SEYMOUR HERSH
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December 10, 2025

ARE WE STILL FIGHTING IRAN?

American experts think the regime in Tehran is teetering while Israelis believe it’s rebuilding its defenses—another confrontation is looming

SEYMOUR HERSH

DEC 10
PAID

I’ve been writing about Iran for decades. I’ve focused on its efforts to become a nuclear power, which the United States and Israel have found worrisome, to say the least. I was always aware that something bizarre was going on because every time I wrote about Iran for the New Yorker experts the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency invariably depicted the country as being no more than five years away from the bomb. I understood that the large Israeli nuclear arsenal had been built with covert help authorized in secrecy by US presidents and had been stored for decades in underground bunkers or deployed in strategically placed underground silos. The weapons always posed an immediate danger to Iran’s security, even its existence.

Last June a group of American B-2 bombers flew around the globe and struck the major nuclear-enrichment plant at Fordow, Iran’s most important weapons facility, with deep-penetrating bunker-buster bombs while other aircraft and Tomahawk missiles, launched from sea, hit other vital nuclear-related facilities throughout the nation. In a televised address, President Donald Trump told the nation that Iran’s nuclear sites were “completely and fully obliterated” and warned Iran not to carry out any retaliatory strikes: the leadership in Tehran had a choice between “peace or tragedy.”

There has been no significant Iranian retaliation since then, but the old cliché that you are where you sit is very much at play in US-Iranian relations today. The joint US-Israeli attacks went far beyond merely targeting known nuclear sites and caused enormous damage to military bases, government facilities, and military and civilian housing. There were numerous successful and attempted assassinations of key government officials as well as scientists linked to nuclear activity and other vital military and intelligence specialists. Some of the killings were carried out by Israeli agents who, I was told by an Israeli source, had been planted on the ground months or years earlier or smuggled across the border at the last minute.

I was told that one major Israeli plan—to bomb the Iranian parliament building and kill or injure all or most of the religious leaders at work there—was stopped due to US fears of unforeseen consequences.

In recent months Iranian opposition groups have reported an ongoing water-supply crisis throughout the nation as well as increasing inflation and diminishing air quality in Tehran and other major cities. Iran is still a major producer of oil, and international sanctions have led the government to offer heavy discounts. The religious government headed by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei remains in control, but there have been published reports that many women, especially young women in Tehran and other major cities, are increasingly going out in public without head coverings, in direct violation of the regime’s dicta.

Some well-informed officials in Washington believe the Iranian leadership is confronted right now with an existential crisis. “Iran is about to have a revolution,” one experienced intelligence expert on the Middle East told me. He then listed the reasons: “Not enough water. Nothing to eat. No money. No public services, no buses . . . in the major cities. No organization—no one is in charge and the key military leadership is dead,” a reference to the success of Israel’s assassination program last summer.

“The state is on the verge of total collapse,” the official concluded. “This is a victory for Trump. Iran has been a thorn for four decades in the side of American policy in the Middle East. . . . Iran has not fallen yet, but Israel is not planning any more to demolish Iran.”

A well-informed Israeli close to the military leadership took issue with Trump’s declaration last June, that Iran’s nuclear capability had been wiped out by US bombing. Not so, he told me. Israeli intelligence believes that “Iran still has about 420 kilograms of uranium left. . . . It is buried underground”—not in the destroyed Fordow plant—“and has yet to be retrieved, but it is intact. The notion that Iran’s nuclear-weapons capability has been ‘obliterated’ exists only in Trump’s fantasy world.” The 420 kilograms of uranium, if retrieved intact and enriched by a centrifuge, could produce enough material for up to twenty nuclear warheads.

The Israeli did not say whether or where Iran is currently digging its way to an underground cache, and it’s not clear whether Iran could enrich the uranium, if an undamaged centrifuge still exists somewhere underground there, to the 90 percent level that assures a chain reaction.

The remote possibility of a continuing Iranian nuclear threat is, however, not at the top of the agenda on Iran for the Israel Defense Forces, the Israeli told me. The immediate concern is evidence of an all-out effort to rebuild its air defense systems, which were put out of commission by the Israeli intelligence in the days before the US strikes, with no opposition. Israeli intelligence shut down all communications and warnings going to and from the Iranian air defense batteries before the US attack began, leaving Iran unable to defend itself against the bombings.

Israel is convinced, I was told, that “the first elements” of an upgraded Iranian air defense system will become operative in late summer. Therefore, the Israeli told me, Israel is now planning “to launch a new, massive attack on Iran in the spring,” before the Iranian system “comes on line.” Israel also believes Iran has been secretly reconstructing its capability to manufacture missiles and missile launchers; the involved plants and weapons also will be “prime targets” for the Israeli Air Force next summer, when the first wave of launchers are expected to be ready to go.

I shared details of the Israeli planning with the American official for his assessment. He acknowledged that, as usual, there is a “difference of opinions on the degradation of life in Iran and level of discontent” there. “Bad, getting worse” in Iran “but no real solutions possible…may have some enriched [uranium] left over but under rubble and not accessible. Not bomb-worthy anyway.

“Spring,” he said, “is a long way off. Any planning now is pure contingency plan. Nothing on the schedule at this point. IDF watching developments.”

The religious Iranian regime has been in power since the revolution that overthrew the US-supported Shah in 1979. America and Israel have been hoping for its overthrow for forty-six years. Iran’s longtime allies in Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon are no longer in power and have been abandoned by Russia. It’s no surprise that the enemies of the ayatollahs expect the next domino to fall.

In the world of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu anything is possible.