Seymour Hersh

Seymour Hersh

IRAN'S RADIOACTIVE DILEMMA

Amid continued US strikes, new intelligence says Iran's partially enriched uranium has been compromised

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Seymour Hersh
Jul 08, 2026
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President Donald Trump speaks to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as he arrives at Etimesgut Air Base for the annual NATO Summit this week in Ankara, Turkey. / Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images.

President Donald Trump, in a striking change of tone, has told the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, that he is prepared to escalate the current US attacks on Iran. “We’re going to hit them hard tonight, but we’ll see how it all works out” Trump said. The targets, a report in the New York Times said, would include the nation’s infrastructure and desalination plans—all potential war crimes.

There is a previously unknown explanation for the change in tone. The US and Israeli intelligence communities have recently learned that Iran’s supposedly existential threat to Israel and the West—its underground supply of partially enriched uranium—has degraded while in underground storage. Two of the three Iranian nuclear storage depots, at Fordow and Isfahan, are “hot”—that is, filled with radioactivity from what clearly has been significant degradation of the storage containers Iran had used for the keep saving of Iran’s hope of eventually upgrading the stored material to weapons level and becoming another player in the nuclear world.

I have been told by sources close to US and Israeli intelligence that a recent inspection of the underground storage areas led to the death of at least two Iranian technicians—they may have been members of the Iranian military—who were exposed to high levels of radioactivity.

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