Early US Intel assessment suggests strikes on Iran did not destroy nuclear sites
109 comments
·June 24, 2025cluckindan
ramshanker
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.
mgiampapa
That's probably why they targeted the air duct system. It's already been cut and provides a blast channel.
LastTrain
Ah, the Death Star theory
mrtksn
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.
swat535
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.
barbazoo
If they haven't removed the sensitive stuff before anyway after someone suggested they will make a decision within two weeks whether to attack.
bitsage
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.
barbazoo
> 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...
bamboozled
Feel the same, not to mention Israel would have spies in Iran, satellites all over it.
votepaunchy
This has been repeated so many times but the enriched uranium is far more vulnerable in transport.
barbazoo
> 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...
FuriouslyAdrift
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.
buildbot
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.
cjbgkagh
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.
RationPhantoms
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.
influx
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.
potato3732842
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.
PaulHoule
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.
CoastalCoder
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.)
m3kw9
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
everfrustrated
How they going to get to them?
giardini
Nuke them and then say that the Iranians f'ed up while handling the material?
tonyedgecombe
I presume they will just fire the people who did the assessment.
estebank
Are the US and Israel going to continuously bomb any working crew in the area that goes to dig?
I_Lorem
Murdering PhD's in Nuclear Engineering would be cheaper, and is a continuous Israeli program already.
gtsop
CL/CB - Continuous Liberation / Continuous Bombing
it's the ci/cd of american foreign poliyics
123yawaworht456
if you're American, watch out for army recruitment ads without the usual DEI flavoring
Loughla
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.
heraldgeezer
Already happened hehe
cjbgkagh
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.
barbazoo
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.
stronglikedan
> 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.
unsnap_biceps
I'm sure that killing Iran's negotiator a few days before the negotiations were to take place helped deescalate the situation.
tartoran
Wait, they killed the Iranian negociator?
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gtsop
> 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...
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mrtksn
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.
bitsage
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.
mrtksn
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
unsnap_biceps
This all happened due to Trump's killing of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Comprehensive_Plan_of_Ac... in his first presidency.
gip
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.
Animats
> 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.
alkyon
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).
LastTrain
I don’t follow. You say “no one can truely know”, what’s changed to make it almost certainly detected now?
neuroelectron
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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lenerdenator
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.
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Tadpole9181
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.
perihelions
> "“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...
thekid314
Here's a great podcast he was on today if you want more depth than one of those big bombs: https://overcast.fm/+AA4I1vyy4qY
impossiblefork
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.
dantillberg
> 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.
mulmen
> 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.
dantillberg
> 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.
mulmen
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.
dzhiurgis
US should’ve just contaminated area slightly enough so that cleanup is impossible. Same outcome and 100% guaranteed success.
bitsage
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...
mulmen
It can easily be pointless and also cause WW3.
xnx
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...
omegaworks
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.
votepaunchy
There are no civilian uses for these large quantities of 60% enriched uranium.
deftnerd
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".
7e
A submarine is a good place to hide a breeder reactor. Far from any detectors.
Tronno
> 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.
HankB99
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.
kashunstva
> “…the brave fighter pilots…”
Is Ms. Leavitt unaware that the B-2 is a heavy strategic _bomber_?
nopelynopington
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.”
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.