said the authorities were focused on the threat of possible internal unrest, particularly in Kurdish areas.

Revolutionary Guard and Basij paramilitary units were put on alert and internal security was now the primary focus, said the senior security official.

The official said authorities were worried about Israeli agents, ethnic separatists and the People's Mujahideen Organisation, an exiled opposition group that has previously staged attacks inside Iran.

Activists within the country are lying low.

"We are being extremely cautious right now because there's a real concern the regime might use this situation as a pretext," said a rights activist in Tehran who was jailed during mass protests in 2022.

The activist said he knew dozens of people who had been summoned by authorities and either arrested or warned against any expressions of dissent.

Iranian rights group HRNA said on Monday it had recorded arrests of 705 people on political or security charges since the start of the war.

Many of those arrested have been accused of spying for Israel, HRNA said. Iranian state media reported three were executed on Tuesday in Urmia, near the Turkish border, and the Iranian-Kurdish rights group Hengaw said they were all Kurdish.

Iran's Foreign and Interior Ministries did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

CHECKPOINTS AND SEARCHES

One of the officials briefed on security said troops had been deployed to the borders of Pakistan, Iraq and Azerbaijan to stop infiltration by what the official called terrorists. The other official briefed on security acknowledged that hundreds had been arrested.

Iran's mostly Sunni Muslim Kurdish and Baluch minorities have long been a source of opposition to the Islamic Republic, chafing against rule from the Persian-speaking, Shi'ite government in Tehran.

The three main Iranian Kurdish separatist factions based in Iraqi Kurdistan said some of their activists and fighters had been arrested and described widespread military and security movements by Iranian authorities.

Ribaz Khalili from the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (KDPI) said Revolutionary Guards units had deployed in schools in Iran's Kurdish provinces within three days of Israel's strikes beginning and gone house-to-house for suspects and arms.

The Guards had taken protective measures too, evacuating an industrial zone near their barracks and closing major roads for their own use in bringing reinforcements to Kermanshah and Sanandaj, two major cities in the Kurdish region.

A cadre from the Free Life Party of Kurdistan (PJAK), who gave her nom de guerre of Fatma Ahmed, said the party had counted more than 500 opposition members being detained in Kurdish provinces since the airstrikes began.

Ahmed and an official from the Kurdish Komala party, who spoke on condition of anonymity, both described checkpoints being set up across Kurdish areas with physical searches of people as well as checks of their phones and documents.