What will Iran do next? How they could copy North Korea and race for the bomb

Telegraph

25-06-2025

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.
'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 United States – is shrouded in uncertainty.
No one seems to know how badly the bombing damaged Iran's enrichment and processing facilities. No one seems to know the location of Iran's 400kg of 60 per cent-enriched uranium – enough for almost a dozen bombs. And nor is it clear that all Iran's nuclear facilities were even known to the Israelis.
'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,' Sima Shine, a former head of Mossad, Israel's overseas intelligence service, told The Telegraph.
'They cannot do anything now, tomorrow, but in the future, they have all the capabilities [to build a bomb].'
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 cooperation 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 cooperation 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 United States 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 Jon 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 weapon-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 they still have, or how quickly they could build more.
Israeli officials have claimed the bombing raids set the Iranian nuclear program back by up to two years.
But can Khamenei wait that long?
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.
They are the only country known to have done so, says Citrinowicz, making them 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 or America 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.'