The latest U.S. strikes in Iran hit the infrastructure that supports advanced uranium enrichment: centrifuge components, vacuum systems, and critical power supplies. Even striking peripheral infrastructure, like vacuum pumps or cold traps, can cripple enrichment throughput without necessarily destroying centrifuges.
Professor Anna Erickson, the Director of ETI Consortium 2.0, was recently invited to CBS News 24/7 to explain how centrifuge technology shapes nuclear weapons capability and intentions, how designs have evolved from the IR-1 to the IR-9, and why disrupting enrichment infrastructure can matter without dismantling an entire nuclear program. Watch this CBS News video here. Her article, “Why the US bombed a bunch of metal tubes − a nuclear engineer explains the importance of centrifuges to Iranian efforts to build nuclear weapons,” was published in The Conversation earlier this month. More details are available here.