How Did We Do?

Image by UK Royal Air Force, via Wikimedia Commons, license.

Over the weekend, the United States attacked three fortified uranium enrichment facilities inside Iran.

While President Trump has claimed that the facilities were "obliterated," the jury is out regarding a more rigorous assessment. Two reports I found, one from NPR and one from the Guardian, indicate that the strikes, while successful, have not necessarily been the knockout blow to the nuclear ambitions of Iran's theocratic, genocidal regime.

Aside from the fact that, of course, damage assessments from the subterranean explosions will take time and come with some degree of uncertainty, two points in particular bother me.

First, if we are to take claims from Iran at face value, the attacks did not cause any deaths:

The Iranian Red Crescent Society reported no deaths from the US strikes, appearing to confirm Iranian claims they had been largely evacuated in advance. The health ministry said those who were injured showed no evidence of nuclear contamination.

Although Israel had conducted a wave of assassinations of key personnel in that program some time before, even a partial evacuation of the facilities will have left knowledgeable people behind.

Worse, in the immediate aftermath, I saw reports that there was no detectable radioactivity from the sites -- which satellite images show coated with a grey ash.

It would seem then, that with all the dithering before the attacks, Iran evacuated more than personnel:

Iran has claimed that it evacuated the sites several days ago, and satellite imagery from several days ago suggests there was unusual truck traffic at Fordow. That appears to confirm the movement of some material from the site, possibly including the uranium stockpile -- or parts of it -- which remains unaccounted for.

Hassan Abedini, the deputy political head of Iran's state broadcaster, said Iran had evacuated the three sites -- Natanz, Isfahan and Fordow -- some time ago.

We thus do not yet know whether the threat of an Iranian nuke is over, despite its program taking a definite setback.

That said, the attack Saturday was far more effective than decades of diplomacy with lunatics who see mass murder as a form of prayer ever could be.

More of that, please!

-- CAV