Currently President Trump and the rest of his administration's merry band of MAGA acolytes are puffing out their chests, all proud that seven B-2 bombers dropped 14 giant 30,000 pound "bunker buster" bombs on three underground nuclear sites in Iran.
But as I said in a post about the attacks on my Church of the Churchless blog yesterday, it's likely that things aren't going to go so smoothly from now on.
The best case scenario would be that the attacks were successful, Iran doesn't retaliate in a major way, Iran agrees to a peace deal with the United States and Israel that guarantees Iran won't reconstitute its nuclear program, and a pro-democracy movement takes hold in Iran that ends the fundamentalist Islam control of the country by a single person, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Unfortunately, it is very unlikely that the best case scenario will happen.
As the saying goes, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Iran will respond in some fashion. Then Israel and the United States will respond to that response. And so it will go, actions spurring reactions in a series of events that are impossible to predict.
Obviously it would be dangerous for Israel and the world if Iran ever was able to build a nuclear bomb and develop the capability to deploy it via a missile or some other means. Problem is, the March 2025 Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community said that Iran isn't building a nuclear weapon and hasn't reauthorized a suspended nuclear weapons program.
We continue to assess Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003, though pressure has probably built on him to do so. In the past year, there has been an erosion of a decades-long taboo on discussing nuclear weapons in public that has emboldened nuclear weapons advocates within Iran’s decision making apparatus. Khamenei remains the final decision maker over Iran’s nuclear program, to include any decision to develop nuclear weapons.
So there was no pressing need to bomb the underground nuclear sites. It appears that Trump gave the go-ahead to do this because Israel's prime minister, Netanyahu, goaded Trump into action after Israel attacked Iran with the weapons at its disposal and needed the United States military to bomb the underground sites -- since only a B-2 bomber can carry the bunker-buster bomb, both of which Israel lacks.
As I said in my previous blog post:
Iran has been denying that it seeks to build a nuclear bomb. But it's been enriching uranium to levels that are far beyond what's needed for civilian nuclear purposes, such as generating electricity. Israel is justifiably concerned that if Iran did get a nuclear bomb, it could be used to destroy much of their country.
Problem is, life is inherently unpredictable. Wars, even more so. At the moment there's no reliable evidence as to how much damage the B-2 bomber attacks caused to Iran's underground nuclear facilities.
There's a strong possibility that the lesson Iran is going to take from the attacks by the United States and Israel is that it needs to acquire nuclear weapons as soon as possible. For nobody messes with North Korea, a nuclear power, while Russia invaded Ukraine after that country gave up its nuclear weapon stockpile following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Iran could develop a nuclear weapon in secret, perhaps with the help of Russia and North Korea. Or those countries could give a nuclear weapon to Iran, though they might not be willing to risk the blowback if this was made public. Today Vice-President Vance said that the United States isn't at war with Iran, it is at war with Iran's nuclear program.
Fine. But if Iran's nuclear program goes underground, not physically but secretly, how is the United States going to stop what can't be detected?
There's no way we're going to invade Iran like we invaded Iraq. If Iran quietly develops a nuclear weapons program that up until now it has held off on, the first we might hear about it is when Iran announces that it is a nuclear power with multiple weapons and the capability to deliver them.
As a final observation, the screenshot below of a post on X shows that the only reason Iran currently possesses such a large stockpile of enriched uranium is because Trump withdrew from the JCPOA agreement negotiated between Iran, the United States, and several other nations during Obama's second term.
After Trump tore up the agreement following his 2016 presidential win, Iran steadily enriched uranium from a negligible level until it reached about the same level as before the JCPOA went into effect.
This means that Trump is having to deal with the problem that he himself created, since the JCPOA was working fine to limit Iran's nuclear capability until Trump trashed that agreement.
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