Bunkers unbusted: Israel and Iran

0:10Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Rosie Bloor. And I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

0:25Over the past 40 years, South Asia has warmed far more slowly than any other part of the world. Researchers are now questioning whether one surprising reason for this could be pollution. And you could describe the Beach Boys songs, co-written by the late Brian Wilson, as one-dimensional breezy pop, but our correspondent digs deeper, finding many more musical dimensions beneath the hummable melodies.

1:01First up, though.

1:14What you can hear there are big mechanical earth movers backing up, car alarms and mainly house alarms of the shops and homes that were destroyed here. Anshul Pfeffer is our Israel correspondent and has been in Tel Aviv this morning looking at some of the housing hit by Iranian missiles. around me a lot of televivians have come to have a look some of them are even still holding their plastic cups of coffee or juice it's a rather bizarre feeling of both people trying to go about their lives but also to survey the wreckage here

2:01the feeling getting from people here on the street isn't one of hysteria or panic the expectation was actually much worse. In the war with Iran, the amount of missiles which would hit Tel Aviv and other parts of central Israel would come also from Lebanon, from Hezbollah, and more missiles would have got through Israel's defence systems. I'm not saying that people here are happy about what's happening. There is a sort of stoic feeling of it could have been much worse. Both Israel and Iran have spent decades thinking about and planning the missile and air war that is now taking place. Shashank Joshi is our defense editor.

2:46Israel has done remarkable damage to Iran's armed forces. It has complete air superiority from western Iran all the way to Tehran, the capital. and it has decimated Iran's military leadership. This probably still has many days yet to run, but that's going to be a test of endurance, of missile arsenals, of stamina, of munitions for both countries. First of all, Shashank, bring us up to date. What's happened over the weekend? Israel has launched hundreds of airstrikes. It has prioritized striking Iranian military headquarters, the homes of generals, missile launchers, and air defense systems. It has also struck some energy sites, some gas fields, and it has continued to strike some nuclear-related sites.

3:34Iran has responded with salvos of ballistic missiles and drones. Only a handful of those missiles have actually penetrated Israel's defense systems, but they have caused fairly significant damage in Israel. Officially, Israel's objective is still removing what it calls the existential threat of Iran's nuclear program and its missiles. But we have seen increasing hints from Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as from Israel's defense minister, Israel Katz, that there is also a sense of retaliation against residential areas in Iran, and that there's a potential objective of creating the conditions for regime change.

4:13I think the interesting thing is that Israel has only hit a handful of nuclear sites. Our estimates are that the Israel Defense Forces have hit Asif about lunchtime Sunday, which is the latest assessment we have. They'd hit about a third of the nuclear program. It's not exactly a knockout blow. There is no indication of damage at Fordow. In a way, it's the kind of crown jewel in Iran's nuclear program. It's the site that is buried way under a mountain. And the general feeling among officials that I talk to is that Israel does not have sufficiently powerful bunker-busting bombs or the planes to deliver them to completely destroy that facility.

4:53And in fact, even with those bombs, it isn't clear to me whether it would be able to. And that is partly why we are hearing talk of Israel trying to get Donald Trump to join this campaign. And what about damage on the Israeli side, though? Presumably a lot of what Iran sent was intercepted. In the first 48 hours, Iran launched around 300 missiles, but the handful that got through did destroy dozens of buildings and they killed at least 14 people. They struck very near Israel's main military headquarters and an oil refinery in Haifa. And again, last night, we saw some of these missiles get through.

5:27Now, the physical damage is not as bad as many people expected. The financial bill, though, is going to be pretty severe. So if you think about Israel's war since October 2023, the total cost has been$85 billion. That's huge. That's more than the total defense budget of the UK. And that is before the latest conflict with Iran. The estimate is that this war is costing around$300 million a day. And although Israel does have total air superiority over Iran or large parts of Iran, it does still have limited numbers of munitions. So it will be running out of munitions at some point. And I think there will be a sense that they have to do as much damage as they can, particularly in destroying Iranian missile launches prior to the point that Israel's own stockpiles of air defense interceptor missiles are depleted.

6:17Though that will, of course, depend on Donald Trump's willingness to restock those. And insofar, this is a question of who has more munitions all told. How is Iran faring? Iran is really mauled on the military side. And I think from a missile perspective, it would have expected bigger launches towards Israel and more of its missiles getting through. I think that it may be suffering from a disruption to its command and control, and it may be struggling to get its missiles up from underground storage sites onto launches without being identified and struck by Israel, possibly with help from the United States.

6:52Iran still has a lot of missiles, about 2 ,000 missiles capable of reaching Israel. A lot of those will have been destroyed, but it will still have enough to keep firing night after night for some time. And I suspect that it may be rationing its arsenal just in case this turns into a really long campaign. The balance here, Jason, is that Iran is coming off with way more damage and its economy could be really badly hit if the oil facilities and gas facilities are struck. The flip side is that Israel's a small country, which is calling up lots of people. It's relying on lots of reservists to fly many of these fighter jets.

7:28Its entire air force is being worked all the time. And there are indications Donald Trump is a little bit impatient. So in a way, we are now in a kind of war of endurance. I still think Israel has quite a lot of staying power in this, but Iran is definitely not completely out. It will still keep firing these missiles. Well, as you say, for Israel, this is an existential concern. We spoke on the show on Friday about what the motivations are here. You agree with that? Do you believe that it is pointedly just about the nuclear program? I think that it's possible to have mixed motives. I think that Israel launched this campaign because there's a genuine and sincere concern about how advanced and mature and dangerous Iran's nuclear program was getting.

8:11I think that aims can change in a war, and we've seen this in the past, now that they have bombed Iran, if they don't do enough damage to nuclear sites, I think they recognize that this could cause an Iranian leadership that previously had not revived its old nuclear weapons program in a formal way, might well think, hang on a minute, this shows exactly why we need a bomb. And they could dash for a bomb. And so the Israeli objective could then change to, actually, we need to take out the regime. We need an uprising in Iran that topples the Islamic Republic, because as long as this government survives.

8:42Now that we have wounded it, it will dash to enrich and build a weapon. So that is one reason I think Israel is now playing up the prospect of internal unrest in Iran and encouraging the Iranian people to rise up. As SBB Netanyahu said, this is your opportunity to stand up to a system which has oppressed you for almost 50 years. Right now, I think that is unlikely. As long as Israel is expanding its targets, is hitting populated areas in Tehran, including some very upscale neighborhoods. The general sense I have is that this is more likely to push the Iranian people behind a regime that they really despise rather than to drive a wedge between them.

9:25And that's particularly the case if Israeli ministers keep saying very belligerent things such as Tehran will burn, we will hit residential areas in Tehran. All of that I don't think is going to go down very well in Iran. And along the way there, several times you've mentioned that what might tip the balance in this war of endurance is America's involvement. What's your take on that as of right now? Well, on Sunday, Donald Trump published this long rambling social media post where he said basically Israel and Iran should do a deal, implying he does not want to get dragged in. I think it's more complicated than that.

9:56I think there will be many Israeli officials saying to the Trump administration, don't leave the job half done. You have to come in and finish it. That will appeal to many people in Trump's orbit. Others will be horrified by that. And as Trump famously said in his inauguration address, I was elected to stop wars, not to stop them. I think the other interesting piece of evidence is that Donald Trump reportedly vetoed an Israeli plan over the weekend to kill Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader. And that again suggests he is not interested in regime change. But overall, the striking thing is that once again, as with Gaza, you have an Israeli campaign that has met with great military success, but has no immediately apparent or obvious diplomatic exit strategy.

10:35The thing that I will be watching for over the next 24 hours, Jason, is having wiped out so much of Iran's military capability. Is this the moment that Israel now turns its attention and does severe and lasting damage to the remainder of Iran's nuclear sites? Shishong, thanks very much for your time. Thank you for having me.

11:14South Asia is already a hot place. The period between April and June, just before the monsoon, is typically the worst. Temperatures in parts of Pakistan, India and Bangladesh often exceed 40 degrees Celsius. But over the past 40 years, South Asia has warmed far more slowly than elsewhere in the world. And researchers question whether pollution may be playing a role. Countries in South Asia are actually warming far more slowly than the rest of the world. Ainsley Johnston is a data journalist and science correspondent at The Economist. Temperatures in India and Pakistan have risen by about a tenth of a degree per decade over the past 40 years.

11:58Whereas across the rest of the world, temperatures have risen by about three times as much. Scientists don't fully understand why this is, but it seems like pollution is probably part of the answer. So normally we think about pollution driving climate change, but what you're saying is it might actually be preventing warming? Yeah, exactly. So the Indo-Gangetic Plain, which is the area that spreads from eastern Pakistan across the north of India and into Bangladesh, is one of the most polluted areas in the world. There's heavy industry, traffic emissions, burning of agricultural waste and solid fuels for cooking.

12:37And all of this just creates a lot of aerosol particles in the air. While some of these particles, like carbon dioxide, act to trap heat inside the atmosphere, which we understand is the cause of global warming, other types of pollutants like sulfate particles and soot and certain other things actually reflect sunlight back out into space, sort of not allowing the heat to get down to the ground below. They can also influence cloud cover as well so clouds can form around these particles which again shields the ground below from sunlight even more. And there have been several studies that suggest that higher levels of these types of pollutants can actually counteract the effects of global warming in a local scale.

13:21And so is it just pollution that's so-called protecting South Asia from global warming or something else going on as well? There is another factor. Scientists think that perhaps the expansion of irrigation has also played a role in the region. So water absorbs heat as it evaporates and that acts to cool the air around it. In India, since around the 1980s, the area of irrigated land has more than doubled. And scientists think that this area might have a cooling effect on the air around it and that by expanding irrigation at around the same time that the world has been warming, this again might have counteracted the effect of global warming just locally in South Asia.

14:06There was one study from 2020 that estimated that without irrigation, South Asia could have between two and eight times more days of extreme heat than it does right now. So how substantial is the evidence on this? Is there really a consensus that the slowdown in warming in South Asia is because of these effects? Climate science is very tricky. I think at the moment, scientists don't really have a good understanding of how things like pollution and irrigation influence all of these factors that affect temperature. So that's just heat, rainfall patterns, the monsoon timing is a really important factor in this region.

14:44But they're pretty sure that these two factors are at least playing part of the role. One thing that they do agree on though is what may lie ahead. Neither air pollution nor irrigation are going to expand in the same way that they have in the past. And what that means is that these two factors are probably no longer going to have this shielding effect for future warming. Over the next 20 years, India is predicted to warm at around twice the rate of the past two decades, and experts think that the region will soon be warming far faster than the rest of the world. Extreme heat and air pollution are both deadly right now, but it seems to be the case that if India wants to choke less, it's going to fry more.

15:25So the choice between choking or frying seems pretty horrible. Is one or other of them worse than the other? Yeah, so at the moment air pollution is far worse for the people of South Asia than extreme heat is. So there's one study that estimated that in 2021 aerosol pollution killed between two and three million people in the region, while extreme heat led to between maybe 100 ,000 to 600 ,000 deaths. So those are pretty crazy figures. But the problem is that even a modest increase in temperature in South Asia could be really devastating. Already there are days where the combined effects of heat and humidity push parts of the region pretty close to the limits that humans are able to bear.

16:10So that's roughly equivalent to, say, temperatures of 45 degrees with relative humidity of 50%, or, say, a temperature of 35 degrees with humidity of 100%. And these conditions are expected to become a lot more common. And Ainsley, is there anything that the region can do to adapt? Well, tackling pollution has been a really big programme for the Indian government. By 2024, the country aimed to reduce aerosol pollution by around 20 to 30 % relative to 2017 levels. Although a lot of cities missed that target for 2024, there is a recent study that has shown that there has been some improvement in pollution levels over the past decade, and that will probably continue.

16:53At the moment, sweltering heat is pretty unavoidable for a lot of people in South Asia. According to one analysis by the Hindustan Times, in 2022, around half of Indians worked outdoors. And there are estimates that only around 10 % of households in the country have access to air con. A lot of Indian cities have these heatwave action plans, which lay out how they'll provide cooling and water to people if there's an extreme heat event. But there's very few that are making steps to try and make cities more resilient or try and mitigate their exposure to extreme heat. So really, without drastic changes, this coming temperature surge could be really deadly.

17:38Sobering stuff. Ainsley, thanks for talking to us. Thank you, Rosie.

17:53I get around, I get around, yeah, get around. I came to the Beach Boys pretty late. I'm in the East Coaster, I don't surf, I don't like the beach, and the Beach Boys always seemed like pleasant and poppy. John Fassman is our senior culture correspondent. Songs like I Get Around were hummable, but I didn't really understand the complexity of what they were doing until someone recommended that I give Pet Sounds a serious listen. Brian Wilson, who died recently, wrote, produced, and arranged the Beach Boys songs. He had this incredible ear for harmonies and instrumentation that you could hear in songs like You Still Believe in Me.

18:36This is from Pet Sounds, which Paul McCartney called his favorite album of all time, which would give you some idea of the esteem in which he was held by his peers. and we thought this would be a good chance to go back and revisit some of his catalog of hits.

18:52Surfer Girl was one of their early hits. It was from 1963 and was when they were still coming up with their own sound. It's a classic bubblegum pop song. You've got the pining, you've got the extravagant promises, I'll make your dreams come true. It makes them sound like a sort of typical early 60s doo-wop group. But if you listen to it closely, you'll hear a group that was figuring out how to both write within and wink at convention. Paul McCartney called God Only Knows the greatest song ever written, and it's generally agreed to be their masterpiece. It is a sweet, sentimental love song, but it has this really weird instrumentation underneath.

19:32If you listen through it, you can hear sleigh bells and an oboe and some French horns and a harpsichord. the song kind of unspools in the middle and falls apart and then comes back together again. It's a classic example of the way the Beach Boys music was super pleasant and easy to listen to on the surface and underneath was just incredibly complex and inventive.

19:55Sloop John B is my all-time favorite Beach Boys song and one of my favorite pop songs ever written. It's an old Bahamian folk song that other artists recorded before the Beach Boys did. The Kingston Trio did a famous version of it. Johnny Cash did a really weird but kind of compelling Texas Calypso version of it. It is swift and precise. The other thing I love about it is the lyrics are really quite melancholy, right? It's about a shipwrecked sailor who just wants to go home. But the Beach Boys have never sounded happier than when they were pretending to be this homesick sailor.

20:27Good vibrations may be the absolute peak of Wilson's production skills. It is reported to be the most expensive pop song ever recorded because he recorded it in something like 17 sessions. You have woodwinds, you have strings, you have an electrothermin underneath. Like so much of their work, you'll be humming it for days after you hear it, or you can listen to it over and over again and sort of get at what he was doing with the layers underneath.

20:57This beautiful song called Summer's Gone is the last track from their last studio album. It was recorded in 2012. And it, to me, is the musical equivalent of the sun setting into the Pacific. It's sweetly melancholic and it's reflective. And the lyrics clearly come from someone closer to the end of his life than the start of it. When you hear him saying...

21:22It really does sound like someone understanding that it's time to go. the opening tracks from his unfinished album smile our prayer and g reminds us that wilson was not only a genius he was also a very troubled man this is from 1967 the year after pet sounds this was supposed to be a big follow-up album it was never finished because he fell into a spiral of drug abuse and addiction and mental illness and he was secluded for decades but it is a reminder that wilson's legacy is a pioneering pop producer he pushed the boundaries of pop music in a way that nobody had before and really nobody has since.

22:19That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.