On the menu today: A deeper look at the Fordow nuclear enrichment plant, hidden deep underground and, as of this writing, largely unscathed by the Israeli aerial bombardment. Everyone seems to think that the only way to ensure the site is destroyed or disabled is through American bunker-buster bombs — but would the Israelis start a conflict with Iran if they knew they would need the Americans to play such a decisive blow? Or do the Israelis have some other trick up their sleeve? Meanwhile, President Trump is reportedly “incensed” about his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, releasing an unauthorized video declaring, “Political elite and warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers.” Finally, there are reports that 86-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khameini is being kept out of the loop on certain Iranian government decisions by his aides because he’s mentally not all there. During this time of terrifying conflict, let me just reach out to the Iranians and say, “Guys, we know exactly how you feel.”
How Now, Fordow?
Israel can’t eliminate the threat from the Iranian nuclear program without taking out the Fordow site. Built into the side of a mountain near the city of Qom, the Fordow site is 262 to 295 feet underground.
So far, the Israelis have barely scratched that site — or at least that’s what the Iranians have revealed to the International Atomic Energy Agency. The Iranians provided the IAEA with a fairly detailed description of the damage to the Natanz Fuel Enrichment Plant site:
At Natanz, the above-ground part of the Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant, where Iran was producing uranium enriched up to 60% U-235, has been destroyed.
Electricity infrastructure at the facility (electrical sub-station, main electric power supply building, emergency power supply and back-up generators) has been destroyed.
There is no indication of a physical attack on the underground cascade hall containing part of the Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant and the main Fuel Enrichment Plant. However, the loss of power to the cascade hall may have damaged the centrifuges there.
The level of radioactivity outside the Natanz site has remained unchanged and at normal levels indicating no external radiological impact to the population or the environment from this event.
However, due to the impacts, there is radiological and chemical contamination inside the facilities in Natanz. The type of radiation present inside the facility, primarily alpha particles, is manageable with appropriate radiation protection measures.
Iran revealed the existence of the underground Fordow enrichment plant back in 2009, three years after construction. The revelation was serious enough to get President Obama to hold an on-camera warning alongside French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown:
Iran’s decision to build yet another nuclear facility without notifying the IAEA represents a direct challenge to the basic compact at the center of the non-proliferation regime. . . . Iran has a right to peaceful nuclear power that meets the energy needs of its people. But the size and configuration of this facility is inconsistent with a peaceful program. [Emphasis added.]
Within a few years, Obama came up with a plan, parts of which consisted of accepting Iran’s promise to “pause” its nuclear weapons program and giving the regime $1.7 billion in cash. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Wooden pallets stacked with euros, Swiss francs and other currencies were flown into Iran on an unmarked cargo planes.”
According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, “At the Fordow plant, located near the city of Qom, the Iranians have enough centrifuges (including IR-6s, their more advanced type) and uranium hexafluoride gas to produce several nuclear weapons. They could probably produce enough weapon-grade (90 percent) enriched uranium for one nuclear weapon within five to six days.”
As discussed yesterday, Israel has bunker-buster bombs, but not the largest, heaviest, and most powerful ones that the U.S. has. Last October, in the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings magazine, Commander Graham Scarbro, a U.S. Navy aviator, analyzed how Israel dropped its smaller and less powerful “bunker-buster” JDAMs in the strike that killed former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah:
The GBU-31(v)3 is a “bunker-buster” weapon, which uses a specially built BLU-109 bomb body of the 2,000-lb class, and unique fuse settings to allow the bomb to penetrate heavily fortified structures such as multi-story buildings, caves, and bunkers. The GBU-31(v)3 is the JDAM successor to the laser-guided GBU-24, most notably carried by Maverick’s strike force in Top Gun: Maverick. . . .
Exact settings are classified, but the bunker buster’s electronic fuse can be set for a long delay. Combined with the hardened bomb body, this allows the weapon to punch through to the heart of a structure before detonating — ideally inside a room where the explosive damage can destroy the target. . . .
Setting a salvo of bombs to different fuse delays would allow multiple weapons to penetrate a target building simultaneously, with each bomb detonating at different times on different floors. Imagine four bombs dropped into a high rise, one set to detonate in the top quarter, one halfway down, one near the ground floor, and the last in the basement or sub-basement, then multiply those times four — one for each corner of the building. Then repeat for four buildings. A rough calculation puts that strike at 64 weapons. Adding a similar setup in the buildings’ centers or including spare weapons as backups for malfunctions would yield an 80-bomb payload, spread across multiple F-15Is. This is a complex problem requiring precise coordinates, timing, and weapon setup, but it would certainly be possible for an air force of the IAF’s caliber.
If you want to clean up a site like Fordow, you need a MOP:
Northrop B-2 Spirits are what the U.S. Air Force uses when it needs to drop very powerful bombs in a very stealthy manner. Among those very powerful bombs is the Massive Ordinance Penetrator (MOP) Bunker-Buster, a 30,000 pound bomb that is described as “the most powerful and deeply burrowing non-nuclear bunker buster on earth.” In fact, the B-2 is the only plane that can carry a MOP.
(Some have contended that a B-52 is an option or that a modified C-130 could drop one out its back.)
Israel does not have a MOP. Is their plan to echo the attack that killed Nasrallah, and to keep hitting the site with multiple GBU-31s, over and over again, hoping it reaches the inner chambers?
As Rich observed on yesterday’s episode of The Editors, it is just about unthinkable that Israel would launch its largest military operation against Iran ever, without a plan to ensure the destruction or disabling of the Fordow enrichment plant on its own. Considering how exceptionally meticulously planned every step of the Israeli strikes have been so far, there’s just no way that Bibi Netanyahu would go into a war with the strategy, “and hopefully after a few days, the Americans change their minds and use the MOP to take out Fordow.” President Trump has largely been a friend to Israel, but would the Israelis bet their country’s continued existence upon his willingness to get the U.S. into a shooting war with Iran?
A commando raid? Some sort of saboteur within the ranks of the Iranians, waiting for the “go” signal?
Drones flying down into the tunnels? (We know that “Mossad cells have recently established bases inside Iran, where they have kept precision missiles and suicide drones.”)
And if Israel does have some trick up its sleeve to deal with Fordow . . . does the U.S. need to get involved in the war and directly attack the site with a MOP?
Go Figure, the President Doesn’t Like His DNI Warning of Nuclear Armageddon
Now, I know this is going to shock you, but it turns out President Trump was not a fan of U.S. director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard posting a video on her personal social-media accounts declaring, “We stand here today closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before.”
Trump saw the unauthorized video and became incensed, complaining to associates at the White House that she had spoken out of turn, according to three people familiar with the episode — two of them inside the administration and all granted anonymity to describe sensitive dynamics. . . .
Trump even expressed his disapproval to her personally, the three people said. . . .
In recent months, Trump has increasingly mused about nixing Gabbard’s office completely, an idea he floated when he gave her the job. In the White House there have been discussions about folding its mandate into the CIA or another agency, according to one of the people familiar with his response to the video and two others familiar with the matter — though it’s unclear what that would mean for Gabbard. The Director of National Intelligence serves as the president’s principal intelligence adviser and oversees the sprawling U.S. spy community. . . .
Trump has “just been kind of down on her in general,” said one of the people familiar with Gabbard’s interactions with the White House, adding that Trump thinks she “doesn’t add anything to any conversation.”
And as noted yesterday, Gabbard was not at the president’s lengthy meeting with his national-security team discussing Israel and Iran at Camp David on June 8 because she wasn’t invited. (This dispels the social-media claims that yesterday’s newsletter was inaccurate because Gabbard attended by videoconference.)
All of this was foreseen. The DNI is a thankless job; on paper it makes sense to have someone who’s trying to improve coordination among agencies, make sure key intelligence isn’t getting stove-piped, and to separate the previously dual role of running the CIA and overseeing the entire intel community. In practice, it’s proven difficult to lead the intelligence community if you don’t have budgetary authority and half the agencies report to other cabinet members.
Gabbard has been a celebrity of sorts, as the “surfing congresswoman,” since the Obama years. Gabbard spent most of 2019 and 2020 running for president. She chose not to run for reelection to Congress; in November 2022 she signed on as a commentator with Fox News Channel and started guest-hosting Tucker Carlson Tonight. She’s spent most of the past six years either campaigning for the presidency herself or working as a Trump surrogate in the 2024 campaign.
On top of it all, her perspective is so unaligned with certain Trump administration priorities and positions that in her confirmation hearing, she had to distance herself from statements she had made six months earlier. One of her jobs as DNI is to evaluate intelligence and separate proven truths from enemy disinformation; you would prefer to not have a big fan of Kremlin-funded RT television in that role.
On June 11, Gabbard appeared on Fox News Channel’s Jesse Watters Primetime and opined about the Los Angeles riots.
Cabinet posts are not a good job for you if you like being on camera and talking about the events of the day. As Ramesh wrote after her Hiroshima video, “Commenting is, I can testify, a great gig — much more fun, I imagine, than running a bureaucracy or sifting through a lot of dull intelligence reports.”
Tulsi Gabbard was always an exceptionally awkward selection for the DNI job at best and a mess waiting to happen at worst.
ADDENDUM: Reports in Israel claim that Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei “has been removed from making key decisions due to his poor mental state, and military commanders are hiding the reality of the war from him in order to manage his mental state.” If, after the war, there’s a big reckoning about keeping an elderly, doddering head of state in the dark about what the government is actually doing, I suspect the Iranians may echo that old anti-drug public service announcement, “I learned it by watching you!”
I look forward to Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s next book, Original Djinn: Ayatollah Khamenei’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Remain Supreme Leader.