If they weren't planning on making nukes before, they for sure are now. Good job everyone involved!
Just couldn't wait for diplomacy to play out.
They for sure got determined making the bomb after the diplomatic solution was bombed by Trump in his previous term.
IIRC, Iran appeared to comply with the terms of the agreement and once that was out of the window they no longer complied.
Iran was hiding nuclear material during the duration JCPOA was active. They were declared in violation of the NPT by the IAEA recently for actions undertaken between 2009-2018.
You're right that the IAEA has indeed pointed to Iran's past undeclared nuclear material and activities, leading to NPT safeguard violations for the 2009-2018 period. However, it's also important to distinguish between those historical undeclared issues and the specific JCPOA compliance. For the duration it was active and before the US withdrawal, the IAEA consistently verified that Iran was adhering to its JCPOA commitments regarding its declared program. The argument is often that while those past issues were concerning, the JCPOA still provided a robust framework for monitoring Iran's active program, which was then dismantled
Iran was objectively not in compliance though [1]. The IAEA just didn’t know they weren’t so they gave Iran a seal of approval. Israel had always claimed that Iran was hiding material, which convinced Trump to leave the JCPOA, but the IAEA could only corroborate it later.
Perhaps we should be making the argument that Trump shouldn’t have only gonna off of Israeli intel, but he ended up being correct that Iran wasn’t correctly reporting their enrichment stockpile, which was a provision of JCPOA. The reason why JCPOA wasn’t revived is actually because of Iran refusing to cooperate about what they did with the undeclared nuclear material.
Yeah, that's not very honest position. You have to decide if you want to squeeze them out or make things right.
If they hid things and the agreement wasn't just trashed, that could have been a scandal that gets resolved on the path to peace. It could happen for many reasons, maybe they don't trust the West to uphold their part and wanted an insurance policy, maybe it was division within. It doesn't matter that much, it's not like they made the bomb already and were about to hit once everyone lowers their guard.
Later what we had was Iran that was on the table, trying to play nice and that was destroyed probably because of the ego of a guy who couldn't handle to stick with the agreement signed by someone he hates.
Interesting way to play nice by having dozens of secret sites that nobody knew about (nuclear archive) and recently taking enrichment to 60% (they've been caught with over 80%) and dabbling in metallization which have only military applications.
Well, whoever did that was proven right(from their standing point + Ukraine). Apparently you can't trust USA and give up your nukes. If you don't have nukes they don't honor the agreements and guarantees and even bomb you.
Unfortunately the American attitudes will result in proliferation. Not the Iranian ones.
Giving up nukes was never the intention. They would've slow-boiled the frog and we would one day wake up with a nuclear iran (with icmbs! - not banned under jpoa) if they were smart about it like dprk. Unfortunately for mullahs they weren't and got cocky and overextended. Then 10/7 happened and the rest is like they say history
Maybe or maybe not, we will never know that. Who knows how things play out when a country is integrated back in the international system and have something to lose when if get caught on checks. Maybe there would have been a book about how Iran continued its clandestine nuke program but eventually dismantled it as its society and economy normalized and having that had no benefits.
Now we know the timeline where agreements are not honored by the US.
OK but we actually kinda do know that because there were sunsets in that deal which meant we would've gotten here just a few years late.
> Who knows how things play out when a country is integrated back in the international system and have something to lose when if get caught on checks
Ah that's the Merkel's school of international relations =) We also know that with a russia example which you mentioned. Didn't work too well, did it?
Btw, DPRK were also given many concessions and reintegration opportunities (Kaesong) yet that was not the path they chose.
Look, I don't know why you believe so much in the imaginary timeline but maybe Iran would have been like Israel: having the bomb and not talking about it.
Who knows, it's all speculation at this point. The current reality is that if you don't have a nuke you get invaded. Everyone will have nuke soon. Those who fail will be destroyed because agreements, international laws etc doesn't mean anything anymore.
Why are you suddenly arguing against Israel? I mean he’s we know they have hidden nuclear weapons and will not enter into any deals or allow inspection. But they are on our side so we don’t care about that.
silly argument. iran is not a tiny country surrounded by much larger countries that want to run them into the sea. they should have invested that 500B into conventional forces instead - be a lot safer for that as a country (except that would threaten the regime).
yea enriching uranium to weapons grade in a secrete underground lair indicates no intention of developing a nuclear weapon.
> Just couldn't wait for diplomacy to play out.
For something to play out, it has to start. For something to start, someone has to start it. When no one is willing to start it, then it will never play out.
I'm sure that killing Iran's negotiator a few days before the negotiations were to take place helped deescalate the situation.
Wait, they killed the Iranian negociator?
> Just two days before U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations were set to begin, Israel assassinated the high-ranking Iranian official leading the talks
> For something to play out, it has to start. For something to start, someone has to start it. When no one is willing to start it, then it will never play out.
Very insightful, but the iranian minister had already started talks with the EU regarding the nukes[1], when Trump came in the bar and said "no you talk with us"[2]. So I don't know exactly the starting of what you're talking about.
You don’t need to be a genius to figure out that centrifuges installed 70–80 meters underground will be largely unaffected by bombs which are believed to have an effect down to a depth of 60 meters.
The New York Times reported on Saturday that they had lost track of 400kg of 60% enriched uranium, which could yield 9-10 nuclear bombs:
According to Israeli media, it is not known whether the Fordow underground nuclear complex has been destroyed.
Netanyahu has already declared victory, but Iran's nuclear capabilities will likely be completely restarted, most likely within a few years or some estimations says months.
There is no doubt that during that time Iran will strengthen its aviation, intelligence and reconnaissance, which have now failed drastically. "Regime change" goal for Israel also failed.
Many more Mossad agents and collaborators will fall in Iran over the next few months as IRGC begins its crack down and Israel will surely lose a huge portion of their main weapon. Further TRUMP declaring "no regime change" today, made this matter worse.
Iran practically has a script for its problems now. Israel has learned what will happen when Iran gets thousands of their hypersonic missiles and fixes the problem with the lack of launchers which Iran will certainly continue to produce.
Only a ceasefire has been achieved, but there will certainly be a second round (likely by Israel again once more intel is gathered), because a war like this never officially ended.
More importantly, let's not forget who paid the price at the end? As always, innocent Israelis and Iranians who never knew each other or had a problem with died.
A bomb is much cheaper than a factory. That was the message of this bombing run: try to restart you nuke game again, and we’ll bomb you again. And that time we won’t stop until we topple your regime.
Yeah, swinging military "might" around in the middle east is a GREAT IDEA... zero unintended consequences...
... just none.
.. every time a win....
are you even sentient?
And a nuclear armed Iran is better?
Moreover, I read the wiki ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GBU-57A/B_MOP ) that 60m penetration specification is for ~35MPA concrete. And good basalt rocks easily go 100MPA. So if Iranians choose just good Mountain, and there are plenty of them...... Mother earth is really strong some places.
That's probably why they targeted the air duct system. It's already been cut and provides a blast channel.
Ah, the Death Star theory
Or the Top Gun Maverick lookalike.
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They probably have blast doors on those and USA made it very clear on Flightradar24 that the bombers are coming, lock the doors.
I would assume that this thing is entirely compartmentalized, so to destroy everything you will need a bomb in every room.
According to wikipedia, US made around 20 of those bombs and Trump used 14 of those. So %70 of the stockpile is gone in one go.
Especially on the main site they dropped 3 bobs per strike location, so at best they could have destroyed 2 compartments with 6 bombs. If those were able to penetrate of course.
Honestly, it looks like it was a show like the one where Trump fights professional fighters on the ring. Just significantly more expensive.
Maybe they should just generate those images in AI, would be much more cost effective propaganda.
> According to wikipedia
Wikipedia says "at least 20" and cites a source that says the exact number is unknown.
In general Wikipedia is an extremely inaccurate source for military aviation. I have found while following the citations that information is routinely entirely fabricated in this topic, with unrelated or marginally related citations added without quotes to make them seem plausible.
And now we've learned that these weapons were purpose designed and built specifically for this mission back during the Obama administration:
As in, the were designed to be dropped on this one particular facility, they're not general purpose weapons.
Also likely softer rock to begin with
You are mixing ft and meters...Do not land on Mars or Europa.
For concrete, ( that the mountain limestone is almost like..) is only 18 meters.
"... analysts at Janes say the weapon can penetrate about 200 ft (60 m) of earth or 60 ft (18 m) of concrete.."
Overpressure... as the Russians taught to the Afghani's, a small explosion in an enclosed space does massive damage to both soft and hard materials.
You don't have to blow something up to destroy it.
Centrifuges and driving equipment, sure.
But U-235 doesn't stop being U-235 because you pressurized or heated it up. Can't blow up atoms.
Best case, instead of a pile of enriched uranium, you now have a highly concentrated mine.
Sure, you'd have to separate it again, but getting U-235 away from dirt and rock is a lot easier than separating it from other uranium isotopes.
Even if it was stored as volatile UF6, what, you've converted it to UO2F2 / U3O8?
They can buy enriched uranium from at least 2 sources...
The expertise and equipment to develop and maintain a nuclear arsenal at scale is vastly more important.
If they haven't removed the sensitive stuff before anyway after someone suggested they will make a decision within two weeks whether to attack.
I find this argument hard to believe. Israel had complete air superiority for a week and was monitoring all the sites, routinely hitting the above ground nuclear facilities. I’m skeptical Iran could transfer anything significant from Fordow and not be immediately spotted by Israel.
> The report also found that much of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium that could be put to use for a possible nuclear weapon was moved before the strikes and may have been moved to other secret nuclear sites maintained by Iran.
I still consider the main report to not be substantiated. Israel claims that they know where the stockpile is and that they have been monitoring sites[1][2]. Some official even claimed it’s mostly under the rubble. Not sure why one is to believed and the other not when neither have hard evidence.
Israel could not spot hundreds of Hamas terrorists rehearsing the 7 of October attacks, and using cell phones for weeks, 20 miles from their Urim base in the Negev desert. [1]
Feel the same, not to mention Israel would have spies in Iran, satellites all over it.
This has been repeated so many times but the enriched uranium is far more vulnerable in transport.
> The report also found that much of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium that could be put to use for a possible nuclear weapon was moved before the strikes and may have been moved to other secret nuclear sites maintained by Iran.
Most modern goods are valuable and hard to replace because of their mechanical or chemical properties, and so blowing them up destroys the value.
My understanding is that U-235 is not like that, blowing it up accomplishes very little when recovery consists of what they'd already be doing to clear the debris, plus some mechanical and chemical separation.
Sure but they claim they put more than one on to it, it we don’t know how many or how accurate they were requiring one on top of the other to get more depth
In other words: We selectively embrace intelligence assessments when they justify our actions, yet dismiss them when they prove politically inconvenient...
How they going to get to them?
I presume they will just fire the people who did the assessment.
if you're American, watch out for army recruitment ads without the usual DEI flavoring
I graduated from a very small high school. There were fewer than 20 guys in my graduating class, fewer than 40 total graduates. I graduated in 2002. 2 guys did not join the military; because of 9/11, the rest felt some kind of patriotic duty to join up.
Of the guys I graduated with, half died either in Iraq or Afghanistan between 2002 and 2006, or killed themselves shortly after returning home. The other half are broken. Either physically or mentally.
We cannot do that again. That we're involved in this shit show is an absolute travesty.
“The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history." - Georg Hegel
Nukes or ground invasion, the point of the attack wasn’t to knock out the facilities, it was so that Trump can be dragged along ‘reluctantly’ so he can sell the conflict to his base. It is a persuasion technique called mirroring. Trump mirrors the position of the anti-war base, then slowly piece by piece he changes his position bringing his base with him. I guess how far it’ll go will depend on how effective the state is at suppressing anti-war sentiment. If history is a guide then the state can be surprisingly effective at this.
Polling of independents at 60/40 against should scare the shit out of the GOP, if they intend to press this.
I expect there is no desire on Trump's part for a long game, and he just took an isolated opportunity (Iranian air defenses smashed and air force suppressed) to wave the flag and look militaristic.
Limiting the strike to nuclear facilities also provides deniability to Iranian civilians that, unlike Israel, the US isn't looking for a full scale war.
Nuke them and then say that the Iranians f'ed up while handling the material?
Are the US and Israel going to continuously bomb any working crew in the area that goes to dig?
Murdering PhD's in Nuclear Engineering would be cheaper, and is a continuous Israeli program already.
We’re in the BDP stage—Bomb Driven Politics. That’s when you drop the bombs first, and then you have a meeting.
Really? I think calculating the achieved overpressure to whatever structure underground after 6x 30k pound bomb impacts is far into the “genius” category. I’d wager you’d need a team of pretty smart people to even begin to get a wrong model of that.
No genius needed, but all those involved are motivated to lie about it. The bombs have a depth range and 200ft (60m) is the optimistic depth for ideal conditions. These were far from ideal conditions as the location was specifically chosen to resist this. That and ultra high performance concrete is now a thing. This is why the entrance and exists were bombed and those are easy enough to dig back out again. The attack was telegraphed so advanced preparations were made. It is rumored that the entrances and exits were packed with dirt in advance to minimize the damage.
I don't know if it's only effective depth of the ordinance that matters here. Positive interference could be used to amplify the explosive wave of the 6 bombs that were dropped with accurate-enough timing.
If you were going to do that you wouldn’t waste energy breaking the rock to begin with. I highly doubt it’s feasible to time things that accurately and even if you could there is a lot of mountain in the way to soak up the energy.
The depth assumptions for the facility are often with a shallow gradient roads for the entrance and exits, but there is no need for the gradient to be shallow.
And yet the leaked reports don't say that happened, they say it didn't work and that most of the material and equipment was likely already moved.
Is this where we are? Just making up technobabble to glorify the US war machine in a supposedly intellectual forum? All the while the white house says the report is real, but they disagree with the contents of their own intelligence report because "we want big bomb make big boom work good"?
After 25 years it has become abundantly clear that Iraq (the concept) is what the US is, and what it deserves.
I wonder why the US wouldn't lie about the effective depth range. Seems kinda dumb to telegraph to your enemies how far to dig.
It's a pretty dumb ordnance, gravity delivered GBU57 is a physics bound problem. The dimensions etc are known, you can give it the most optmistic assumptions, i.e. complete steel for max penetration, release at altitude where it reach max terminal velocity without grid fins deployed, run that through ndrc/young pentration equations etc. There aren't any super secret parameters for subterfuge like electronic warfare. Eitherway there's public videos of GBU57 in action - grid fins deployed to hit a traffic cone - defense autists counted frames, did napkin math, it's more or less what's purported ~ mach 0.8-1.2 penetrator designed for ~60m concrete. IIRC the assume sphere cow math for heavier all steel, no grid fin (i.e. not accurate), max out at mach ~2, doubles energy, penetrates ~80m.
On the other hand, Fordow's construction time is known... as far as I know, many years before fgcc / uhpc and other "advanced" concrete formulas PRC formulated against US penetrators. And Israel probably has entire blue print, so who knows. E: quick lookup and GBU57 seems to be revealed shortly after guestimate of when Fordow started construction, possible Fordow could update design in anticipation, but then again, B2s were known entity and Iran's engineers can probably guestimate out what the maximum size/weight penetrator US could deliver on B2s before knowing GBU57 existed.
What if it has some sort of a booster to increase its kinetic energy just before the hit?
Also the behavior might improve in an area already weakened by a ventilation shaft/previous hit (first bomb turns 40 meters into fine gravel + detonates weakening quite a large are, second and third bomb easily go deeper)
I think 1) is unlikely, b2 bays can't fit much more, gbu57 is mostly metal and no booster for penetration 2) is what no one knows, but we (as in the public) also don't know layout/construction, i.e. actual depth, bunker design (can emb sloped concrete/steel layer to deflect penetrators laterally so follow up drop don't go straight down).
The real weapons system specs are never disclosed. Even on retired systems the real capabilities are often still classified because they can provide clues to their replacements capabilities.
The math isn’t that hard and the ideal case is a linear extrapolation so people can sit down with a calculator and figure it out.
The math is really that hard? I have no idea what the soil or rock is, what happens when the first bomb hits it, the second, and then the third? Does the timing matter? Does the timing matter if it's 5 minutes between? 1 hour between? Seconds between? Does the type of soil or rock compact or loosen when bombed? What's the variation in explosive yield? Does the ground transfer force from a shockwave well or poorly? Does that change after the first one?
I really doubt this is very linear.
For it to be super-linear an additional meter of concrete / earth / whatever must be easier to penetrate than the one before it which I would classify as a physical impossibility. This is why linear is the ideal case.
Not with regard to multiple bombs.
> Does the type of soil or rock compact or loosen when bombed?
Is the most relevant question.
It seems reasonable that fractured rock may be easier for subsequent bombs to penetrate.
Even if I were to accept the dubious premise that there is enough fractured rock to make a difference and there is no hampering with rocks falling into the void and that it's possible to hit the exact same spot repeatedly without touching the sides, all that would do in big O notation would be increase the constant factor. It would not be super linear after the second bomb.
If your are talking about bombs that hit side by side then clearly that is sub-linear as no matter how fractured the rock it’s not easier to push through than air.
An explosion creates a pressure wave. A pressure wave fractures rock. Fractured rock may be easier to pierce than solid rock.
Ergo, if first bunker buster penetrates to maximum depth -20m and then explodes, fracturing rock within a __ radius, then second bunker buster travels through that fractured rock, the second (and so on) may be able to penetrate deeper.
I have no idea about the physics of penetrating fractured vs non-fractured rock, but it's a physically plausible mechanism.
Furthermore, given the multi-minute timeline reported, there's enough time for the bombs to be deployed sequentially.
In the linear case a bomb twice the size goes twice as deep.
Take a bomb, cut it in half and drop each half separately, one after another into the same hole, would you except the cumulative depth to be greater than the whole bomb or less? Consider that in the case of the whole bomb it is equivalent to two halves arriving at the exact same time.
It's not about bomb size.
It's about bomb quantity and sequential effects.
Scaling is about bomb size, that’s what linear was referring to. No one is arguing that multiple bombs can’t ‘drill’.
Gotcha. Sounds like we're in agreement, then.
The strike may have been able to achieve greater penetration depth with multiple sequential weapons impacting the same point (i.e. the three seen in satellite imagery).
Edit: official reporting is 6 weapons per shaft, into 3 visible entry points per shaft, so there's at least some doubling.
I'm confident that 'drilling' with multiple bombs was the known approach prior to the attack. The planned approach to soviet bunkers was to use repeated accurate strikes of nuclear bombs to achieve a similar drilling for their bunkers.
There appears to be an assumption that the main facility was exposed to blasts from the tunnels and since that appears to be an obvious weakness I'm wondering why the Iranians wouldn't have blast doors between the tunnels and the facility as a form of redundancy. I am still worried that this is part of an approach to slowly warm Americans up to another war, much easier to sell a limit strike as a success, then 3-6 months later when the Iranians have recovered it'll be even easier to sell another strike or a more involved engagement.
The administration forgot the political tenet that you lead the public into supporting military action before taking the action, not after.
But I guess that level of ignorance is what you get from B-tier politicians who would sign on to this admin.
You are still relying on parameters that they are disclosing to you.
There are physical limits to weight, hardness, max explosive energy and max kinetic energy and these are all known. The only way to exceed them would be to drop it from a higher altitude, like space, or give it a nuclear warhead. The US isn’t the only country that has tested bunker busters and the physics involved isn’t that hard. It’s just expensive.
Sure, but you have no firsthand knowledge of that information.
You are told the B2 can carry a certain payload weight.
You are told the B2 has a certain operational ceiling.
You are told the bombs are a certain weight.
You are told the bombs are made from a certain material.
You are told the bombs contain a certain type of explosive.
Everything you know about this device and its capabilities came from an organization that has every motivation to publish specs that are just enough to raise the eyebrows of the people this device is supposed to scare hell out of, but they have less than zero motivation to publish specs that speak to maximum capabilities.
So while your calculations might be accurate for the component values you gave it, your component values of your calculation are not accurate, because all you know is what you were told.
You can calculate these things based on wing size and airspeed and neither are hard to figure out, it’s clearly subsonic and it’s been seen in public.
While skunkworks are certainly a thing they’re not hiding some Star Trek antigravity device, physics is still physics and physical limits are physical limits. Look at the Otto Celera 500L if you want to see what attacking physical limits looks like. It’s an engineering problem and the fundamentals are well understood. The real magic is in creating the money to pay for it.
> You can calculate these things based on wing size and airspeed
If you can calculate the depth and damage those bombs did based on wing size and airspeed (which technically is another parameter you really don’t know, but are relying on what you are told) you ought to be working for the government.
The US military isn't the only entity making airplanes and bunker busters. We don’t need to rely on their figures to know a great deal about what happened. You are assuming they have some order of magnitude hidden capacity which would break the laws of physics, and I’m very confident that they didn’t do that.
Gotcha. So your perspective is there are other entities making airplanes with the capabilities of the B-2 and a bunker buster bomb equivalent to the GBU-57 so much so that you can reliably determine capabilities of those weapon systems…as a layman with just a hand calculator?
That is a $2B aircraft and a $20M ordinance (each). You want to tell us exactly what entity has anything even remotely equivalent? No one else but the US could bear to afford it. Maybe China…but if they have it’s not common knowledge.
I think you have pretty much dug yourself a hole here on your knowledge and capabilities…you have landed into silliness now. (That pun was definitely intended)
No amount of money enables an aircraft to violate the laws of physics. Clearly your knowledge on aircraft is limited otherwise we would have a shared understanding of the physics involved and wouldn’t even be having this argument.
Who is arguing that? I’m not. The only argument I have made is that you do not have all the values you need to plug into your “calculator” to make a BDA.
But perhaps you can figure all of those values you need by just knowing the wingspan and airspeed of the aircraft delivering the payload, if so…I defer to you and this amazing deductive knowledge that you possess.
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Credibility helps with deterrence.
This is not a "genius" problem. This is mundane number crunching that every military has been doing for hundreds of years with ever increasing accuracy.
You need a few bombs and some places of varying geology to set them off. You take those data points, cross reference with all your historical knowledge and should be able to say whether a bunker of given construction a given depth under a given geology can be breached.
I hate how allergic to just testing and prototyping things modern engineering culture is.
Yeah, the bomb is expensive, but you gotta test it too so if you do it all right you get two birds with one stone.
They tested those bombs plenty. It's clear that they punched three holes in that mountain, but it's a whole frickin' mountain.
Never mind the fact that bomb damage assessment is one of the most difficult problems in photograph interpretation -- it's hard enough when the target is above ground, worse when it isn't.
I agree, but I don't think it's entirely unique to this era.
The US Navy's torpedo station in Newport, RI produced torpedos that were really prone to failure during the first few years of WW2.
IIRC, the problem persisted so long because an admiral in charge refused to provide enough torpedos for adequate testing.
(Sorry if there are any errors here, I can't easily fact check at the moment.)
That's accurate. They sped the torpedoes up, but failed to redesign the trigger, with the end result of ideal (and taught) geometry shots having a low chance of detonating. (Among other problems)
The status of Iran’s nuclear sites (and more importantly, its stockpile of enriched uranium) is anyone’s guess at this point. It’s likely that no one truly knows, not even the Iranians. It will take significantly more time to get a clear answer.
That said, it may not matter much. Restarting their nuclear program in secret would likely be far more difficult now and would almost certainly be detected. Ideally, a political agreement will soon render the issue moot.
> The status of Iran’s nuclear sites (and more importantly, its stockpile of enriched uranium) is anyone’s guess at this point. It’s likely that no one truly knows, not even the Iranians.
The project is dispersed and hardened enough that a single attack probably wont' be a decisive blow.
The surprising thing is that Iran doesn't have an atomic bomb yet. Enrichment is the hard part. Building an A-bomb from enriched uranium is not that difficult. The technology is 80 years old and most of it is well known. It's no worse than building, say, an auto engine from scratch, something racing shops do routinely.
H-bombs are another matter. Those are hard.
They suspended they nuclear program 20 years ago. Still they keep enriching uranium as a kind of insurance policy.
This is what US intelligence has been saying for years (as opposed to Israel who has vested interest in denying this).
What makes h-bomb so hard? It seems like the Teller–Ulam design is shockingly well publicized and ussr, china and even north korea have figured it out in just a few years. I would presume with modern computer modeling techniques it's not so hard to retrace those same footsteps.
They also got designs passed down from pakistan and former soviet "consulters" so that couldve easily included the h-bomb as well
I don’t follow. You say “no one can truely know”, what’s changed to make it almost certainly detected now?
It probably damaged them to some extent. Sensitive machines don't like dust and vibration. Bombs are known to cause a lot of both.
From a negotiation standpoint, you're in a weaker position if the enemy's killing machines can cross into your territory virtually unopposed and strike what should be three of the most secure locations in Iranian territory. Both the Israelis and US managed to seriously compromise Iranian territory recently, and while the Iranians could probably draw blood and destruction on American territory if they wanted to, they couldn't do it to the same extent.
Everyone knows you don't kill America with bombs at this point. You use social media and fearmongering and crony capitalism to make the county rip itself apart and kill itself.
For all of the issues the US has, it can still seriously dick up things with its military.
Then you'll be glad to know that military is being used on it's own citizens.
Oh, I know.
Not happy about it, but I know.
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This is just a repeat of what they said the likely outcome of using bunker busters on these facilities would be, likely using advanced modeling and simulation. There's not any new intel and if there were some sort of future tech, ground penetrating vision, they certainly wouldn't use it for public statements.
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> "“The ceasefire came without either Israel or the United States being able to destroy several key underground nuclear facilities, including near Natanz, Isfahan and Parchin,” Lewis said,
Here's more about these (not-widely-discussed) additional underground sites from Professor Lewis,
Side note, very pleased to see an overcast link. Fantastic podcast player.
Worth it to keep in mind as well, that Iran was committed under the NPT to limit nuclear development to non-weapons based usage. They were inspected regularly by UN bodies like the IAEA and the conclusions of our own intelligence agencies did not support the assertion that they were developing a weapon.
They were using it to support a legitimate nuclear energy and radiotheraputics industry. They are in the part of the planet that will be most impacted by climate warming, so nuclear is critical for them to support baseline power needs.
The United States striking these sites throws the entire international system of non-proliferation into question. If there is no commitment any country can make to any system of governance that allows for peaceful development of nuclear energy, there is no controlling nuclear weapons development and proliferation.
Nowhere in this CNN brief are we informed about whether the sites were or were not used for weapons development. If we take the lessons of mainstream media's coverage of the Iraq war, it is likely CNN is stating this because their owners have been told that it would be better for their bottom line to manufacture consent for a second round of strikes than to preserve the President's assertion that the strikes were successful.
There are no civilian uses for these large quantities of 60% enriched uranium.
Civilian uses? Perhaps not, but Iran has always wanted to have a respected navy. Compact nuclear reactors like the type used in submarines with nuclear reactors for their power production require 90%+ enriched uranium. That's one very plausible use of HEU that isn't just "they want to build a bomb".
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A submarine is a good place to hide a breeder reactor. Far from any detectors.
deftnerd says>Iran has always wanted to have a respected navy.<
They couldn't find enough men who could swim!
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> Two of the people familiar with the assessment said Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was not destroyed.
Is it even possible to "destroy" enriched uranium? It would seem to me that the most one might achieve by blowing it up with bombs is to spread it out a little bit.
> Is it even possible to "destroy" enriched uranium?
Yes, obviously you can cause it to go critical.
But that wasn’t the question. A stockpile can be destroyed by simply redistributing the contents in a way they cannot be easily retrieved.
> cannot be easily retrieved
This is I guess where the analysis gets fuzzy, where honest assessments may vary widely.
My gut instinct is that enriched uranium blown up underground (assuming it was even there) would take at most around a year to recover, by turning the site into an open-pit uranium mine. The product wouldn't need to be re-enriched from scratch, as simpler mechanical filtering could probably isolate much of the already-enriched uranium.
But perhaps it would be much harder.
There’s no state change in the enrichment process. It’s literally just mechanically filtering isotopes.
The point is it is possible to destroy a stockpile without destroying the contents of the stockpile.
If you have to turn the site into an open pit mine then I am comfortable calling that a destroyed stockpile.
This kind of strike will only ever delay the process. There’s no decisively preventing anyone from enriching uranium because the laws of physics are universal.
US should’ve just contaminated area slightly enough so that cleanup is impossible. Same outcome and 100% guaranteed success.
That is a good idea and possibly would make processing or handling traceable (by adding easily-traced material to the scene).
Are people really going to pick and choose which unsubstantiated reports[1] to believe instead of just waiting for actual proof? The narrative has shifted with breakneck speed from “WW3” to “it was pointless anyways”.
I've seen more propaganda/hivemind behavior pushing this 'assessment' narrative than I saw promoting the hostilities by the US/Israeli's.
It can easily be pointless and also cause WW3.
Sounds like Israel and the United States have "no idea what the fuck they are doing," as one sage was heard saying..
Even assuming your big expensive heavy bunker busters can penetrate & trigger as designed:
Throwing big darts X square miles of mountain & hoping you hit a valuable target seems absurd.
This feels like trying to depth charge a submarine, you just have to pour out endless charges & hope hope hope you get lucky. When those charges weigh 15 tons a piece, that's extra hard.
You really think US intelligence doesn’t have a schematic of the underground complex?
Trump would have tweeted it by now.
Enriching uranium to levels like 60% is hard. But from there on you don't need thousands of centrifuges anymore. This means that they can set up covert enriching plants and get weapons grade uranium without drawing attention.
How deep would a nuclear bunker-buster penetrate?
The title is wrong: the word "intel" should not start with a capital, the original site doesn't do this.
Can they try again? Build some kind of ultra-buster and use a Falcon Heavy to deliver it?
Obviously this has been presented as done, but it doesn't seem ideal to allow a situation where Iran gets nuclear weapons.
> Karoline Leavitt: “This alleged assessment is flat-out wrong and was classified as ‘top secret’ but was still leaked to CNN by an anonymous, low-level loser in the intelligence community. The leaking of this alleged assessment is a clear attempt to demean President Trump, and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program. Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000 pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration.”
All the juicy intel is right here in this press statement. The bombs struck bullseye and killed satire dead.
> “…the brave fighter pilots…”
Is Ms. Leavitt unaware that the B-2 is a heavy strategic _bomber_?
Everything out of her mouth is a lie anyway. You have to calculate the opposite of her statement and that's the truth
So:
"This correct assessment is accurate and was not classified as ‘top secret’ and leaked to CNN by an known, high level competent person in the intelligence community. The leaking of this assessment is not an attempt to demean President Trump, or discredit the nervous bomber copilots who conducted a failed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program. Nobody knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000 pound bombs imperfectly on their targets: so we're not sure.”
I'd like to emphasize "Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000 pound bombs perfectly on their targets" because I don;t and I suppose anyone not intimately familiar with this particular munition and the task to which it has been applied does either.
She's just bloviating which makes her the perfect mouthpiece for Trump.
"Democratic Rep. Pat Ryan of New York said on X on Tuesday that “Trump just cancelled a classified House briefing on the Iran strikes with zero explanation. The real reason? He claims he destroyed ‘all nuclear facilities and capability;’ his team knows they can’t back up his bluster and BS.”"
This one is quite telling...
If this assessment is true, then I would expect the situation to get really bad in less than a year. What would you do if you were Khamenei ? Trump already said he doesn't raelly care if he needs to do a 'regime change'. The only way to ensure that this doesn't happen, given the dramatic air superiority of Israel / US, is to get nukes and get them quickly... What are his other realistic options ?
> The only way to ensure that this doesn't happen, given the dramatic air superiority of Israel / US, is to get nukes and get them quickly... What are his other realistic options ?
Disband his nuclear program altogether? The only reason Iran is being bombed at all, at least by the US, is because of their nuclear program. Even when the Houthis, their sponsored proxy, were attacking US shipping, the US never took direct military action Iran.
That would be an option, but given how Middle East work, you're either strong or you will be bombed sooner or later.
Sure they could just make peace with Israel and that may be a solution, but not a realistic one. In the realistic solution, if they don't get a nuke, they will share the same fate as Libya, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon...
> if they don't get a nuke they will share the same fate as Libya, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon...
The Syrian government (which had and used WMDs) was ultimately toppled by its own citizens, after losing support from Russia, wasn't it? And what is the "fate" Lebanon? What's changed, besides Hezbollah's capabilities being substantially degraded? It's the same state with the same constitution, isn't it?
True.
However all of those countries were bombed into submission or chaos (Israel destroyed most of Syria military equipmenet just after the fall of Al Assad).
North Korea has the bomb and hasn't been bombed at all. It's a great deterrent. Now look at Ukraine, which gave up its nukes in exchange for promises of security, and how those were totally violated by Russia.
North Korea isn't bombed because they have artillery directly against the head of South Korea. That's the reason they were allowed to get the bomb in the first place.
> North Korea
is a client state of China, and it also possess a massive array of conventional artillery in range of Seoul. And since the Korean War, which we now know conclusively that NK started, almost every overt act of aggression between the two Koreas has been perpetrated by the North against the South, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Flight_858
Uh....did trump not say "its all gone", Bibi said the same while Iranians said "a few months setback, nothing more"......
So.... whose lying now? Still the Iranians ?
They were aware the site was at risk of strike prior to it happening.
1 - they moved uranium off site (or may do that regularly as standard practice).
2 - centrifuges were likely moved off site just to prior to the strike.
The whole facility looks to only take a small area, around the size of a basketball court, so have no doubt this will be able to set up in another small area. Possibly multiple decentralised areas after this attack.
If this could fit in a basketball court they'd do deep cover and do it in a basement somewhere. You are full of shit.
All of them.
Great, so we pissed them off. Now they’ll just be more determined and we’ll have another 9/11.
TSA will be ready this time.
That look on the TSA agents face when you take your shoes off and there is 200g of HEU under each sole.
I don’t support the bombing of Iran, but where is the US media that reflects my opinions? I will literally throw money at any publication using the “T” word to describe Trump’s actions here.
If you were around for the last bush terms you'll know that anti war media is going to be restricted to small circulation news papers and blogs. Any large TV channel will follow the white house on this kind of thing, with varying flavors of reluctance about the necessity of it or exaggeration of the threat posed by WMDs, etc.
Try small news sites on the scale of 404media or social media commentators you trust, I guess.
We might not be in this mess if US media weren't utterly compromised. I don't know how we get back to a world where there are news outlets with principles, but the free market of ideas doesn't seem to be working out.
It was not a free market of ideas but a free market of media outlets and those with the biggest wallets bought most all of the media outlets.
That's certainly the primary driver of the state of media outlets today, but good ideas don't win on even ground either. The nuances of reality cannot compete with simple narratives for human attention and buy-in. Gatekeeping and general respect for intellectual integrity are necessary cultural components that have been eroded, and it will not be easy to reestablish them.
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commondreams.org? It's not as good as it once was - it's full of a lot of defeatism and fluff these days.
From my poli sci student days, AP wire and (yes, really) the Christian Science Monitor were considered about as good as you could get for straight reporting of events without much of a slant (so far as that's possible). That was a while ago, though. And they'll still use biased language for US and allied actions versus our "enemies".
If you're seeking news with an actual leftward lean (not "leftist" CNN and "leftist" NPR and "leftist" NYT, which, LMFAO, sure Jan) to anything even remotely resembling the rightward lean of a Fox or your average AM radio program, your options are extremely limited. I guess Democracy Now! and The Nation. They don't do a ton of their own reporting AFAIK (outside labor action and issues, and sometimes environmental movement action, on which DN local correspondents are often practically the only people covering them) and are more on the commentary/analysis side.
You can also check out stuff like the journal Foreign Affairs, for this kind of topic. Your library probably gets it, no need to pay. It's more for gauging the zeitgeist among the mainstream international politics wonk/consultant class than anything else, but sometimes contributors accidentally write something more broadly insightful, too.
Try non-US media for foreign affairs topics. Even machine-translated French or German or Indian papers, that kind of thing, if you can't read the language. Sometimes they'll spend a lot of time on stories that have practically zero visibility in the US, and with a different perspective that's less deferential to the US.
(Pro tip: for any story that features Trump himself heavily, and especially lots of quotes from him, it'll be 1,000% more fun to read in the BBC's pidgin English service. Try not to think too hard about whether your enjoyment of it is kind of mean to speakers of pidgin English, and just bask in the distance & shifted perspective [and, yes, humor] the language difference provides for these stories in particular.)
>I don’t support the bombing of Iran, but where is the US media that reflects my opinions?
If they weren't planning on making nukes before, they for sure are now. Good job everyone involved!
Just couldn't wait for diplomacy to play out.
They for sure got determined making the bomb after the diplomatic solution was bombed by Trump in his previous term.
IIRC, Iran appeared to comply with the terms of the agreement and once that was out of the window they no longer complied.
Iran was hiding nuclear material during the duration JCPOA was active. They were declared in violation of the NPT by the IAEA recently for actions undertaken between 2009-2018.
You're right that the IAEA has indeed pointed to Iran's past undeclared nuclear material and activities, leading to NPT safeguard violations for the 2009-2018 period. However, it's also important to distinguish between those historical undeclared issues and the specific JCPOA compliance. For the duration it was active and before the US withdrawal, the IAEA consistently verified that Iran was adhering to its JCPOA commitments regarding its declared program. The argument is often that while those past issues were concerning, the JCPOA still provided a robust framework for monitoring Iran's active program, which was then dismantled
Iran was objectively not in compliance though [1]. The IAEA just didn’t know they weren’t so they gave Iran a seal of approval. Israel had always claimed that Iran was hiding material, which convinced Trump to leave the JCPOA, but the IAEA could only corroborate it later.
Perhaps we should be making the argument that Trump shouldn’t have only gonna off of Israeli intel, but he ended up being correct that Iran wasn’t correctly reporting their enrichment stockpile, which was a provision of JCPOA. The reason why JCPOA wasn’t revived is actually because of Iran refusing to cooperate about what they did with the undeclared nuclear material.
1. https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/25/06/gov2025-25.pd...
Yeah, that's not very honest position. You have to decide if you want to squeeze them out or make things right.
If they hid things and the agreement wasn't just trashed, that could have been a scandal that gets resolved on the path to peace. It could happen for many reasons, maybe they don't trust the West to uphold their part and wanted an insurance policy, maybe it was division within. It doesn't matter that much, it's not like they made the bomb already and were about to hit once everyone lowers their guard.
Later what we had was Iran that was on the table, trying to play nice and that was destroyed probably because of the ego of a guy who couldn't handle to stick with the agreement signed by someone he hates.
Interesting way to play nice by having dozens of secret sites that nobody knew about (nuclear archive) and recently taking enrichment to 60% (they've been caught with over 80%) and dabbling in metallization which have only military applications.
Well, whoever did that was proven right(from their standing point + Ukraine). Apparently you can't trust USA and give up your nukes. If you don't have nukes they don't honor the agreements and guarantees and even bomb you.
Unfortunately the American attitudes will result in proliferation. Not the Iranian ones.
Giving up nukes was never the intention. They would've slow-boiled the frog and we would one day wake up with a nuclear iran (with icmbs! - not banned under jpoa) if they were smart about it like dprk. Unfortunately for mullahs they weren't and got cocky and overextended. Then 10/7 happened and the rest is like they say history
Maybe or maybe not, we will never know that. Who knows how things play out when a country is integrated back in the international system and have something to lose when if get caught on checks. Maybe there would have been a book about how Iran continued its clandestine nuke program but eventually dismantled it as its society and economy normalized and having that had no benefits.
Now we know the timeline where agreements are not honored by the US.
OK but we actually kinda do know that because there were sunsets in that deal which meant we would've gotten here just a few years late.
> Who knows how things play out when a country is integrated back in the international system and have something to lose when if get caught on checks
Ah that's the Merkel's school of international relations =) We also know that with a russia example which you mentioned. Didn't work too well, did it?
Btw, DPRK were also given many concessions and reintegration opportunities (Kaesong) yet that was not the path they chose.
Look, I don't know why you believe so much in the imaginary timeline but maybe Iran would have been like Israel: having the bomb and not talking about it.
Who knows, it's all speculation at this point. The current reality is that if you don't have a nuke you get invaded. Everyone will have nuke soon. Those who fail will be destroyed because agreements, international laws etc doesn't mean anything anymore.
Why are you suddenly arguing against Israel? I mean he’s we know they have hidden nuclear weapons and will not enter into any deals or allow inspection. But they are on our side so we don’t care about that.
silly argument. iran is not a tiny country surrounded by much larger countries that want to run them into the sea. they should have invested that 500B into conventional forces instead - be a lot safer for that as a country (except that would threaten the regime).
yea enriching uranium to weapons grade in a secrete underground lair indicates no intention of developing a nuclear weapon.
> Just couldn't wait for diplomacy to play out.
For something to play out, it has to start. For something to start, someone has to start it. When no one is willing to start it, then it will never play out.
I'm sure that killing Iran's negotiator a few days before the negotiations were to take place helped deescalate the situation.
Wait, they killed the Iranian negociator?
> Just two days before U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations were set to begin, Israel assassinated the high-ranking Iranian official leading the talks
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/iranian-official-leadin...
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> For something to play out, it has to start. For something to start, someone has to start it. When no one is willing to start it, then it will never play out.
Very insightful, but the iranian minister had already started talks with the EU regarding the nukes[1], when Trump came in the bar and said "no you talk with us"[2]. So I don't know exactly the starting of what you're talking about.
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/international-relations/t...
[2] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/prospects-diplomacy-dim-afte...
Trump peddled back from the contract and negotiations of nuclear disarmament in his first term. So yeah, it plays out exactly like he wanted it to be.
Create enemy yourself, declare martial law, no re-election necessary. Easy as pie.
This all happened due to Trump's killing of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Comprehensive_Plan_of_Ac... in his first presidency.
You don’t need to be a genius to figure out that centrifuges installed 70–80 meters underground will be largely unaffected by bombs which are believed to have an effect down to a depth of 60 meters.
The New York Times reported on Saturday that they had lost track of 400kg of 60% enriched uranium, which could yield 9-10 nuclear bombs:
https://nytimes.com/2025/06/22/us/politics/iran-uranium-stoc...
According to Israeli media, it is not known whether the Fordow underground nuclear complex has been destroyed.
Netanyahu has already declared victory, but Iran's nuclear capabilities will likely be completely restarted, most likely within a few years or some estimations says months.
There is no doubt that during that time Iran will strengthen its aviation, intelligence and reconnaissance, which have now failed drastically. "Regime change" goal for Israel also failed.
Many more Mossad agents and collaborators will fall in Iran over the next few months as IRGC begins its crack down and Israel will surely lose a huge portion of their main weapon. Further TRUMP declaring "no regime change" today, made this matter worse.
Iran practically has a script for its problems now. Israel has learned what will happen when Iran gets thousands of their hypersonic missiles and fixes the problem with the lack of launchers which Iran will certainly continue to produce.
Only a ceasefire has been achieved, but there will certainly be a second round (likely by Israel again once more intel is gathered), because a war like this never officially ended.
More importantly, let's not forget who paid the price at the end? As always, innocent Israelis and Iranians who never knew each other or had a problem with died.
A bomb is much cheaper than a factory. That was the message of this bombing run: try to restart you nuke game again, and we’ll bomb you again. And that time we won’t stop until we topple your regime.
Yeah, swinging military "might" around in the middle east is a GREAT IDEA... zero unintended consequences...
... just none.
.. every time a win....
are you even sentient?
And a nuclear armed Iran is better?
Moreover, I read the wiki ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GBU-57A/B_MOP ) that 60m penetration specification is for ~35MPA concrete. And good basalt rocks easily go 100MPA. So if Iranians choose just good Mountain, and there are plenty of them...... Mother earth is really strong some places.
That's probably why they targeted the air duct system. It's already been cut and provides a blast channel.
Ah, the Death Star theory
Or the Top Gun Maverick lookalike.
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They probably have blast doors on those and USA made it very clear on Flightradar24 that the bombers are coming, lock the doors.
I would assume that this thing is entirely compartmentalized, so to destroy everything you will need a bomb in every room.
According to wikipedia, US made around 20 of those bombs and Trump used 14 of those. So %70 of the stockpile is gone in one go.
Especially on the main site they dropped 3 bobs per strike location, so at best they could have destroyed 2 compartments with 6 bombs. If those were able to penetrate of course.
Honestly, it looks like it was a show like the one where Trump fights professional fighters on the ring. Just significantly more expensive.
Maybe they should just generate those images in AI, would be much more cost effective propaganda.
> According to wikipedia
Wikipedia says "at least 20" and cites a source that says the exact number is unknown.
In general Wikipedia is an extremely inaccurate source for military aviation. I have found while following the citations that information is routinely entirely fabricated in this topic, with unrelated or marginally related citations added without quotes to make them seem plausible.
And now we've learned that these weapons were purpose designed and built specifically for this mission back during the Obama administration:
https://www.twz.com/air/gbu-57-massive-ordnance-penetrator-s...
As in, the were designed to be dropped on this one particular facility, they're not general purpose weapons.
Also likely softer rock to begin with
You are mixing ft and meters...Do not land on Mars or Europa.
For concrete, ( that the mountain limestone is almost like..) is only 18 meters.
"... analysts at Janes say the weapon can penetrate about 200 ft (60 m) of earth or 60 ft (18 m) of concrete.."
Overpressure... as the Russians taught to the Afghani's, a small explosion in an enclosed space does massive damage to both soft and hard materials.
You don't have to blow something up to destroy it.
Centrifuges and driving equipment, sure.
But U-235 doesn't stop being U-235 because you pressurized or heated it up. Can't blow up atoms.
Best case, instead of a pile of enriched uranium, you now have a highly concentrated mine.
Sure, you'd have to separate it again, but getting U-235 away from dirt and rock is a lot easier than separating it from other uranium isotopes.
Even if it was stored as volatile UF6, what, you've converted it to UO2F2 / U3O8?
They can buy enriched uranium from at least 2 sources...
The expertise and equipment to develop and maintain a nuclear arsenal at scale is vastly more important.
If they haven't removed the sensitive stuff before anyway after someone suggested they will make a decision within two weeks whether to attack.
I find this argument hard to believe. Israel had complete air superiority for a week and was monitoring all the sites, routinely hitting the above ground nuclear facilities. I’m skeptical Iran could transfer anything significant from Fordow and not be immediately spotted by Israel.
> The report also found that much of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium that could be put to use for a possible nuclear weapon was moved before the strikes and may have been moved to other secret nuclear sites maintained by Iran.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/24/iran-strikes-n...
I still consider the main report to not be substantiated. Israel claims that they know where the stockpile is and that they have been monitoring sites[1][2]. Some official even claimed it’s mostly under the rubble. Not sure why one is to believed and the other not when neither have hard evidence.
1. https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-858895 2. https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-858619
Israel could not spot hundreds of Hamas terrorists rehearsing the 7 of October attacks, and using cell phones for weeks, 20 miles from their Urim base in the Negev desert. [1]
Or could they? ;-)
[1] - https://mondediplo.com/2010/09/04israelbase
Feel the same, not to mention Israel would have spies in Iran, satellites all over it.
This has been repeated so many times but the enriched uranium is far more vulnerable in transport.
> The report also found that much of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium that could be put to use for a possible nuclear weapon was moved before the strikes and may have been moved to other secret nuclear sites maintained by Iran.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/24/iran-strikes-n...
Most modern goods are valuable and hard to replace because of their mechanical or chemical properties, and so blowing them up destroys the value.
My understanding is that U-235 is not like that, blowing it up accomplishes very little when recovery consists of what they'd already be doing to clear the debris, plus some mechanical and chemical separation.
Sure but they claim they put more than one on to it, it we don’t know how many or how accurate they were requiring one on top of the other to get more depth
In other words: We selectively embrace intelligence assessments when they justify our actions, yet dismiss them when they prove politically inconvenient...
How they going to get to them?
I presume they will just fire the people who did the assessment.
if you're American, watch out for army recruitment ads without the usual DEI flavoring
I graduated from a very small high school. There were fewer than 20 guys in my graduating class, fewer than 40 total graduates. I graduated in 2002. 2 guys did not join the military; because of 9/11, the rest felt some kind of patriotic duty to join up.
Of the guys I graduated with, half died either in Iraq or Afghanistan between 2002 and 2006, or killed themselves shortly after returning home. The other half are broken. Either physically or mentally.
We cannot do that again. That we're involved in this shit show is an absolute travesty.
“The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history." - Georg Hegel
Already happened hehe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM-wp4oJ2LY
Nukes or ground invasion, the point of the attack wasn’t to knock out the facilities, it was so that Trump can be dragged along ‘reluctantly’ so he can sell the conflict to his base. It is a persuasion technique called mirroring. Trump mirrors the position of the anti-war base, then slowly piece by piece he changes his position bringing his base with him. I guess how far it’ll go will depend on how effective the state is at suppressing anti-war sentiment. If history is a guide then the state can be surprisingly effective at this.
Polling of independents at 60/40 against should scare the shit out of the GOP, if they intend to press this.
I expect there is no desire on Trump's part for a long game, and he just took an isolated opportunity (Iranian air defenses smashed and air force suppressed) to wave the flag and look militaristic.
Limiting the strike to nuclear facilities also provides deniability to Iranian civilians that, unlike Israel, the US isn't looking for a full scale war.
Nuke them and then say that the Iranians f'ed up while handling the material?
Are the US and Israel going to continuously bomb any working crew in the area that goes to dig?
Murdering PhD's in Nuclear Engineering would be cheaper, and is a continuous Israeli program already.
CL/CB - Continuous Liberation / Continuous Bombing
it's the ci/cd of american foreign poliyics
We’re in the BDP stage—Bomb Driven Politics. That’s when you drop the bombs first, and then you have a meeting.
Really? I think calculating the achieved overpressure to whatever structure underground after 6x 30k pound bomb impacts is far into the “genius” category. I’d wager you’d need a team of pretty smart people to even begin to get a wrong model of that.
No genius needed, but all those involved are motivated to lie about it. The bombs have a depth range and 200ft (60m) is the optimistic depth for ideal conditions. These were far from ideal conditions as the location was specifically chosen to resist this. That and ultra high performance concrete is now a thing. This is why the entrance and exists were bombed and those are easy enough to dig back out again. The attack was telegraphed so advanced preparations were made. It is rumored that the entrances and exits were packed with dirt in advance to minimize the damage.
I don't know if it's only effective depth of the ordinance that matters here. Positive interference could be used to amplify the explosive wave of the 6 bombs that were dropped with accurate-enough timing.
If you were going to do that you wouldn’t waste energy breaking the rock to begin with. I highly doubt it’s feasible to time things that accurately and even if you could there is a lot of mountain in the way to soak up the energy.
The depth assumptions for the facility are often with a shallow gradient roads for the entrance and exits, but there is no need for the gradient to be shallow.
And yet the leaked reports don't say that happened, they say it didn't work and that most of the material and equipment was likely already moved.
Is this where we are? Just making up technobabble to glorify the US war machine in a supposedly intellectual forum? All the while the white house says the report is real, but they disagree with the contents of their own intelligence report because "we want big bomb make big boom work good"?
After 25 years it has become abundantly clear that Iraq (the concept) is what the US is, and what it deserves.
I wonder why the US wouldn't lie about the effective depth range. Seems kinda dumb to telegraph to your enemies how far to dig.
It's a pretty dumb ordnance, gravity delivered GBU57 is a physics bound problem. The dimensions etc are known, you can give it the most optmistic assumptions, i.e. complete steel for max penetration, release at altitude where it reach max terminal velocity without grid fins deployed, run that through ndrc/young pentration equations etc. There aren't any super secret parameters for subterfuge like electronic warfare. Eitherway there's public videos of GBU57 in action - grid fins deployed to hit a traffic cone - defense autists counted frames, did napkin math, it's more or less what's purported ~ mach 0.8-1.2 penetrator designed for ~60m concrete. IIRC the assume sphere cow math for heavier all steel, no grid fin (i.e. not accurate), max out at mach ~2, doubles energy, penetrates ~80m.
On the other hand, Fordow's construction time is known... as far as I know, many years before fgcc / uhpc and other "advanced" concrete formulas PRC formulated against US penetrators. And Israel probably has entire blue print, so who knows. E: quick lookup and GBU57 seems to be revealed shortly after guestimate of when Fordow started construction, possible Fordow could update design in anticipation, but then again, B2s were known entity and Iran's engineers can probably guestimate out what the maximum size/weight penetrator US could deliver on B2s before knowing GBU57 existed.
What if it has some sort of a booster to increase its kinetic energy just before the hit?
Also the behavior might improve in an area already weakened by a ventilation shaft/previous hit (first bomb turns 40 meters into fine gravel + detonates weakening quite a large are, second and third bomb easily go deeper)
I think 1) is unlikely, b2 bays can't fit much more, gbu57 is mostly metal and no booster for penetration 2) is what no one knows, but we (as in the public) also don't know layout/construction, i.e. actual depth, bunker design (can emb sloped concrete/steel layer to deflect penetrators laterally so follow up drop don't go straight down).
The real weapons system specs are never disclosed. Even on retired systems the real capabilities are often still classified because they can provide clues to their replacements capabilities.
The math isn’t that hard and the ideal case is a linear extrapolation so people can sit down with a calculator and figure it out.
The math is really that hard? I have no idea what the soil or rock is, what happens when the first bomb hits it, the second, and then the third? Does the timing matter? Does the timing matter if it's 5 minutes between? 1 hour between? Seconds between? Does the type of soil or rock compact or loosen when bombed? What's the variation in explosive yield? Does the ground transfer force from a shockwave well or poorly? Does that change after the first one?
I really doubt this is very linear.
For it to be super-linear an additional meter of concrete / earth / whatever must be easier to penetrate than the one before it which I would classify as a physical impossibility. This is why linear is the ideal case.
Not with regard to multiple bombs.
> Does the type of soil or rock compact or loosen when bombed?
Is the most relevant question.
It seems reasonable that fractured rock may be easier for subsequent bombs to penetrate.
Even if I were to accept the dubious premise that there is enough fractured rock to make a difference and there is no hampering with rocks falling into the void and that it's possible to hit the exact same spot repeatedly without touching the sides, all that would do in big O notation would be increase the constant factor. It would not be super linear after the second bomb.
If your are talking about bombs that hit side by side then clearly that is sub-linear as no matter how fractured the rock it’s not easier to push through than air.
An explosion creates a pressure wave. A pressure wave fractures rock. Fractured rock may be easier to pierce than solid rock.
Ergo, if first bunker buster penetrates to maximum depth -20m and then explodes, fracturing rock within a __ radius, then second bunker buster travels through that fractured rock, the second (and so on) may be able to penetrate deeper.
I have no idea about the physics of penetrating fractured vs non-fractured rock, but it's a physically plausible mechanism.
Furthermore, given the multi-minute timeline reported, there's enough time for the bombs to be deployed sequentially.
In the linear case a bomb twice the size goes twice as deep.
Take a bomb, cut it in half and drop each half separately, one after another into the same hole, would you except the cumulative depth to be greater than the whole bomb or less? Consider that in the case of the whole bomb it is equivalent to two halves arriving at the exact same time.
It's not about bomb size.
It's about bomb quantity and sequential effects.
Scaling is about bomb size, that’s what linear was referring to. No one is arguing that multiple bombs can’t ‘drill’.
Gotcha. Sounds like we're in agreement, then.
The strike may have been able to achieve greater penetration depth with multiple sequential weapons impacting the same point (i.e. the three seen in satellite imagery).
Edit: official reporting is 6 weapons per shaft, into 3 visible entry points per shaft, so there's at least some doubling.
https://www.twz.com/air/gbu-57-massive-ordnance-penetrator-s...
I'm confident that 'drilling' with multiple bombs was the known approach prior to the attack. The planned approach to soviet bunkers was to use repeated accurate strikes of nuclear bombs to achieve a similar drilling for their bunkers.
There appears to be an assumption that the main facility was exposed to blasts from the tunnels and since that appears to be an obvious weakness I'm wondering why the Iranians wouldn't have blast doors between the tunnels and the facility as a form of redundancy. I am still worried that this is part of an approach to slowly warm Americans up to another war, much easier to sell a limit strike as a success, then 3-6 months later when the Iranians have recovered it'll be even easier to sell another strike or a more involved engagement.
Public opinion polling after the strikes, especially for independents, hasn't been favorable. 60/35 independent against? https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3925
The administration forgot the political tenet that you lead the public into supporting military action before taking the action, not after.
But I guess that level of ignorance is what you get from B-tier politicians who would sign on to this admin.
You are still relying on parameters that they are disclosing to you.
There are physical limits to weight, hardness, max explosive energy and max kinetic energy and these are all known. The only way to exceed them would be to drop it from a higher altitude, like space, or give it a nuclear warhead. The US isn’t the only country that has tested bunker busters and the physics involved isn’t that hard. It’s just expensive.
Sure, but you have no firsthand knowledge of that information.
You are told the B2 can carry a certain payload weight.
You are told the B2 has a certain operational ceiling.
You are told the bombs are a certain weight.
You are told the bombs are made from a certain material.
You are told the bombs contain a certain type of explosive.
Everything you know about this device and its capabilities came from an organization that has every motivation to publish specs that are just enough to raise the eyebrows of the people this device is supposed to scare hell out of, but they have less than zero motivation to publish specs that speak to maximum capabilities.
So while your calculations might be accurate for the component values you gave it, your component values of your calculation are not accurate, because all you know is what you were told.
You can calculate these things based on wing size and airspeed and neither are hard to figure out, it’s clearly subsonic and it’s been seen in public.
While skunkworks are certainly a thing they’re not hiding some Star Trek antigravity device, physics is still physics and physical limits are physical limits. Look at the Otto Celera 500L if you want to see what attacking physical limits looks like. It’s an engineering problem and the fundamentals are well understood. The real magic is in creating the money to pay for it.
> You can calculate these things based on wing size and airspeed
If you can calculate the depth and damage those bombs did based on wing size and airspeed (which technically is another parameter you really don’t know, but are relying on what you are told) you ought to be working for the government.
The US military isn't the only entity making airplanes and bunker busters. We don’t need to rely on their figures to know a great deal about what happened. You are assuming they have some order of magnitude hidden capacity which would break the laws of physics, and I’m very confident that they didn’t do that.
Gotcha. So your perspective is there are other entities making airplanes with the capabilities of the B-2 and a bunker buster bomb equivalent to the GBU-57 so much so that you can reliably determine capabilities of those weapon systems…as a layman with just a hand calculator?
That is a $2B aircraft and a $20M ordinance (each). You want to tell us exactly what entity has anything even remotely equivalent? No one else but the US could bear to afford it. Maybe China…but if they have it’s not common knowledge.
I think you have pretty much dug yourself a hole here on your knowledge and capabilities…you have landed into silliness now. (That pun was definitely intended)
No amount of money enables an aircraft to violate the laws of physics. Clearly your knowledge on aircraft is limited otherwise we would have a shared understanding of the physics involved and wouldn’t even be having this argument.
Who is arguing that? I’m not. The only argument I have made is that you do not have all the values you need to plug into your “calculator” to make a BDA.
But perhaps you can figure all of those values you need by just knowing the wingspan and airspeed of the aircraft delivering the payload, if so…I defer to you and this amazing deductive knowledge that you possess.
Credibility helps with deterrence.
This is not a "genius" problem. This is mundane number crunching that every military has been doing for hundreds of years with ever increasing accuracy.
You need a few bombs and some places of varying geology to set them off. You take those data points, cross reference with all your historical knowledge and should be able to say whether a bunker of given construction a given depth under a given geology can be breached.
I hate how allergic to just testing and prototyping things modern engineering culture is.
Yeah, the bomb is expensive, but you gotta test it too so if you do it all right you get two birds with one stone.
They tested those bombs plenty. It's clear that they punched three holes in that mountain, but it's a whole frickin' mountain.
Never mind the fact that bomb damage assessment is one of the most difficult problems in photograph interpretation -- it's hard enough when the target is above ground, worse when it isn't.
I agree, but I don't think it's entirely unique to this era.
The US Navy's torpedo station in Newport, RI produced torpedos that were really prone to failure during the first few years of WW2.
IIRC, the problem persisted so long because an admiral in charge refused to provide enough torpedos for adequate testing.
(Sorry if there are any errors here, I can't easily fact check at the moment.)
That's accurate. They sped the torpedoes up, but failed to redesign the trigger, with the end result of ideal (and taught) geometry shots having a low chance of detonating. (Among other problems)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_14_torpedo#Problems
The status of Iran’s nuclear sites (and more importantly, its stockpile of enriched uranium) is anyone’s guess at this point. It’s likely that no one truly knows, not even the Iranians. It will take significantly more time to get a clear answer.
That said, it may not matter much. Restarting their nuclear program in secret would likely be far more difficult now and would almost certainly be detected. Ideally, a political agreement will soon render the issue moot.
> The status of Iran’s nuclear sites (and more importantly, its stockpile of enriched uranium) is anyone’s guess at this point. It’s likely that no one truly knows, not even the Iranians.
The project is dispersed and hardened enough that a single attack probably wont' be a decisive blow.
The surprising thing is that Iran doesn't have an atomic bomb yet. Enrichment is the hard part. Building an A-bomb from enriched uranium is not that difficult. The technology is 80 years old and most of it is well known. It's no worse than building, say, an auto engine from scratch, something racing shops do routinely.
H-bombs are another matter. Those are hard.
They suspended they nuclear program 20 years ago. Still they keep enriching uranium as a kind of insurance policy.
This is what US intelligence has been saying for years (as opposed to Israel who has vested interest in denying this).
What makes h-bomb so hard? It seems like the Teller–Ulam design is shockingly well publicized and ussr, china and even north korea have figured it out in just a few years. I would presume with modern computer modeling techniques it's not so hard to retrace those same footsteps.
They also got designs passed down from pakistan and former soviet "consulters" so that couldve easily included the h-bomb as well
I don’t follow. You say “no one can truely know”, what’s changed to make it almost certainly detected now?
It probably damaged them to some extent. Sensitive machines don't like dust and vibration. Bombs are known to cause a lot of both.
From a negotiation standpoint, you're in a weaker position if the enemy's killing machines can cross into your territory virtually unopposed and strike what should be three of the most secure locations in Iranian territory. Both the Israelis and US managed to seriously compromise Iranian territory recently, and while the Iranians could probably draw blood and destruction on American territory if they wanted to, they couldn't do it to the same extent.
Everyone knows you don't kill America with bombs at this point. You use social media and fearmongering and crony capitalism to make the county rip itself apart and kill itself.
For all of the issues the US has, it can still seriously dick up things with its military.
Then you'll be glad to know that military is being used on it's own citizens.
Oh, I know.
Not happy about it, but I know.
This is just a repeat of what they said the likely outcome of using bunker busters on these facilities would be, likely using advanced modeling and simulation. There's not any new intel and if there were some sort of future tech, ground penetrating vision, they certainly wouldn't use it for public statements.
> "“The ceasefire came without either Israel or the United States being able to destroy several key underground nuclear facilities, including near Natanz, Isfahan and Parchin,” Lewis said,
Here's more about these (not-widely-discussed) additional underground sites from Professor Lewis,
https://bsky.app/profile/armscontrolwonk.bsky.social/post/3l...
Here's a great podcast he was on today if you want more depth than one of those big bombs: https://overcast.fm/+AA4I1vyy4qY
Side note, very pleased to see an overcast link. Fantastic podcast player.
Worth it to keep in mind as well, that Iran was committed under the NPT to limit nuclear development to non-weapons based usage. They were inspected regularly by UN bodies like the IAEA and the conclusions of our own intelligence agencies did not support the assertion that they were developing a weapon.
They were using it to support a legitimate nuclear energy and radiotheraputics industry. They are in the part of the planet that will be most impacted by climate warming, so nuclear is critical for them to support baseline power needs.
The United States striking these sites throws the entire international system of non-proliferation into question. If there is no commitment any country can make to any system of governance that allows for peaceful development of nuclear energy, there is no controlling nuclear weapons development and proliferation.
Nowhere in this CNN brief are we informed about whether the sites were or were not used for weapons development. If we take the lessons of mainstream media's coverage of the Iraq war, it is likely CNN is stating this because their owners have been told that it would be better for their bottom line to manufacture consent for a second round of strikes than to preserve the President's assertion that the strikes were successful.
There are no civilian uses for these large quantities of 60% enriched uranium.
Civilian uses? Perhaps not, but Iran has always wanted to have a respected navy. Compact nuclear reactors like the type used in submarines with nuclear reactors for their power production require 90%+ enriched uranium. That's one very plausible use of HEU that isn't just "they want to build a bomb".
A submarine is a good place to hide a breeder reactor. Far from any detectors.
deftnerd says>Iran has always wanted to have a respected navy.<
They couldn't find enough men who could swim!
> Two of the people familiar with the assessment said Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was not destroyed.
Is it even possible to "destroy" enriched uranium? It would seem to me that the most one might achieve by blowing it up with bombs is to spread it out a little bit.
> Is it even possible to "destroy" enriched uranium?
Yes, obviously you can cause it to go critical.
But that wasn’t the question. A stockpile can be destroyed by simply redistributing the contents in a way they cannot be easily retrieved.
> cannot be easily retrieved
This is I guess where the analysis gets fuzzy, where honest assessments may vary widely.
My gut instinct is that enriched uranium blown up underground (assuming it was even there) would take at most around a year to recover, by turning the site into an open-pit uranium mine. The product wouldn't need to be re-enriched from scratch, as simpler mechanical filtering could probably isolate much of the already-enriched uranium.
But perhaps it would be much harder.
There’s no state change in the enrichment process. It’s literally just mechanically filtering isotopes.
The point is it is possible to destroy a stockpile without destroying the contents of the stockpile.
If you have to turn the site into an open pit mine then I am comfortable calling that a destroyed stockpile.
This kind of strike will only ever delay the process. There’s no decisively preventing anyone from enriching uranium because the laws of physics are universal.
US should’ve just contaminated area slightly enough so that cleanup is impossible. Same outcome and 100% guaranteed success.
That is a good idea and possibly would make processing or handling traceable (by adding easily-traced material to the scene).
If it was an obvious success, Trump would be tweeting spy satellite photos (again): https://www.npr.org/2022/11/18/1137474748/trump-tweeted-an-i...
Are people really going to pick and choose which unsubstantiated reports[1] to believe instead of just waiting for actual proof? The narrative has shifted with breakneck speed from “WW3” to “it was pointless anyways”.
1. https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/israeli-intel-a...
I've seen more propaganda/hivemind behavior pushing this 'assessment' narrative than I saw promoting the hostilities by the US/Israeli's.
It can easily be pointless and also cause WW3.
Sounds like Israel and the United States have "no idea what the fuck they are doing," as one sage was heard saying..
Even assuming your big expensive heavy bunker busters can penetrate & trigger as designed:
Throwing big darts X square miles of mountain & hoping you hit a valuable target seems absurd.
This feels like trying to depth charge a submarine, you just have to pour out endless charges & hope hope hope you get lucky. When those charges weigh 15 tons a piece, that's extra hard.
You really think US intelligence doesn’t have a schematic of the underground complex?
Trump would have tweeted it by now.
Enriching uranium to levels like 60% is hard. But from there on you don't need thousands of centrifuges anymore. This means that they can set up covert enriching plants and get weapons grade uranium without drawing attention.
How deep would a nuclear bunker-buster penetrate?
The title is wrong: the word "intel" should not start with a capital, the original site doesn't do this.
Can they try again? Build some kind of ultra-buster and use a Falcon Heavy to deliver it?
Obviously this has been presented as done, but it doesn't seem ideal to allow a situation where Iran gets nuclear weapons.
> Karoline Leavitt: “This alleged assessment is flat-out wrong and was classified as ‘top secret’ but was still leaked to CNN by an anonymous, low-level loser in the intelligence community. The leaking of this alleged assessment is a clear attempt to demean President Trump, and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program. Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000 pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration.”
All the juicy intel is right here in this press statement. The bombs struck bullseye and killed satire dead.
> “…the brave fighter pilots…”
Is Ms. Leavitt unaware that the B-2 is a heavy strategic _bomber_?
Everything out of her mouth is a lie anyway. You have to calculate the opposite of her statement and that's the truth
So:
"This correct assessment is accurate and was not classified as ‘top secret’ and leaked to CNN by an known, high level competent person in the intelligence community. The leaking of this assessment is not an attempt to demean President Trump, or discredit the nervous bomber copilots who conducted a failed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program. Nobody knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000 pound bombs imperfectly on their targets: so we're not sure.”
I'd like to emphasize "Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000 pound bombs perfectly on their targets" because I don;t and I suppose anyone not intimately familiar with this particular munition and the task to which it has been applied does either.
She's just bloviating which makes her the perfect mouthpiece for Trump.
"Democratic Rep. Pat Ryan of New York said on X on Tuesday that “Trump just cancelled a classified House briefing on the Iran strikes with zero explanation. The real reason? He claims he destroyed ‘all nuclear facilities and capability;’ his team knows they can’t back up his bluster and BS.”"
This one is quite telling...
If this assessment is true, then I would expect the situation to get really bad in less than a year. What would you do if you were Khamenei ? Trump already said he doesn't raelly care if he needs to do a 'regime change'. The only way to ensure that this doesn't happen, given the dramatic air superiority of Israel / US, is to get nukes and get them quickly... What are his other realistic options ?
> The only way to ensure that this doesn't happen, given the dramatic air superiority of Israel / US, is to get nukes and get them quickly... What are his other realistic options ?
Disband his nuclear program altogether? The only reason Iran is being bombed at all, at least by the US, is because of their nuclear program. Even when the Houthis, their sponsored proxy, were attacking US shipping, the US never took direct military action Iran.
That would be an option, but given how Middle East work, you're either strong or you will be bombed sooner or later.
Sure they could just make peace with Israel and that may be a solution, but not a realistic one. In the realistic solution, if they don't get a nuke, they will share the same fate as Libya, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon...
> if they don't get a nuke they will share the same fate as Libya, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon...
The Syrian government (which had and used WMDs) was ultimately toppled by its own citizens, after losing support from Russia, wasn't it? And what is the "fate" Lebanon? What's changed, besides Hezbollah's capabilities being substantially degraded? It's the same state with the same constitution, isn't it?
True.
However all of those countries were bombed into submission or chaos (Israel destroyed most of Syria military equipmenet just after the fall of Al Assad).
North Korea has the bomb and hasn't been bombed at all. It's a great deterrent. Now look at Ukraine, which gave up its nukes in exchange for promises of security, and how those were totally violated by Russia.
North Korea isn't bombed because they have artillery directly against the head of South Korea. That's the reason they were allowed to get the bomb in the first place.
> North Korea
is a client state of China, and it also possess a massive array of conventional artillery in range of Seoul. And since the Korean War, which we now know conclusively that NK started, almost every overt act of aggression between the two Koreas has been perpetrated by the North against the South, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Flight_858
Uh....did trump not say "its all gone", Bibi said the same while Iranians said "a few months setback, nothing more"......
So.... whose lying now? Still the Iranians ?
They were aware the site was at risk of strike prior to it happening.
1 - they moved uranium off site (or may do that regularly as standard practice).
2 - centrifuges were likely moved off site just to prior to the strike.
The whole facility looks to only take a small area, around the size of a basketball court, so have no doubt this will be able to set up in another small area. Possibly multiple decentralised areas after this attack.
If this could fit in a basketball court they'd do deep cover and do it in a basement somewhere. You are full of shit.
All of them.
Great, so we pissed them off. Now they’ll just be more determined and we’ll have another 9/11.
TSA will be ready this time.
That look on the TSA agents face when you take your shoes off and there is 200g of HEU under each sole.
I don’t support the bombing of Iran, but where is the US media that reflects my opinions? I will literally throw money at any publication using the “T” word to describe Trump’s actions here.
If you were around for the last bush terms you'll know that anti war media is going to be restricted to small circulation news papers and blogs. Any large TV channel will follow the white house on this kind of thing, with varying flavors of reluctance about the necessity of it or exaggeration of the threat posed by WMDs, etc.
Try small news sites on the scale of 404media or social media commentators you trust, I guess.
We might not be in this mess if US media weren't utterly compromised. I don't know how we get back to a world where there are news outlets with principles, but the free market of ideas doesn't seem to be working out.
It was not a free market of ideas but a free market of media outlets and those with the biggest wallets bought most all of the media outlets.
That's certainly the primary driver of the state of media outlets today, but good ideas don't win on even ground either. The nuances of reality cannot compete with simple narratives for human attention and buy-in. Gatekeeping and general respect for intellectual integrity are necessary cultural components that have been eroded, and it will not be easy to reestablish them.
commondreams.org? It's not as good as it once was - it's full of a lot of defeatism and fluff these days.
From my poli sci student days, AP wire and (yes, really) the Christian Science Monitor were considered about as good as you could get for straight reporting of events without much of a slant (so far as that's possible). That was a while ago, though. And they'll still use biased language for US and allied actions versus our "enemies".
If you're seeking news with an actual leftward lean (not "leftist" CNN and "leftist" NPR and "leftist" NYT, which, LMFAO, sure Jan) to anything even remotely resembling the rightward lean of a Fox or your average AM radio program, your options are extremely limited. I guess Democracy Now! and The Nation. They don't do a ton of their own reporting AFAIK (outside labor action and issues, and sometimes environmental movement action, on which DN local correspondents are often practically the only people covering them) and are more on the commentary/analysis side.
You can also check out stuff like the journal Foreign Affairs, for this kind of topic. Your library probably gets it, no need to pay. It's more for gauging the zeitgeist among the mainstream international politics wonk/consultant class than anything else, but sometimes contributors accidentally write something more broadly insightful, too.
Try non-US media for foreign affairs topics. Even machine-translated French or German or Indian papers, that kind of thing, if you can't read the language. Sometimes they'll spend a lot of time on stories that have practically zero visibility in the US, and with a different perspective that's less deferential to the US.
(Pro tip: for any story that features Trump himself heavily, and especially lots of quotes from him, it'll be 1,000% more fun to read in the BBC's pidgin English service. Try not to think too hard about whether your enjoyment of it is kind of mean to speakers of pidgin English, and just bask in the distance & shifted perspective [and, yes, humor] the language difference provides for these stories in particular.)
>I don’t support the bombing of Iran, but where is the US media that reflects my opinions?
X/Twitter is that thing.