Could Israel End Iran's Enrichment Capability Without the US?

The honest answer begins by correcting the question. Destroying Iran’s enrichment capability is not a task waiting to be attempted. Most of it has already been done. The centrifuges went in June 2025, in an operation whose hardest target was struck by American aircraft carrying an American weapon that no other country owns.

What that campaign did not do is account for 440.9 kilograms of enriched uranium. That is the part still outstanding, and it is not a bombing problem.

What is actually left of Iran’s enrichment capability?

Very little that anyone can find.

Analysis of the June 2026 IAEA reports records that the June 2025 attacks likely destroyed or rendered inoperable all of Iran’s installed centrifuges — almost 22,000 — across its three safeguarded enrichment sites: Natanz, the Natanz pilot plant and Fordow.

The conclusion drawn from that is the strongest statement available: for the first time in two decades, Iran has no identifiable route to produce weapon-grade uranium in its centrifuge enrichment plants. Satellite imagery shows no operational activity at the damaged facilities, and no resumption of enrichment has been verified.

One contemporaneous note is worth keeping for balance. Immediately after the June 2025 strike, the Israeli military’s own initial assessment was that Fordow had sustained serious damage but had not been completely destroyed — alongside reports that Iran may have moved equipment beforehand.

That is a real result. It is also only half the machine.

Where is the uranium, and who has seen it?

Nobody outside Iran has seen it since 13 June 2025.

Only the total is a measurement. The location breakdown is one proportion, one report and one figure the Institute explicitly flags as unconfirmed. Esfahan — the tunnel complex holding most of it — is the site inspectors have not been allowed into, and in February 2026 the IAEA recorded regular vehicle movement at its entrance.

The IAEA’s own position is unambiguous: it cannot provide any information on the current size, composition or whereabouts of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile. Iran formally suspended cooperation in July 2025, and after 28 February 2026 the agency stopped conducting verification activities under the safeguards agreement altogether. Iran has denied the agency access to 20 declared nuclear sites and one location outside facilities, and the IAEA has called nearly a year without access a matter of proliferation concern.

There is a further wrinkle from the first round. A preliminary, low-confidence US Defense Intelligence Agency assessment concluded that Iran had moved much of the stockpile before the June 2025 strikes, and that those strikes did not collapse the underground facilities. Treat the confidence level as part of the finding.

Which part of the job was American?

The part that reached the bottom of a mountain.

Fordow is built under 260 to 300 feet of rock, reinforced with concrete, about 18 miles from Qom. The only non-nuclear weapon that reaches that depth is the GBU-57A/B, a 30,000-pound penetrator and the heaviest non-nuclear weapon in the US inventory. The United States is the only state that has it, and the B-2 is the only aircraft that carries it.

The Congressional Research Service records what was used on 21 June 2025: over 125 US aircraft, including seven B-2 Spirit bombers, firing approximately 75 precision-guided weapons of which 14 were GBU-57 MOPs, over 25 minutes. The MOPs went against Natanz and Fordow, with the bulk of the firepower directed at Fordow, while a US submarine launched over two dozen Tomahawks at Isfahan.

The CRS document also contains the single most direct statement on the question this article is asking. Writing at the time, it records that Israeli officials sought direct US involvement in striking certain Iranian nuclear facilities “via capabilities Israel apparently does not have.”

That is the answer in the words of Congress’s own research service, written while it was happening. It is not a judgement about Israeli capability in general; it is a record of what was asked for and who owned it.

What did the strikes not solve?

Verification. And it is the thing that decides whether any of this holds.

Consider what is now true simultaneously:

• The centrifuges are destroyed, which can be seen from orbit.
• The uranium is unaccounted for, which cannot.
• No inspector has entered the site holding most of it in over a year.

A stockpile you cannot see is not a stockpile you have eliminated. Further strikes could damage more buildings; they cannot produce a verified inventory. Only inspectors can do that, and inspectors are a diplomatic outcome, not a military one.

That is why the analysts closest to the documents refuse to publish a breakout timeline. The Institute heads that section “Not Enough Information for Breakout Calculations”, on the basis that producing one would require unsubstantiated speculation about whether centrifuges exist and function. Anyone offering you a number of weeks is doing something the people with the best information decline to do.

What the Institute will say is narrower and worth quoting for its shape rather than its precision: before the strikes Iran could have built a first, non-missile-deliverable device within months; today it assesses that would take more than a year, with significant new uncertainty about whether such a device would even work. That is a judgement about weapon development, not a breakout clock.

Is the United States still in this?

It is trying to get out. That is the context any question about acting alone now sits in.

The 2026 war opened on 28 February with US and Israeli strikes. Since then:

The constraints reported alongside that are material rather than rhetorical: senior commanders describing the munitions stockpile as dangerously low, about $37.5bn spent by late July with roughly $67bn more requested, and a planned escalation stood down after Middle Eastern allies said they feared retaliation against their energy infrastructure. We covered that in detail in the off-ramp piece .

Note what the June memorandum did with the nuclear file: it postponed it. The question in this article was never settled by either the fighting or the deal.

So could it be done without American support?

Three answers, because the question has three parts.

The destruction of enrichment plants: largely already done, and not by Israel alone. The centrifuge halls are wrecked. On the hardest target, the weapon, the aircraft and the sortie were American. Whether Israel could have achieved the same result by other means is not something the public record can answer — and the public record is what this article is limited to.

The elimination of the material: not done, and not achievable by bombing at all. 440.9 kg is unaccounted for, held wherever Iran has put it, most likely in tunnels that survived. No air campaign converts that into a verified zero.

The guarantee that it stays destroyed: not a military question. Centrifuges can be rebuilt; the analysis notes a programme burrowing deeper. What prevents reconstitution is inspection and agreement, and Iran has tied inspector access to a final deal.

So the useful version of the answer is this. The part that bombs can do has mostly been done, and the United States did the hardest of it. The part that remains is the part bombs were never able to do. Framing it as a question about whether one country can finish the job alone assumes the job is the kind of thing that can be finished from the air, and the evidence on the table says it is not.

Sources

Checked on 9 August 2026.

The hero image is a generic arid landscape, not any facility named in this article.