A few points on the effect rather than the wisdom or possible fall-out of these attacks.
The President has repeatedly said the Fordow nuclear facility was “obliterated”. Clearly that is a party slogan rather than any kind of factual analysis. We’re now getting the first after-action reports out of the Pentagon and Israel which speak of the Fordow facility appearing to have sustained “severe damage” but not being destroyed. One thing that struck me last night was the US assessment that helped prompt this attack which, reportedly, was that the entirety of the Israeli assault had pushed Iran’s program back roughly six months. That’s pretty paltry in terms of any great change in the strategic outlook. I note that because we should wait a significant period of time before we conclude – if the evidence ever merits it – that the US has somehow put the Iranians back to square one in their ability to build nuclear warheads.
We should remember that you can’t destroy the quest to create a nuclear weapons (or more specifically the quest to have all the parts and knowledge to do so on short notice) with bombing alone. If you take the logic of this action on its own terms it has to set the stage for negotiations or effective deterrent. In other words, one option is you hopefully destroy a lot of what Iran has spent years building. With that done, you hope they are more open to an agreement that gets them to verifiably agree not to work on the building blocks for nuclear warheads because you’ve demonstrated that the costs are too great. Or perhaps with this demonstration you make clear that any rebuilding effort will be met by another similar or more devastating attack. So they give up on the effort because they decide it’s not worth it or simply hopeless. You’ll always destroy the work before it gets to completion.
Absent one version of those scenarios being the case they just restart their efforts and get there again in say two or three years. And presumably that’s an Iran far more focused on actually building a deliverable nuclear weapon to be sure it never finds itself in this position again.
Nuclear weapons have existed for 80 years. The fundamental science isn’t a secret. Obviously I’m far from an expert on this. But the challenges are producing the fuel, which is time consuming and a major industrial-scale process, and what are basically engineering and industrial challenges to produce materials with a level of precision that are suitable for nuclear warheads. The point is those things are doable with a reasonably advanced industrial economy and engineers and physicists who can direct the work. Those things are all fundamentally replaceable. We’re already hearing people in the MAGA world saying that Trump ended the Iranians nuclear program. But even in the most successful attack scenario that’s not actually possible.
Source link
