A Hard-to-Digest, Whale of a Tale about Iranian Nuclear Bombs
David Haggith

Nearly everyone says Iran's enriched uranium is unaccounted for, but the president says the bomb threat has been obliterated as he heads for a Nobel Prize.

There is a lot of disagreement over President Trump’s claim that the US “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear enrichment program at all three major sites. A leaked US assessment says the US attack only did enough damage to set Iran’s program back about two years, leaving the deeply buried parts unharmed and taking out only the tunnels. Trump is enraged over the “false” government report.

He notes—rightly so—that the report, itself, says it is too early to be considered highly reliable. I’d say the same thing of the report that I did of Trump’s initial and typical boasting—that it is too early to be considered reliable. Trump tries to create his own truth by speaking it into being, but this report cannot be much better than that. As some of key military officials already said, it’s going to take awhile to literally dig down into the evidence to know, and we may not ever have the opportunity to do that. Only so much can be discovered from the air and by satellite about damage so far beneath rock and layers of reinforced concrete with any clarity.

The Peace President

However, the president has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize because of how quickly he supposedly terminated the concern about Iran’s nuclear developments. At the same time, the peace president announced today that he is considering renaming the entire US Department of Defense back to its old name, “the War Department” because, he says, “We feel like warriors!”

The Peace President also leveraged his Iranian success over the past 24 hours to successfully talk NATO into greatly increasing all member contributions to 5% of each nation’s GDP, leaving Putin with a whole lot more European NATO than he originally despised. (More NATO member nations along Russia’s border now with much more arming up.)

Though Spain refused because that would cut into its social programs (leaving the US, thereby, to subsidize those programs), Trump made it clear that Spain would pay double the price in tariffs if it did not capitulate and join the new NATO agreement. (Apparently, the president still believes the nations the US places tariffs on are the entities that pay for those tariffs. What he really meant to say, if he understood truth, was that, if Spain does not contribute 5% of its GDP to the NATO budget, he will double his taxes on Americans when they import Spanish merchandise. That’ll teach those dirty Spaniards!)

At any rate the Nobel-nominated Peace President has launched war with Iran for the first time in US history, ended its nuclear enrichment program without any verification, is considering renaming the Defense Dept. the “War Dept.” because he feels like such a warrior now and has expanded NATO’s power more than any president in history now that all member nations, except Spain, rapidly got in line and agreed to more than double down on their existing contributions. His feelings of power must be immense at the moment.

The mystery of the lost uranium

What I’d be most concerned about, however, is not whether Trump’s boasting about total obliteration of the Iran facilities is truthfully the success he claims but about what happened to all the highly enriched uranium that had been stored in these facilities. Pretty much everyone agrees right now that no one knows whether the enriched uranium is buried down under the bomb sites or fled in the dozen or so large trucks that lined up outside the facility tunnels just a few days before the bombing.

Iran's nuclear stockpile of almost 400 kg of uranium enriched to 60 per cent has not been accounted for, with the extent of damage caused to the Fordow facility still not known. Amid talks about the missing nuclear fuel, US Vice-President J D Vance said the Iran's uranium stockpile might be buried beneath the three enrichment facilities struck by the US over the weekend.

Sure it might be. It might have been swallowed by a whale when Iran ditched it to the bottom of the sea, too, for later retrieval. There is a lot places it might have gone. What I don’t understand is the utter incompetence of letting all those heavy trucks line up outside the facility and then roll out of there, neither taking them all out, nor apparently tracking them all in order to capture them during the strike and find out what they held. They were probably just “cleaning trucks,” coming to tidy up the site.

Two Israeli officials also told New York Times that Iran had already moved a significant stockpile of uranium and other equipment from the nuclear site before the US strikes. After the strikes, Iran had maintained that the sites did not contain any materials that could cause radiation.

Certainly no hint of radiation was discovered in the dust that settled outside the facility according to the US government. I’m not sure what boots on the ground the government used to get that assessment, but so they said. One would think some radioactive material might have gone up the blow hole if all nuclear material had not been evacuated for storage elsewhere. There was after all, a large spread of dust visible in satellite images that did spew out of the blow holes.

I’d be concerned that the uranium got moved to the new Pickaxe Mountain facility that is much deeper just adjacent to the Natanz plant; but, then, I like a good mystery story.

The deeply buried installation, which is just minutes from the Natanz nuclear facility — one of the three sites struck over the weekend — has been quietly reinforced in recent years.

Multiple reports have suggested that Pickaxe could be the perfect hiding place for uranium — as speculation mounted that Iran may have been able to remove its cache before the attacks unfolded over the weekend.

In all that has been said, nothing has been said about the Pickaxe Mountain facility being one of the targeted sites. How did we let that one go unscathed? And why did we let those dozen or so truck apparently head that way after lining up outside the tunnel of Natanz? Are we really that dumb?

It wasn’t immediately clear if Pickaxe suffered any damage during the latest strikes that targeted Natanz, as well as the Fordow and Isfahan nuclear facilities.

President Trump, for his part, has insisted Iran wouldn’t have been able to remove any uranium being enriched at the sites before the attacks.

Why? We have satellite pictures of the trucks lined up outside the tunnels only a few days before and then images later on showing them gone. Some images showed some of what looked to be the same trucks en route to the adjacent new facility. According to Trump, sometimes teller of tales,

“It would have taken two weeks, maybe. But it’s very hard to remove that kind of material, very hard and very dangerous for them to remove it.”

Not if they had spent a month properly containerizing it and moving it all up near the mouths of the tunnels and were smart enough not to line up the trucks until all of it was ready to go, so they could just grab it and go. And, again, the president is overstating his case with false or “alternative facts”:

What’s more alarming is how easily such a cache could be moved. According to U.S. estimates, the uranium could fit in 16 metal cylinders, each roughly the size of a scuba tank and weighing just 25 kilograms—light enough to be transported by foot or in a small vehicle.

So, you ought to be able to blow it onto a dozen large trucks (or even just one small truck) that were already designed to receive it—a likely contingency plan Iran would have put in place years ago.

There is, of course, a reason we didn’t bomb Pickaxe Mountain. We already knew that it is deeper than our bombs can reach, and we have no desire to prove that to the world. And the IAEA says it has no idea what is down there because it has never been allowed access.

What other sites might the escapee trucks have fled to with their mystery cargo in the days immediately before the attack? Or were they just all lined up to use the truck-wash facilities that day? One article even claims the Trump administration kindly warned Iran the attack was coming so they could evacuate personnel out of harm’s way. That seems likely too dumb to be true. Even “Big Balls” wouldn’t make a mistake that big.

IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi later said, “It cannot be excluded” that the [Pickaxe] site is being used to store undeclared nuclear materials….

Evidence of truck movement at Fordow suggests some uranium could have already been smuggled out and possibly stashed at Pickaxe Mountain.

The true extent of damage from the U.S. strikes remains unclear, as does the current state of Pickaxe Mountain. But the site’s sudden prominence—and the mystery surrounding the missing uranium—has reignited fears about Iran’s long-term nuclear intentions and raised urgent questions about what might still be hidden beneath its mountains.

Reignited the same fears that Trump just obliterated? Sounds like a sequel to this whale of a tale is already in the works.

(You can read all about the ongoing mystery and the apparent failure/neglect to take out this deeper site in the articles that follow. Of course, admitting it wasn’t taken out, might diminish the likelihood of Israel feeling settled about the matter and might also diminish the prospects for that Nobel Peace Prize.)

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