That’s not really news, beyond it being refreshing that the general is telling the truth. Even before the bombing, it was known that it’d be almost impossible to verify total destruction without boots on the ground.
I would think that if the uranium material was hit, that a radiation signature could be get, “severely damaged” does not tell us that.
Fair enough.
Looks like Iran said “I can’t go for that… no CANDU”.
Pentagon pushing Pershings for Persia.
Thoughts? Did the OP wildly react?
Some in Congress are raising opposition to the action.
Trump has no declaration of war, and no wishy-washy authorization for use of military force, either. By what authority is he bombing this country?
Pretty sure someone at DoJ/DoD must have already printed a statement that the post-9/11 “emergency authorization” to act against “terrorist sponsors”, or some other such authority regarding defense of Israel, extends to anything POTUS wants to do against Iran. But it being Trump he doesn’t care to act like he needs to justify it.
The Washington Post wrote:
Presidents have some unilateral war-making power. Barack Obama did not ask Congress to authorize his air campaign in Libya in 2011. The exact limits of that power are blurry, defined by politics, not law.
Assuredly, this will be brought up incessantly in the coming weeks.
It’s still hundreds of feet below ground. If the bombing was completely successful, then what we’d have would be uranium (and processing equipment and offices and people and…) buried in a cave-in, still hundreds of feet below ground.
How has Iran been bombed to rubble?
It hasn’t yet, but it will be. That’s what happens when the enemy demands unconditional surrender, like Trump did. I expect he’ll eventually just use nuclear weapons when they refuse to submit. “It worked on Japan!”
Moderating:
Please keep in mind this is a breaking news thread. For speculative discussion, please take that elsewhere. Here’s a handy thread in P&E:
Since I’m not at work today and we’re discussing this I found more information on how uranium is enriched for various purposes. There are multiple methods available, although apparently only two have ever been used commercially. See here. The centrifuge method is, apparently, the most cost-efficient, especially if you aren’t factoring the costs to your nation’s infrastructure from being bombed by people who don’t want you refining weapons-grade uranium.
Bottom line - Iran could have used a different method but chose not to. Again, because they wanted the weapon option.
IIUC one can then detect uranium deep underground by detecting Radon on the ground. It can be detected because rocks could be porous when looking for deep underground uranium, I would think what was left of the location is more porous than solid rock.
True. But there is a percolation rate.
The radon detected above a natural uranium deposit 300 feet down may have spent 10,000 centuries slowly percolating to the surface.
A bunch of uranium enrichment debris buried 300 feet down in a destroyed hardened facility may percolate a lot faster than that. But it may not be next week, or even next decade before it’s at the surface above the facility. And until somebody whose word you choose to trust can stand there with a radon detector, you won’t know what to believe.
I know, the problem of having unreliable narrators as rulers (that goes for Iran, Israel and particularly the US)
Part of my point was that remote sensing won’t give anyone an answer. The tech doesn’t work that way. Somebody needs to go stand atop the facility with a handheld or truck mounted detector.
Which is separate from the “unreliable” part.
But as you say the results will certainly confounded by that unreliability factor too. E.g. if next week Iran announces “There’s no surface contamination”, or they announce “There’s massive surface contamination”, credible arguments by sane outside experts can be made that they’re motivated to tell the truth, or that they’re motivated to lie.
And of course the insane clown posse / CT mongers will have plenty of specious arguments of their own being shouted from rooftops.
And if that person is there with the detector and the truck anyway, they might as well just go in the access tunnels and take a look at the damage directly.