Have the American and Israeli strikes destroyed Iran’s nuclear stockpiles, rendered them inaccessible, or left them intact and waiting? Months after the initial bombing campaign, that question remains unanswered in any way the public can verify.
But there is, suddenly, a glimmering. The legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh has just supplied a piece of the answer that, if true, is considerably darker than anything Washington has acknowledged.
In a July 8 Substack post titled “Iran’s Radioactive Dilemma,” Hersh reports that American and Israeli intelligence have concluded that two of Iran’s three underground uranium storage sites, at Fordow and Isfahan, have gone “hot.” Citing unnamed sources “close to” both U.S. and Israeli spy agencies, he maintains that the lead-and-concrete canisters built to hold Iran’s partially enriched uranium for decades have degraded inside the tunnels, and that at least two Iranian technicians died after entering the contaminated areas.
One “source close to Israel” disputes Hersh’s framing, telling him the story is Trumpist misinformation designed to let the administration declare the nuclear threat gone and walk away with a deal.
Hersh gives us only the outline of this dispute and not the full texture of his sourcing. His story reads like a calculated pump-primer designed to tease further revelations out of the woodwork.
Disclaimer: I have given the article only cursory treatment here out of deference to its paid-subscriber status. If you want the incomparable, unvarnished Hersh, sign up for his Substack site and read the master himself.
A President Talking Past Himself
Whatever else the Hersh article does, it lands atop a public record already thick with contradiction, and most of that contradiction comes from the president himself.
In the hours after the June 2025 strikes on Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, Trump declared that Iran’s “key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.” Vice President Vance went further, saying Iran was now incapable of building a weapon at all.
Within days Trump was already talking about bombing Iran again if it resumed enrichment. That was an odd hedge for a program supposedly obliterated, and, as PBS noted, it sat uneasily beside the president’s own claim of total destruction.
Then, in April, when asked about the roughly 900 pounds of 60-percent-enriched uranium believed still buried in Iran, Trump said the material was “so far underground, I don’t care about that,” adding that satellites could watch it well enough. The Guardian read this as another hedge, one that called into question one of the original U.S. rationales for the war.
Three weeks later, the President reversed course again, telling Reuters the United States intended to send in heavy machinery and dig the uranium out, and by early May he was insisting the stockpile be “unearthed” and destroyed under IAEA supervision.
By June he was threatening to resume the strikes if Iran didn’t “behave,” even as negotiators worked toward a deal meant to dismantle the very program he’d already declared obliterated.
A president cannot simultaneously believe that a problem has been obliterated, that it doesn’t matter because it’s buried, and that it must urgently be excavated before it becomes a weapon.
Those are not three descriptions of one reality. They are three different purported realities, and only one of them can be true.
What the Record Actually Supports
None of this means Hersh’s specific claim — degraded canisters, lethal contamination, two dead technicians — has been independently confirmed. It has not.
No wire service, no IAEA report, no satellite imagery firm has corroborated it, and Hersh himself offers no detail on the type of containers involved, the chemical form of the uranium, or how American or Israeli intelligence came to learn of deaths inside a facility the IAEA cannot even enter.
But even if you set the specific allegation aside, the surrounding picture is not nearly as reassuring as Trump’s “obliterated” claim implies.
The IAEA’s last verified inventory, before it lost access altogether in June 2025, put Iran’s 60-percent-enriched stockpile at nearly 441 kilograms, most of it in uranium-hexafluoride form. The agency says it can no longer confirm where that material is, what condition it’s in, or whether it has moved.
IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi has said much of it likely sits in the Isfahan tunnel complex. Reuters has reported more than 200 kilograms may remain there with no sign of major movement, while the Institute for Science and International Security estimates roughly 265 to 287 kilograms at Isfahan and perhaps another 80 at Fordow, a figure it explicitly flags as unverified.
Satellite imagery up through last month shows the tunnel entrances at Fordow still buried and the portals at Isfahan backfilled and blocked by roadblocks, with no visible attempt to reopen the underground enrichment halls.
So, to sum up, a large quantity of near-weapons-grade uranium almost certainly still exists, almost certainly still sits underground at facilities that nobody — not the IAEA, not outside journalists, not apparently even Iran on any verifiable schedule — has been able to inspect.
Whether the canisters holding it have failed is the one part of the story that remains genuinely unknown.
Why the Not-Knowing Is Dangerous
That gap in knowledge is not an academic problem. If Hersh’s sourcing is even partly right, and Iranian personnel are dying from entering these tunnels, we are talking about material that is both physically compromised and still recoverable. Iranian officials themselves reportedly believe damaged canisters can be extracted. “It only means it has to be done more carefully,” in the words of one Israeli source who spoke to Hersh.
The underlying chemistry makes that recoverability plausible. A breached uranium-hexafluoride cylinder exposed to moisture produces corrosive, toxic byproducts, and the U.S. Department of Energy’s own safety guidance notes that the chemical hazard from such a breach commonly exceeds the radiological one.
This is exactly the kind of material an aggrieved actor could still put to use.
A U.S. source told Hersh that degradation means “the nuclear threat [from Iran] is no longer there.” But there is another way to parse the issue.
An Iranian government humiliated and under bombardment, looking for a way to answer American and Israeli strikes without inviting a full war, might well decide that folding degraded or partially accessible enriched material into a radiological dispersal device and using it in a demonstration — or threatening to do so — would carry far more political shock value than anything left on the table in negotiations it no longer trusts.
Sounds far-fetched? Perhaps. But a dirty bomb does not require a working warhead. It requires radioactive material, a delivery method, and someone sufficiently enraged to use it. Ambiguity about the state of Iran’s stockpile is not a minor reporting gap. It is the precise condition under which the worst outcomes become more, not less, likely.
Trump’s Own Argument Requires an Answer
There is also a domestic political logic to demanding clarity here, one Trump ought to recognize. His entire case for tearing up the Obama-era nuclear agreement rested on the claim that its inspection regime was too weak and that America could get something better through pressure and, eventually, force.
We are in this position — a stockpile of uncertain size and location, no functioning inspections, technicians possibly dying in contaminated tunnels — in no small part because Trump walked away from a deal that, whatever its flaws, gave the IAEA continuous access to Iran’s declared nuclear sites.
If Hersh’s reporting holds up even partially, the current situation is not an improvement on that arrangement. It is worse than what the Obama deal delivered, replacing verified inspection with strikes, rubble, and guesswork. Trump owes his own argument, and the American people, some evidence that jettisoning inspections produced something safer than inspections did.
An Exclusive That Hasn’t Traveled
What’s notable is how little the Hersh story has moved beyond his own readership. No major outlet has matched it. The likeliest explanation isn’t a cover-up so much as sourcing nobody else can reach.
Hersh cites American and Israeli intelligence contacts exclusively and anonymously, with no Iranian confirmation, no IAEA statement, no imagery showing a radiological response.
And Hersh arrives at this story carrying some baggage. His 2015 account of the bin Laden raid, alleging Pakistani complicity concealed by Washington, was disputed by much of the national security press corps and never fully corroborated. (I believed it, nonetheless.) His 2023 report attributing the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage to the United States and Norway met the same fate — plausible to some, denied by every government named, unconfirmed by any independent investigation. (I believed it, for all the caveats.)
Editors who once ran Hersh’s copy without hesitation now wait for a second or third source before following him.
But make no mistake. These alleged misfires by Hersh, if you want to call them that, are the exception in a career built on the opposite habit. He is a compulsive corroborator, fanatical in his pursuit of air-tight sourcing. He also has an unusual gift for finding overlooked figures holding the whole story.
That is precisely how he broke his career-making My Lai massacre exclusive. A tip from another journalist, working off a secondhand rumor, told him only that an Army officer was being secretly court-martialed. Hersh ran that scrap down, found the lawyer, found the charge sheet, found Lieutenant William Calley himself at Fort Benning.
He then spent weeks reconstructing what had happened by interviewing soldiers, officers, and Army personnel, turning that thread into the reporting that changed how the country understood the Vietnam war, a process Hersh himself has described as starting from almost nothing.
He did it again with Abu Ghraib. CBS already held the prisoner-abuse photographs, but Hersh developed his own confidential source who supplied him the images directly. He then built out, through a network of military and intelligence officials, overwhelming evidence that the abuse reflected interrogation policy set well above the prison guards.
His original source, protected for more than twenty years, was identified publicly in the 2025 documentary Cover-Up as Camille Lo Sapio, a housewife who had received the photos from a relative serving in theater.
The instinct that produced the My Lai and Abu Ghraib blockbusters is the same instinct behind Hersh’s new, hard-to-verify story about Iran’s uranium. It doesn’t guarantee he is right. It means he’s earned the benefit of being taken seriously while we await independent corroboration.
I have my own reason to trust the Hersh instinct. Sy wrote the front-page New York Times exclusive that introduced my CIA memoir, Decent Interval, to the public, and he stayed with the story afterward, tracking the government’s retaliation against me as it unfolded. Years later, when I published my own account of that fight, Irreparable Harm, he reviewed it fairly in The Los Angeles Times, acknowledging, without self-regard, his own role in getting the original story out in the first place.
I learned a long time ago that when a piece runs under a Hersh byline, the rest of us are better off paying attention even as his journalistic peers and competitors gnash their teeth over not having the sources he has so carefully and assiduously cultivated.