What satellite images reveal about damage to Iran’s nuclear sites

Visuals, expert analysis and official statements shed light on Iran’s nuclear sites after U.S. strikes.

By Meg Kelly, Joyce Sohyun Lee, Nilo Tabrizy, Evan Hill and Dylan Moriarty

Satellite images provide the first glimpses of the aftermath of U.S. strikes on three sites said to be central to Iran’s nuclear program, revealing severe damage at aboveground facilities as well as the entry points left by bombs that burrowed deep underground to target some of the program’s most protected operations.

About 2:10 a.m. Sunday local time, a B-2 stealth bomber dropped the first two bunker-busting Massive Ordnance Penetrators, or MOPs, on the heavily fortified uranium enrichment facility at Fordow, according to Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The 30,000-pound precision-guided bombs are designed to destroy subterranean targets. Seven B-2s dropped a total of 14 bombs there and at an enrichment site in Natanz, officials said.

A U.S. submarine launched more than two dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles at “key surface infrastructure targets” at a facility in Isfahan, Caine said. The Tomahawks were the last strikes of the U.S. attack on the three nuclear infrastructure targets, which ended at around 2:35 a.m. local time.

President Donald Trump said the strikes “completely and totally obliterated” the facilities. Pentagon leaders used a more measured description at a news conference Sunday, saying the sites all sustained “extremely severe damage” and they believed they had achieved a “destruction of capabilities” at Fordow.

A senior Israeli official told The Washington Post that an early assessment shows the site in Isfahan was “annihilated” and the facilities in Fordow and Natanz were “severely damaged.” The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence.

Experts cautioned against drawing conclusions too quickly, as underground impacts depend on a variety of factors, including depth of detonation, surrounding geology and any secondary explosions due to any combustible material in the structure. But satellite images provide important early indications about what was hit, they said.

Fordow uranium enrichment facility

Satellite images taken Sunday morning show at least six apparent bomb entry points — two clusters of three such points — along the ridge above the Fordow facility, according to experts. Built into a mountain about 60 miles south of Tehran, the site was considered largely impenetrable to any bomb but the MOP.

Clustering several munitions around a single point of impact is a common targeting method for destroying bunkers and well-hardened structures, said Wes Bryant, the former chief of civilian harm assessments at the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, one of a dozen experts in satellite imagery or munitions interviewed by The Post for this story. He said that in such cases multiple bombs sometimes pass through a single entry point.

The experts said the strikes appear to have targeted a 250-meter-long part of the facility containing centrifuges used to enrich uranium. The images shed little light on the status of that equipment, which is hundreds of feet below ground.

Satellite images from the days before the U.S. strike showed “unusual truck and vehicular activity” at the Fordow facility, according to a senior analyst at the satellite firm Maxar Technologies, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the matter.

On Thursday, there were 16 cargo trucks along the access road leading to the underground complex. Images taken the next day show that most of the trucks had moved a little more than a half-mile northwest, farther from the facility. Other trucks and bulldozers were positioned near the site’s entrance, including one truck directly next to it.

Spencer Faragasso, senior research fellow at the Institute for Science and International Security, said the vehicles appear to be dump trucks and that, among other possible reasons, workers may have backfilled the tunnels in and out of the facility as a precautionary measure to prevent the spread of hazardous material.

“If they evacuated any equipment, it had to happen prior to the filling of the tunnels,” Faragasso said, referencing the challenge of handling the uranium and centrifuges, which use hazardous chemicals and can be easily damaged. “It would be a large and complicated undertaking.”

“They probably shut things down and removed what they could, then sealed it up,” said Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute’s James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, leaving Washington and Jerusalem to play “whack-a-mole with Iran.”

Now, the tunnel entrances near where trucks were seen appear to be filled with dirt, either from the shock wave of the bombing or from previous Iranian activity, experts said.

Isfahan Nuclear Technology Center

About 215 miles south of Tehran, the Isfahan Nuclear Technology Center — the country’s largest nuclear research complex and home to thousands of nuclear scientists, three Chinese research reactors and laboratories linked to Iran’s atomic program — was targeted in Israeli attacks earlier this month. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, those strikes damaged at least 10 buildings on the complex, including the central chemical laboratory, a reactor fuel manufacturing plant and a nuclear material storage site.

Among other functions, the Isfahan facility converted natural uranium into a compound that could be enriched at centrifuges in Natanz or Fordow.

Satellite images after the U.S. strikes show damage and destruction in the complex, with much of the area covered in debris and ash. The complex’s main uranium conversion facility was “severely damaged,” Faragasso said in an email to The Post, “knocking the facility out of operation.”

The entrances to an underground tunnel complex also appears to have been hit, according to the IAEA. The tunnels, north of the main area, are believed to be used to store enriched uranium, Lewis said.

The status of Iran’s almost 900 pounds of highly enriched uranium is not currently known. Isfahan had in the past been a main storage site for Iran’s enriched uranium, according to 2023 reports by the Institute for Science and International Security. IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi told CNN on Sunday that “Iran has made no secret that they have protected this material.”

Similar to what was seen in Fordow, trucks and heavy equipment were spotted in satellite imagery late last week, near the entrances to these tunnels, which were later seen buried with soil, according to Lewis and Faragasso.

The preparation around the tunnel entrances indicates that the Iranians had time to prepare for the Isfahan strikes, Lewis said.

“The destruction of Isfahan NTC will set the program back, but individual machinery pieces have likely been moved out, but not all,” said Decker Eveleth of the Center for Naval Analyses, an expert on satellite imagery analysis of nuclear and ballistic missile power.

Natanz enrichment facility

The Natanz enrichment facility, roughly 140 miles south of Tehran, is Iran’s primary enrichment site with two enrichment plants, one above and another below ground. An additional facility nearby, a newer addition, is buried deep underground and is used to manufacture centrifuges.

Israeli airstrikes hit the Natanz facilities on June 13, destroying electricity infrastructure as well as the aboveground part of one facility where centrifuges were installed, and seriously damaging the enrichment area underground, according to the IAEA.

George Herbert, a missile and explosives expert at the Middlebury Institute for International Studies, told The Post that the Israeli ground-penetrating attacks “may or may not have” destroyed that area of the facility.

Satellite imagery taken after the U.S. strike shows at least one penetration hole from an MOP, also known as a GBU-57, above the buried enrichment facility, according to experts. They said they saw little evidence of new damage to the aboveground facilities.

The underground facility was likely destroyed given the power of the munition and shallow depth of the site, Lewis and Faragasso said. Herbert said he believed that most of the explosive energy of the MOP “expanded into the underground spaces efficiently, and would have destroyed all equipment at least to some distance away.”

The strike probably did not destroy the structural columns holding the halls up, or there would have been a collapse visible on the surface, he said.

Based on the satellite images, Lewis said, the underground facility used to manufacture centrifuges appears not to have been hit in Sunday’s strikes.

Jarrett Ley, Jonathan Baran, Alex Horton and Souad Mekhennet contributed to this report.