The US-Israel war with Iran began on February 28, 2026. Both the United States and Israel have publicly stated the same primary military objective: the elimination of Iran's capacity to develop a nuclear weapon. Twenty-three days later, the International Atomic Energy Agency's Director General, Rafael Grossi, said in a Sunday interview that the current war's strikes have had a "relatively marginal" impact on Iran's nuclear program — and that last June's 12-day war did more damage than this one so far.
This is not a fringe assessment. Grossi leads the only international body with inspectors physically on the ground monitoring Iran's nuclear facilities. His agency has been tracking Iranian nuclear activity continuously since the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). What he says about the physical state of Iran's program carries more direct evidentiary weight than any government's public characterization.
The gap between the stated war aim and the IAEA's assessment of progress toward it is the story this article examines.
The Stated Objective
The language from both governments has been explicit. BBC reporting confirmed: "Both Israel and the US have set the elimination of any possible Iranian capacity to develop a nuclear bomb as the key aim of the war."
This is not a secondary objective or a diplomatic talking point — it is the primary stated justification for the military operation. The public case for the war rests on the claim that Iran was advancing toward nuclear weapons capability and that military strikes were necessary to prevent it.
Iran disputes this characterization. Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation has consistently maintained its program is civilian in nature. Iran signed and then withdrew from the JCPOA under pressure from US sanctions reimposed in 2018. Iran's enrichment levels had reached approximately 60% purity before the war — below the ~90% weapons-grade threshold but above the 3.67% cap set by the JCPOA.
What Has Been Struck
Natanz — Iran's primary uranium enrichment facility — has been hit multiple times across two separate military conflicts:
The BBC confirmed: "Natanz was also targeted in the first days of the war, which started on 28 February, by US-Israeli strikes, as well as during the 12-day war last June." On Saturday March 22, Iranian state TV said Iran's Dimona strike was in retaliation for a fresh US-Israeli strike on Natanz. The IDF, when asked, said it was "not aware of a strike in the area" — a non-denial that left the Saturday Natanz strike unconfirmed officially.
Iran's own Atomic Energy Organisation, responding to the Saturday strike reports, described any attack as "a violation of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons" but said "no leakage of radioactive materials was reported and there is no danger to residents of the surrounding areas."
What the IAEA Director General Said
Rafael Grossi's Sunday statement is the most authoritative public assessment of the strikes' effectiveness from an independent source. His characterization: the current war has had "relatively marginal" impact on Iran's nuclear program compared to what last June's 12-day conflict achieved.
This statement contains several implications worth separating:
First: It implicitly confirms that last June's 12-day war did cause meaningful damage to Iran's nuclear program. That conflict — which Ranked's prior coverage has referenced but not examined in detail — preceded the current war by approximately eight months and appears to have been a significant military event in its own right.
Second: It implies that in 23 days of the current, larger-scale conflict, the US and Israel have achieved less nuclear-program damage than Israel achieved in 12 days last summer. The reasons for this discrepancy are not publicly known — possible explanations include Iran hardening its facilities between the two conflicts, different targeting decisions, more effective Iranian dispersal of nuclear materials, or simply less accurate strike execution.
Third: The IAEA has confirmed no radiation releases at any Iranian nuclear site across all strikes. This means either the strikes are not hitting the most sensitive parts of the facilities, the facilities are structured to contain radiation even when hit, or the strikes are affecting supporting infrastructure (power, equipment, personnel) rather than the enrichment hardware itself.
Why Nuclear Facilities Are Hard to Destroy
The difficulty of destroying a hardened nuclear program through air strikes is well-documented in military history. The specific challenge with Iran is that its key facilities — particularly Natanz and the Fordow enrichment plant — are built underground, beneath rock and reinforced concrete, specifically to survive air attack.
The Fordow facility, for example, is built into a mountain near Qom, approximately 80–100 meters underground. The US has developed the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) — a 30,000-pound bunker-busting bomb — specifically to reach deeply buried facilities like Fordow. Whether MOPs have been used in the current conflict has not been confirmed publicly.
Natanz's main enrichment hall is above ground but its centrifuge halls are underground. Strikes on Natanz have historically targeted above-ground infrastructure (power systems, administrative buildings, support equipment) rather than the deeply buried centrifuge halls directly — because the deeply buried sections require specific munitions that the US has but Israel does not possess in sufficient quantity.
The pattern of no radiation releases across multiple strikes is consistent with strikes hitting above-ground support infrastructure rather than the underground enrichment hardware itself.
The Nuclear Exchange Pattern
While US-Israeli strikes have targeted Iran's nuclear infrastructure, Iran has responded by striking Israeli towns adjacent to Israel's own undeclared nuclear facility — the Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center near Dimona.
The facility is approximately 13km from the town of Dimona, which was struck on Saturday. The IAEA said it was "not aware of any damage to the nuclear research facility." Israel has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and maintains a policy of nuclear ambiguity — neither confirming nor denying its arsenal — for approximately six decades.
Both sides have now conducted strikes in the vicinity of the other's nuclear infrastructure, multiple times, without triggering radiation releases at either site. The IAEA is monitoring both. The pattern — strike, counter-strike near nuclear sites, no radiation, repeat — has no direct precedent in the history of nuclear-armed states or states with nuclear programs.
The Endgame Problem
If the IAEA's assessment is accurate — that 23 days of the current war have done less damage to Iran's nuclear program than 12 days of last summer's conflict — then a central question emerges about the war's logic: what military end state would constitute achieving the stated objective?
Destroying a deeply hardened, dispersed nuclear program through air power alone has never been accomplished in the history of modern warfare. The closest analogues — Iraq's Osirak reactor (1981), Syria's Al-Kibar facility (2007) — involved single reactors, not distributed enrichment programs with thousands of centrifuges across multiple hardened sites.
Iraq's nuclear program in the 1990s was eliminated not through air strikes but through the combination of the Gulf War, UN inspections under the UNSCOM regime, and sustained sanctions over more than a decade. Iran's program, which has been running for 40+ years and has significant underground infrastructure, is a fundamentally different scale of problem.
Trump's 48-hour ultimatum — reopen the Strait of Hormuz or face power plant strikes — expires Monday. The stated war aim is nuclear disarmament of Iran. The IAEA says that aim hasn't been achieved. The question of how those two facts reconcile has not been answered publicly by either the US or Israeli government.
The IAEA monitors Iran's nuclear sites. Its chief says the strikes haven't worked. That assessment comes from the only independent body with people on the ground.