Wednesday, 25 June 2025

Was Iran's uranuim-enrichment plant "obliterated"

Donald Trump chose the word "obliterated" when he announced the successful hits by 30,000lb bombs onto Iran's nuclear facility underground at Fordo. Ever since there have been doubts cast on how much damage was actually done. The US Defence Intelligence Agency which I guuess will now be abolished, reported (and it was leaked of course) that only enough damage was done to put back Iran's nuke programme by a few months. Trump is furious and has stuck to his favourite adjective, "obliterated". I hope for the sake of the world that Trump is right and the DIA is wrong or at least premature with its assessment. But if the DIA turns out to be right, then it means the dropping of FOURTEEN Massive Ordnance Penetraors(MOPs) by seven B-2 staelth bombers didn't do the trick after all. To be honest, there was always doubt about whether these mighty bombs could actually reach the parts that had to be reached, way way down under a mountain. Anyway, Iran smartly removed key equipment as well as the 400 kilos of 60 per cent-enriched uranium from Fordo and from Natanz, another nuke facility hit by MOPs. General Dan Caine, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said that battle-damage assessment still has to be completed. But Trump has made up his mmind that the Iranian sites have been obliterated. So someone must have told him that this was the case, or was that someone too scared to tell him the truth. Even Marco Rubio, the secretary of state who has been totally loyal to his master so far, has suggested the bombing caused severe damage but didn't use the word "obliterated". The battle-damage assessment is going to be pretty tricky if it's seen through the eyes of spy satellites because the images, while showing big craters in the mountain, don't show us the inside of the plants down below. This is not going to be resolved one way or the other in a matter of days but it certainly hasn't helped Trump's case that someone inside the DIA leaked the initial findings to the media. But then this is what always happens in the US.

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