Equipment key to producing a nuclear bomb was destroyed in strikes on Isfahan — NYT

Israeli and American airstrikes at Iran’s Isfahan nuclear site destroyed equipment key to the production of nuclear weapons, according to The New York Times.

The report says the equipment is used for a process known as metallization that converts enriched uranium gas into metal, one of the final steps to producing the explosive core inside a nuclear bomb.

Analysts cited by the US newspaper say that Tehran intensified its nuclear activities at Isfahan after US President Donald Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, adding that the strikes on the metallization gear have denied the Islamic Republic the ability to assemble an atomic weapon in the near future.

“It’s a bottleneck,” David Albright, a former UN nuclear inspector, tells The New York Times regarding the destruction of the equipment. “They have to rebuild it.”