Recent messaging from President Trump and the White House was that a decision on whether to directly participate in Israel’s war on Iran was going to be made in the next two weeks.
As it turns out, it was only two days before a flight of B-2 Spirit bombers from Whiteman AFB in Missouri were tasked with dropping the GBU-57 MOP (Massive Object Penetrator) bomb on the Iranian uranium enrichment facilities at Natanz, Isfahan and Fordo.
The Fordo centrifuge facility is suspected to be buried about 80m inside a mountain south of Tehran which means the MOP is the only weapon that has a chance of penetrating into the mountain far enough and detonating the explosive package to destroy the centrifuges.
These centrifuges are critical for refining uranium gas into weapons-grade fissile material by spinning out and separating and collecting the lighter 235U isotope that is used in the nuclear warhead from the more stable 238U material. It takes roughly 25kg of uranium enriched to 90% 235U to have enough material for the warhead of a single nuclear bomb and Iran supposedly had about 400kg of 60% enriched 235U in it’s stockpile and it doesn’t really take much to push that 60% 235U to weapons-grade refined quality.
Captain Ramius: Ковбой какой-то? [Ramius comments in Russian to Borodin that the sidearm-wearing Mancuso may be a "buckaroo", phrase literally means "some kind of cowboy". Ryan laughs.]
Capt. Bart Mancuso: What's so funny?
Jack Ryan: Ah, the Captain seems to think you're some kind of... cowboy.
Captain Ramius: Вы говорите по-русски? ["Do you speak Russian?"]
Jack Ryan: Немного. Полезно знать, что думает твой оппонент, не правда ли? ["A little. It's useful to know what your opponent is thinking, isn't it?"]
Captain Ramius: [in English] It is.The surprise wasn’t that the US bombed these facilities as anyone who knows anything about the military situation in the Middle East knew full well it was only a matter of time before Israel would want the United States to finish the job of crippling if not outright destroying Iran’s nuclear weapons capability it considers an existential threat to the State of Israel.
There is absolutely no way Prime Minister Netanyahu was going to go full-on cowboy by adding yet another front to the multiple ones he’s currently fighting without knowing that he would have the military support of the United States when needed.
What was (and still is!) unclear was just how close was Iran to actually constructing a usable nuclear weapon.
President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu were clearly of the mind that the Iranians were much closer to the “break out” which would see them have enough material to assemble a bomb even though the American intelligence community has consistently believed otherwise and in particular the Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified to in front of Congress not too long ago before walking back her comments in the last couple of days when President Trump flatly declared that “she is wrong” when answering a reporter’s question on the tarmac before boarding Air Force One.
Ouch! It seems both DNI Gabbard and Secretary of Defence Hegseth (for his less-than-spectacular military parade) are in Trump’s doghouse and were frozen out of the planning for this operation and who knows who is now whispering military plans in his ear. I can’t imagine either of them are going to be in their jobs for much longer not that they were particularly wonderful in those jobs as it was.
Trump and Netanyahu have also been consistent in the belief that Iran can never be permitted to actually possess much less deploy a nuclear weapon and that is absolutely the right call given the Tehran regime’s consistent support for terrorist organisations and destabilising governments all throughout the region in spite of the crippling sanctions they’ve been enduring for years.
The moment Iran or any like-minded regime in the Middle East who believes that Israel should be wiped off the face of the Earth gets a usable nuclear weapon, Tel Aviv is likely going to be the first target it’s lobbed at and that my friends is almost certainly the beginning of World War III and possibly the death of the human race and our planet as we know it.
Israel has never admitted to possessing nuclear weapons (though a spokesman inadvertently came close to spilling the beans once!) but there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that they have quite a few of them and the nuclear triad capable of delivering the weapons against Tehran.
Obviously, we’ll never know who was right about how close Iran was to building/obtaining a workable nuclear weapon because if the Israeli attacks against their nuclear facilities hadn’t severely degraded their capabilities, the B-2 Spirits dropping a load of MOPs on them almost certainly destroyed the targeted facilities.
I’m sure the Iranians have been furiously trying to get as much of the enriched uranium off-site before the Israelis bombed the sites and who knows how much of the fissile material they’ve managed to save for their next attempt at producing a weapon. For they would have had to have known the moment the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) started attacking Iran directly, it was only a matter of time before those facilities would be targeted and attacked.
We also have no idea how long we’re going to be involved in this shooting war with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The “NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE!” call from President Trump is really nice but let’s be real here, it’s hopelessly unrealistic when you still have ongoing Israeli attacks against those nuclear facilities and it’s clear that it’s open season on senior Iranian military leaders with many of the most powerful ones already dispatched to account to Allah for how their lives were spent.
The current regime has never really been particularly friendly toward the United States ever since the revolution that saw them seize our embassy and hold our citizens hostage until President Reagan paid them off prior to his inauguration. It’s kind of hard not to remember being called “the Great Satan” and the chants for “death to America”.
I don’t see the current government being at the point of readiness to stand down and even though it is certainly plausible the US or Israel could take out the Ayatollah (which apparently was vetoed by President Trump and even more surprisingly that Prime Minister Netanyahu didn’t just go ahead and do it anyway as an exercise in “’tis better to beg forgiveness than to ask leave”).
The irony was that one of the talking points during the two Trump campaigns were how against war he was and that his first term was one in which we didn’t engage in any new wars.
I think it’s fair to say the ship has certainly sailed on that latter idea and we may not be done with getting involved in foreign wars before he’s scheduled to leave office in January 2029.
Also, I’ve seen more than a little pearl clutching from members of Congress about the President unilaterally ordering an attack on Iran without seeking Congressional approval.
Even as expansive as the current administration has viewed it’s executive prerogatives, it would be truly hard to imagine that the ranking members of the intelligence and defence committees of both houses weren’t pulled into the SCIF and briefed on the operation that just went down along with the intelligence justifying the use of military force against a perceived threat against the United States.
That’s been the standard when the President wishes to use the military in combat operations in foreign lands and I’d guess that the howling from Congress would be far more vociferous than it has been reported if the administration truly went this one alone on their own authority and especially if the administration is going to later want Congress to sign off on an authorisation for the use of military force (AUMF) or pass a declaration of war (unlikely as we’ve not had a formal declaration of war since World War II).
If an Iranian nuclear weapons programme was closer to building a bomb than has been reported, I don’t think that’s a particularly hard sell for military intervention to degrade or destroy their nuclear capabilities for even the most dovish of members of Congress.
So even though this has squarely put US military personnel in harm’s way with the almost certain retaliation by Iran or it’s proxies, ensuring that Iran and countries like it never have the capability to deliver a nuclear weapon will always be the right call until we can find a true and lasting peace in that region which won’t be happening anytime soon.