Suchomimus: Fordow Assessment

A rising analytical force focused on Ukraine.

UPDATE: Saw the official presser after sending this, looks like six B-2s delivered twelve MOPs into six aim points. The seventh B-2 struck last, a surprise encore at Ishfahan. Natanz got a shower of at least two dozen Tomahawks from one of the Ohio class SSGNs. It’s still worth a look for the context and initial damage assessment.

Suchomimus does top quality work, in this case he seems to be the one analyst that’s come up with the diagram of the facilitate itself. I think the holes labeled as subsidence at the upper right are additional impact points. Fordow appears to have been visited by a trio of B-2 bombers delivering a total of six GBU-57 Massive Ordinance Penetrators.

Ending Iran’s nuclear weapons program is … not the worst thing. I just fear that this is like the strikes on the Taliban in 2001 … the beginning of another generation of blood and treasure being poured on the sands of the Greater Iranian Plateau.

Notice what I had to say about this twelve years ago:

“If the U.S. does not take the lead and back off Iranian sanctions, a sometimes belligerent rational actor will be replace by an ugly amalgam of all the things we have seen from the other interventions and revolutions I named. That outcome may be inevitable due to climate change, but rushing to it is a foreign policy mistake of a similar magnitude to what happened in the Balkans in 1914 or Czechoslovakia in 1938.”