8 ms·
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 a
by cluckindan 1y ago
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.
- everfrustrated 1y agoHow they going to get to them?
- tonyedgecombe 1y agoI presume they will just fire the people who did the assessment.
- estebank 1y agoAre the US and Israel going to continuously bomb any working crew in the area that goes to dig?
- gtsop 1y agoCL/CB - Continuous Liberation / Continuous Bombing it's the ci/cd of american foreign poliyics
- mcphage 1y agoWe’re in the BDP stage—Bomb Driven Politics. That’s when you drop the bombs first, and then you have a meeting.
- I_Lorem 1y agoMurdering PhD's in Nuclear Engineering would be cheaper, and is a continuous Israeli program already.
- 123yawaworht456 1y agoif you're American, watch out for army recruitment ads without the usual DEI flavoring
- Loughla 1y agoI 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.
- cjbgkagh 1y ago“The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history." - Georg Hegel
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- heraldgeezer 1y agoAlready happened hehe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM-wp4oJ2LY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM-wp4oJ2LY
- cjbgkagh 1y agoNukes 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.
- ethbr1 1y agoPolling 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.
- giardini 1y agoNuke them and then say that the Iranians f'ed up while handling the material?
- buildbot 1y agoReally? 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.
- potato3732842 1y agoThis 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.
- CoastalCoder 1y agoI 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.)
- ethbr1 1y agoThat'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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_14_torpedo#Problems
- PaulHoule 1y agoThey 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.
- barbazoo 1y agoIf they haven't removed the sensitive stuff before anyway after someone suggested they will make a decision within two weeks whether to attack.
- votepaunchy 1y agoThis has been repeated so many times but the enriched uranium is far more vulnerable in transport.
- barbazoo 1y ago> 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-nuclear-sites-report https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/24/iran-strikes-n...
- cwillu 1y agoMost 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.
- bitsage 1y agoI 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.
- bamboozled 1y agoFeel the same, not to mention Israel would have spies in Iran, satellites all over it.
- m3kw9 1y agoSure 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
- ramshanker 1y agoMoreover, I read the wiki ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GBU-57A/B_MOP 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.
- mgiampapa 1y agoThat's probably why they targeted the air duct system. It's already been cut and provides a blast channel.
- LastTrain 1y agoAh, the Death Star theory
- mrtksn 1y agoThey 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.
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y agoOverpressure... 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.
- ethbr1 1y agoCentrifuges 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?
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y agoThey 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.
- swat535 1y agoThe 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-stockpile-whereabouts.html 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.
- credit_guy 1y agoA 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.
- jasonm23 1y agoYeah, 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?
- credit_guy 1y agoAnd a nuclear armed Iran is better?
- belter 1y agoIn other words: We selectively embrace intelligence assessments when they justify our actions, yet dismiss them when they prove politically inconvenient...