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2023-05-23 Syria-Lebanon-Iran
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Iran’s latest subterranean nuclear site likely impenetrable to US bunker busters
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[IsraelTimes] Analysts say continued tunneling near Natanz facility, revealed by recent satellite images, complicates calculations for US and Israel.
Several images can be seen at the link. Near a peak of the Zagros Mountains in central Iran, workers are building a nuclear facility so deep in the earth that it is likely beyond the range of a last-ditch US weapon designed to destroy such sites, according to experts and satellite imagery analyzed by The News Agency that Dare Not be Named. The photos and videos from Planet Labs PBC show Iran
...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for spontaneously taking over other countries' embassies, maintaining whorehouses run by clergymen, involvement in international drug trafficking, and financing sock puppet militias to extend the regime's influence. The word Iran is a cognate form of Aryan. The abbreviation IRGC is the same idea as Stürmabteilung (or SA). The term Supreme Guide is a the modern version form of either Duce or Führer or maybe both. They hate Jews Zionists Jews. Their economy is based on the production of oil and vitriol...
has been digging tunnels in the mountain near the Natanz nuclear site, which has come under repeated sabotage attacks amid Tehran’s standoff with the West over its atomic program.
With Iran now producing uranium close to weapons-grade levels after the collapse of its nuclear deal with world powers,
...a feat they were able to work up to while protected from interference by President Barack Obama’s deliberately crafted “deal”... the installation complicates the West’s efforts to halt Tehran from potentially developing an atomic bomb as diplomacy over its nuclear program remains stalled.
Completion of such a facility "would be a nightmare scenario that risks igniting a new escalatory spiral," warned Kelsey Davenport, the director of nonproliferation policy at the Washington-based Arms Control Association. "Given how close Iran is to a bomb, it has very little room to ratchet up its program without tripping US and Israeli red lines. So at this point, any further escalation increases the risk of conflict."
The construction at the Natanz site comes five years after then-US president Donald Trump
...Perhaps no man has ever had as much fun being president of the US...
unilaterally withdrew America from the nuclear accord. Trump argued the deal did not address Tehran’s ballistic missile program, nor its support of militias across the wider Middle East.
Nor even, with any sort of seriousness, the thing it claimed intended to do — prevent Iran from a developing a nuclear weapons. But what it did do was strictly limit Iran’s enrichment of uranium to 3.67% purity, powerful enough only to power civilian power stations, and keep its stockpile to just some 300 kilograms (660 pounds).
At those sites the UN inspectors knew about. The warehouse Mossad emptied of Iran’s records of its nuclear bomb program showed there were other sites going for greater enrichment and larger stockpiles. But President Obama didn’t care and Iran denied the inspectors access — and now here we are. Since the demise of the nuclear accord, Iran has said it is enriching uranium up to 60%, though inspectors recently discovered the country had produced uranium particles that were 83.7% pure. That is just a short step from reaching the 90% threshold of weapons-grade uranium.
As of February, international inspectors estimated Iran’s stockpile was over 10 times what it was under the Obama-era deal, with enough enriched uranium to allow Tehran to make "several" nuclear bombs, according to the head of the ineffective International Atomic Energy Agency.
US President Joe The Big Guy Biden
 ...46th president of the U.S. Sleazy Dem mschine politician, paterfamilias of the Biden Crime Family...
and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have said they won’t allow Iran to build a nuclear weapon. "We believe diplomacy is the best way to achieve that goal, but the president has also been clear that we have not removed any option from the table," the White House said in a statement to the AP.
The White House is currently full of idiots who believe seven impossible things before breakfast, and even more over the rest of the day. The Islamic Theocratic Republic denies it is seeking nuclear weapons, though officials in Tehran now openly discuss their ability to pursue one.
“Awfully pretty country you have over there — it’d be a shame if something were to happen to it.” Iran’s mission to the United Nations
...an organization conceived in the belief that we're just one big happy world, with the sort of results you'd expect from such nonsense...
, in response to questions from the AP regarding the construction, said that "Iran’s peaceful nuclear activities are transparent and under the ineffective International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards."
Taqqiya. However,
a clean conscience makes a soft pillow...
Iran has been limiting access to international inspectors for years.
That, too. Iran says the new construction will replace an above-ground centrifuge manufacturing center at Natanz struck by a kaboom and fire in July 2020. Tehran blamed the incident on Israel, long suspected of running sabotage campaigns against its program.
Underground kabooms are even more interesting, from a physics standpoint, than aboveground ones.... Tehran has not acknowledged any other plans for the facility, though it would have to declare the site to the IAEA if it planned to introduce uranium into it.
Only if the Mad Mullahs were interested in having it properly inspected . The Vienna-based IAEA did not respond to questions about the new underground facility.
The new project is being constructed next to Natanz, about 225 kilometers (140 miles) south of Tehran. Natanz has been a point of international concern since its existence became known two decades ago.
Protected by anti-aircraft batteries, fencing, and Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, the facility sprawls across 2.7 square kilometers (1 square mile) in the country’s arid Central Plateau.
Satellite photos taken in April by Planet Labs PBC and analyzed by the AP show Iran burrowing into the Kūh-e Kolang Gaz Lā, or "Pickaxe Mountain," which is just beyond Natanz’s southern fencing.
A different set of images analyzed by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies reveals that four entrances have been dug into the mountainside, two to the east and another two to the west. Each is 6 meters (20 feet) wide and 8 meters (26 feet) tall.
The scale of the work can be measured in large dirt mounds, two to the west and one to the east. Based on the size of the spoil piles and other satellite data, experts at the center told AP that Iran is likely building a facility at a depth of between 80 meters (260 feet) and 100 meters (328 feet). The center’s analysis, which it provided exclusively to AP, is the first to estimate the tunnel system’s depth based on satellite imagery.
The Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington-based nonprofit long focused on Iran’s nuclear program, suggested last year the tunnels could go even deeper.
Experts say the size of the construction project indicates Iran likely would be able to use the underground facility to enrich uranium as well — not just to build centrifuges. Those tube-shaped centrifuges, arranged in large cascades of dozens of machines, rapidly spin uranium gas to enrich it. Additional cascades spinning would allow Iran to quickly enrich uranium under the mountain’s protection.
"So the depth of the facility is a concern because it would be much harder for us. It would be much harder to destroy using conventional weapons, such as like a typical bunker buster bomb," said Steven De La Fuente, a research associate at the center who led the analysis of the tunnel work.
The new Natanz facility is likely to be even deeper underground than Iran’s Fordo facility, another enrichment site that was exposed in 2009 by US and other world leaders. That facility sparked fears in the West that Iran was hardening its program from Arclight airstrike
...KABOOM! ...
s.
Such underground facilities led the US to create the GBU-57 bomb, which can plow through at least 60 meters (200 feet) of earth before detonating, according to the American military. US officials reportedly have discussed using two such bombs in succession to ensure a site is destroyed. It is not clear that such a one-two punch would damage a facility as deep as the one at Natanz.
With such bombs potentially off the table, the US and its allies are left with fewer options to target the site. If diplomacy fails, sabotage attacks may resume.
Already, Natanz has been targeted by the Stuxnet virus, believed to be an Israeli and American creation, which destroyed Iranian centrifuges. Israel also is believed to have killed scientists involved in the program, struck facilities with bomb-carrying drones, and launched other attacks. Israel’s government declined to comment.
Experts say such disruptive actions may push Tehran even closer to the bomb — and put its program even deeper into the mountain where airstrikes, further sabotage, and spies may not be able to reach it.
"Sabotage may roll back Iran’s nuclear program in the short-term, but it is not a viable, long-term strategy for guarding against a nuclear-armed Iran," said Davenport, the nonproliferation expert. "Driving Iran’s nuclear program further underground increases the proliferation risk."
Amid Iran tensions, US releases photos of bomb able to destroy underground facilities
[IsraelTimes] Bunker-busting ordnance is kept at base that is home to B-2 stealth bombers, the only aircraft that can deploy it.
The US Air Force on May 2 released rare images of the weapon, the GBU-57, known as the “Massive Ordnance Penetrator.” Then it took the photos down — apparently because the photographs revealed sensitive details about the weapon’s composition and punch. 
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