I've seen all the kerfuffle around our bombing of the Iranian nuke sites and people waving their arms and shouting that we didn't do all that much damage. I find that almost impossible to believe.
The combined intel capabilities of Israel and America are unmatched in the world. The Israelis have Mossad agents on the ground in Iran and our SIGINT and satellite intel are terrific. I'd bet a large stack of money that there were UAVs floating around over all of the target sites as well.
Israel has an existential interest in making sure the Iranian nuke effort was wiped out. The attacks on Iran were a one-off. Israel isn't going to be given permanent carte blanche to bomb Iran.
Further, Iran was flat on its back. It couldn't defend itself at all. There was no reason we couldn't have sent the B-2s back several more times and let Israel smack Iran around for another week. We had a pair of carriers in the area who never got off a single air strike.
In order for me to believe that we didn't obliterate Iran's nuke facilities, you'd have to convince me that the Israeli and US intel operations whiffed on their damage assessments after the strikes. There is no way Israel would have called off its attacks or even moved to secondary and tertiary targets, like they did near the end, if they had thought Iran still possessed a significant portion of its uranium enrichment capabilities.
I don't care what a handful of leakers tell the press, I simply don't believe it. I mean, it's possible that the Iranians outfoxed us all, but that seems to be the longest of longshots.
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| Fordow is gone, man, solid gone. |
2 comments:
I think we need to remember that there are two distinct things that needed to be destroyed:
1. The enrichment facility itself. This is probably knocked out for the forseeable future. Gas centrifuges are finicky, high-precision machines that run at unreasonably high speeds (about 90,000 RPM), and will destroy themselves if they aren't tuned exactly right. Even without a direct hit, they will probably need a complete rebuild before they can be used again.
2. The already-enriched uranium. This is more of a problem. A drum of uranium oxide or a cylinder of solidified UF6 is going to be highly resistant to anything but a direct hit. A near miss will just kind of jounce them around. If the Iranians have managed to make even a few pounds of 90% U-235 to act as an initiator for a bomb, they could use their 60% U-235 to bulk it up to something serious. I am not confident that they don't already have the materials to make a bomb. I guess we are likely to find out in the next few months.
Tim, I deeply appreciate your well-considered and educated reply. I suspect our intel units had that same information. I cannot imagine a scenario where we would take such dramatic, irrevocable action and not be substantially assured we got it all.
When the Israelis moved on to taking out the Iranian secret police units, it suggested that they had simply run out of nuke targets to hit. It's possible that, as some suggest, they moved some of their material elsewhere and the Israelis were hoping for a popular uprising against the Mullahs which would provide the coup de grace to Iran's nuclear ambitions.
If I'd been involved in the planning, I'd have gone for everything at once. Nuke materials, centrifuges, scientists, facilities and enough of the secret police to make it much easier to take out the Mullahs and return to the good old days of hot Persian girls in bikinis.
PS - One of my high school crushes was a Persian girl. Good gravy, that chick was hot.
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