Early US Intel assessment suggests strikes on Iran did not destroy nuclear sites
cnn.com
cnn.com
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.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/iranian-official-leadin...
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...
IIRC, Iran appeared to comply with the terms of the agreement and once that was out of the window they no longer complied.
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...
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.
Unfortunately the American attitudes will result in proliferation. Not the Iranian ones.
Now we know the timeline where agreements are not honored by the US.
> 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.
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.
Create enemy yourself, declare martial law, no re-election necessary. Easy as pie.
it's the ci/cd of american foreign poliyics
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
I really doubt this is very linear.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 about bomb quantity and sequential effects.
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).
https://www.twz.com/air/gbu-57-massive-ordnance-penetrator-s...
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/24/iran-strikes-n...
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/24/iran-strikes-n...
1. https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-858895 2. https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-858619
Or could they? ;-)
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.
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.
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.
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.."
You don't have to blow something up to destroy it.
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?
The expertise and equipment to develop and maintain a nuclear arsenal at scale is vastly more important.
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.
... just none.
.. every time a win....
are you even sentient?
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 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.
This is what US intelligence has been saying for years (as opposed to Israel who has vested interest in denying this).
They also got designs passed down from pakistan and former soviet "consulters" so that couldve easily included the h-bomb as well
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.
Not happy about it, but I know.
Here's more about these (not-widely-discussed) additional underground sites from Professor Lewis,
https://bsky.app/profile/armscontrolwonk.bsky.social/post/3l...
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.
They couldn't find enough men who could swim!
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.
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.
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.
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.
1. https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/israeli-intel-a...
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.
Obviously this has been presented as done, but it doesn't seem ideal to allow a situation where Iran gets nuclear weapons.
All the juicy intel is right here in this press statement. The bombs struck bullseye and killed satire dead.
Is Ms. Leavitt unaware that the B-2 is a heavy strategic _bomber_?
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.”
She's just bloviating which makes her the perfect mouthpiece for Trump.
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 ?
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.
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
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...
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?
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).
So.... whose lying now? Still the Iranians ?
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.
Try small news sites on the scale of 404media or social media commentators you trust, I guess.
X/Twitter is that thing.
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.)