You answered your own question.
IIRC the US has not given these bombs to anyone. For US use only.
ETA: What I do not get is these bombs do not seem like a technical marvel. It’s just a really big bomb in a strong casing. I’d think most countries could figure out how to make one. So why don’t they?
The precision guidance is an add-on. Also doesn’t seem too difficult for most countries to figure out.
True. I’m reading ’Lancaster’ at the moment, and they were cranking those bombers out at an impressive rate from large factories that were disguised as farms. To the extent that model cows were moved around on the grassed rooftops at night to counter enemy photographs.
The bunker buster bombs have to stay intact while penetrating up to 300ft. deep through rock, reinforced concrete, and layers of gravel and sand before detonating at sufficient depth. Without that capability we couldn’t deliver a large enough conventional bomb to destroy those bunkers.
Nailed it. This is exactly it. If Iran is going down anyway, Trump can’t let the Jews get all the glory.
And Iran has invested massively in missiles and drones of all stripes (in concert with North Korea). To some extent it is a prestige project and one of their credible demonstrations of strength—the rocket forces are also under the purview of the IRGC, not the regular army, i.e. philosophically it is a means of deterring foreign interference in Iranian affairs. It’s also a means of exerting regional influence, chiefly via Hezbollah and Iran’s Houthi proxies but formerly also Syria (and now Russia, who is also a drone customer).
(Given the lackluster capabilities of the Iranian Navy and Air Force (outside of asymmetric warfare), it would be Iran’s only practical means of delivering a nuclear bomb, although of course Iran would never dream of doing so because their nuclear program is entirely peaceful)
The thing is, also, while it is generally assumed (note in the CNN article how wide the error bars are) that Iran has “thousands” of missiles, the significant majority of those have generally been assumed to be their shorter-range derivatives of the Soviet Scud (Qiam-1 and the older Shahab-1 and Shahab-2 that they are still assumed to have in service) and Frog (Zelzal and Fateh-110) with a range in the hundreds of kilometers.
That’s fine if one is just giving them to Hezbollah, but it won’t let Iran hit Israel from Iranian territory. Since their primary users have been firing them at short range, though, it’s also not unreasonable to think that Iran would be able to find consumers for 300 missiles per month—Hezbollah has fired that many in a day. So that number may be an exaggeration, but even if it’s not an exaggeration most of those missiles are unlikely to be their more complex and expensive MRBMs.
And which Iran has had a difficult time producing. They’ve been consistently assessed as having no more than 50 Shahab-3 launchers since 2017 (at that time possibly as few as 25, but 50 was the estimate as recently as 2024), so they don’t seem to have been able to field more than maybe a half-dozen a year accounting for attrition and exports.
They have more SRBM launchers, again including the older ones for the Soviet rocket artillery they acquired from North Korea in the 80s. Those are not capable of threatening Israel. However, if they choose to broaden the war, the 200km range of the Zelzal-2 is enough to reach all of the American installations in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and northern Oman, and the 800km Qiam rocket would broaden that reach to nearly all of Oman and Saudi Arabia past Prince Sultan Air Base southeast of Riyadh.
Further info on this - the JCPOA was WORKING. Iran reduced their nuclear development to near-zero, as much as could possibly be verified (see the graph link below). Then Trump (with Netanyahu’s blessing) tore it up, gaining absolutely nothing in return, and Iran ramped up their nuclear activity. It was entirely predictable. This was functionally a war of choice by Netanyahu and Trump. They chose back in 2018 to go down this path.
While Iran has been a warning that every night will finally bring their true wrath, their missile barrages have been slowing down. They’re insisting that this is a tactical decision, but it really does seem like their capacity for launching massive attacks like they did on the first couple of nights has been greatly diminished.
Of course, there are limits to what the IDF’s air force can do as well. Assuming that air crews were working overtime for a start of war surge in in-service aircraft, we are going to see the IDF forced to slow down to rest crews and repair airframes. Hopefully this doesn’t allow Iran’s army to catch it’s breath and up the pace of attacks.
Pondering some more about those launchers: With Israel owning the skies, the hard part of destroying the launchers is probably finding them, since many of them are on trucks, and many of those trucks are disguised. But whenever any given launcher is used, it’s easy to trace the missile back to its source and destroy the launcher. So even though Iran still has two-thirds of their launchers, they don’t want to use them, which is why the barrages have been so diminished.
But if Israel were to relax their air coverage, even for a day, then Iran could take all of those remaining launchers and shoot-and-scoot them, getting them back into secrecy before they can be destroyed. So it’s important for Israel to destroy as much as they can before then, and also important for them to manage any diminishment of their air coverage very carefully.
The ideal for Israel would probably be to trick Iran into thinking that they were pulling planes back before they actually do it, to lure the launchers out into the open where they can be destroyed. But I don’t know if Iran’s sensor capabilities are degraded enough to make that realistic. And even in the best case, that would still mean one more very heavy barrage heading towards Israeli cities.
In throws up in mouth fairness to Netanyahu, Israel had never been a part of the jcpoa and had every right to lobby Trump over this just as Trump had every right to say no and continue it. This is still on Trump primarily.
Sure, they had the right, but they were wrong on the facts (unless what Netanyahu really wanted was an excuse for war) - the JCPOA was working and keeping Iran from developing a nuke, and Trump (with Netanyahu’s blessing) sunk it for no good reason.
Yes, I think this would be a good strategy. One point in its favor is the fact that so much of the Iranian command structure has been destroyed, so they may have a hard time adapting their strategy. Fingers crossed.
I have long believed that Netanyahu has been trying to find a way to get a war with Iran that involves the US. That’s why he opposed the JCPOA, which his own security service said was good for Israel. Which makes him a pretty shitty “friend.”
Yeah it may have been a cynical calculation on Netanyahu’s part. I think the anti-JCPOA faction had two big things driving it (both of which I disagree with):
They didn’t think a deal that addressed Iran’s nuclear program but not their ballistic missiles o their network of militants and terrorists was worth it. IMO we’re seeing the counterpoint of that now - as awful as their terror network is, as tragic as any use of their missiles and as much more awful as it could potentially be if they go scorched earth and go after other countries, shipping etc., this would be a completely different situation if they had nukes.
Second, I think people overrated the impact of sanctions. Sanctions alone were not going to topple an authoritarian regime, any more than they did in Venezuela or any other country. They also weren’t going to prevent them from continuing to develop their nuclear program and the rest of their military activities.
Thing is, the damage Iran would be able to inflict doesn’t increase linearly with the number of ballistic missiles they are able to fire.
Instead, we see that small barrages are almost harmless because they’re able to be shot down completely, but larger barrages cause some missiles to slip through. So getting from no hits to one of two hits takes a huge amount of additional missiles for small gains.
There is a level of firepower that would overwhelm defensive capabilities. Once you pass that point, additional missiles provide enormous additional damage. Each of the ballistic missiles fired is more than capable of taking out an apartment building, or half of a suburban street. If Iran was able to fire, say, five hundred missiles in a single barrage, they could potentially reach a point where they overwhelm the defences and destroy entire city blocks with each barrage.
There is a level of ballistic missile firepower that absolutely is an existential threat, just as much as nukes.
I think it’s pretty clear that the JCPOA didn’t prevent them from maintaining the progress they’d already made in their nuclear program, or from building up additional capabilities within the limits of the treaty, or from building up the capability to rapidly build weapons without actually crossing any lines yet. That’s why, despite years and years of sanctions and deals, their nuclear program wasn’t set back; it was just put in hibernation, ready to be reactivated at any moment.
The simple fact is that no deal was going to make Iran dismantle its nuclear program.
Functionally, sanctions are little differentiable from tariffs. They simply add cost to trade with foreign nations.
But, anywhere there’s a nation, there’s the means to support a people.
In siege warfare, as point of comparison, you’re locking someone into a single fortress or castle. They might have stored and preserved food, and some small ability to garden, but the total amount of production capacity in the tight space is generally going to be insufficient to support a meaningful population. Given 6 months to 2 years and you’re going to force them into negotiations or cause their health to fall so much that you can take over.
But if the walls of the fortress were so long that they included enough space to grow and harvest enough resources for unending self-sufficiency? Standing outside their walls and blockading isn’t going to get you the win. Sure, you might block their ability to buy certain luxuries from abroad but that’s not really the biggest concern that a people can have. You need to constrain them at a narrower point or perform a true invasion.
Self-sufficiency limits the total strength that a nation can have. It’s hard to go out conquesting when you’re stuck farming and patrolling the walls.
Sanctions aren’t completely useless, but they’re such a trivial form of siege warfare that someone like Trump can even apply them to his own country and it’s not completely obvious whether it’s worker protectionism or treason.
This is true, but there’s also the “Republicans are awful” part of it. They absolutely hated the idea that the deal actually gave Iran something in return for signing the agreement. This deal unfroze a lot of Iranian-owned assets that had been frozen for decades following the revolution and the hostage crisis. Republicans threw a fit over “Obama giving them billions of dollars”, as if there were some other way we could have ever gotten Iran to sign the deal.
Iran has been one of the Big Boogeymen to the Western powers for over 4 decades now. The nuclear deal, while imperfect, was a good first step in trying to normalize relations with Iran. No one with any sense thought it was going to be everything everyone ever wanted, but it showed that it was possible to have constructive talks with Iran, and that we could accomplish at least some goals if we all worked together, with honest desires to improve things. We could have built on that experience to negotiate new deals to address the issues left out of the nuclear deal.
But that wasn’t good enough for Trump and the Republicans. They wanted everything, and they wanted Iran to get nothing, and so they trashed the whole thing. And now they’re surprised that Iran isn’t taking them seriously any more. Fuck those idiots.
I think it is entirely reasonable to think that Iran had every intention of getting nukes by any means possible. The country was always working towards that goal regardless of treaties or anything else. Honestly, I get it. I would too if I were them. It’s very rational. If they had nukes Israel would not dare to do what they are doing now.
Well of course not. What possible course of action would reverse the progress they’ve made? Most of the progress is in the form of knowledge. If you know how to build a centrifuge or whatever, and someone destroys your centrifuge, you just build another.
Pausing the development was all the agreement did, because it’s all that the agreement could do. And as long as the agreement remains in place, it’s enough.
The main difference is that even if missiles aren’t able to overwhelm defenses, with nukes only one needs to get through.