147. Will Trump Destroy Iran’s Nuclear Programme? (Ep 2)

16:06Gordon:Well, it's research for

16:07David:a bomb yeah it's research for a bomb um but you need to get up to 90 really for a weapon as we said i think last time the hard work is at the early stages and the more if you like of the highly enriched uranium you've got the easier is to remove the less highly enriched and to enrich it further so it gets easier the higher you go up the scale so 440 kilograms of 60 you know enriched uranium is technically enough for i think nine to ten nuclear weapons maybe something like that So it's a significant amount. We're going to be coming back to that 440 kilograms because it isn't the entirety of the Iranian nuclear program, but it feels like that's where the political debate has centered is on that material and what has happened to that material.

16:49David:And we know about that from the last time it was inspected from the IAEA, which was actually quite a few years ago, I think 2022, 2023. This isn't new information, right?

17:03Gordon:No. It's years old. Yeah.

17:05David:It's years old, but that's the last time it was kind of independently checked. And that's what Iran is thought to have had. So that is a key aspect of the program that we're looking at. But actually, when it comes to delivery systems and weaponization, we've talked about that, that they're not necessarily there yet. But it does mean that the gap between how long it would take Iran to become a nuclear state has been shrinking if it took that decision. And that gap has been shrinking, particularly since the joint nuclear deal was pulled out of by the Americans, to a shorter period, which then increased the pressure to do something which led to those strikes June 2025, which, of course, as we know, David, obliterated the program.

17:54Gordon:Totally, totally obliterated it, which is why Pete Hegseth is saying, well, actually, you need to hand over all this other stuff or we'll come get it. I have to say, Gordon, I don't like being in a position of having to give you compliments. It's a very uncomfortable position for me, but I should tell listeners, and I'm man enough to do this, that I put Gordon Carrera on the spot here with that little science explanation.

18:20David:Because it's not in any notes. I had to do that. I had to do that from here.

18:23Gordon:He nailed it. He did that. That's right. Gordon Carrera is the official science explainer of The Rest is Classified.

18:31David:The rest is science. The rest is science, yeah. The rest is Vsauce and Hannah Frye. Step back. I don't think so.

18:38Gordon:You're going to be in Vsauce's chair before you know it, explaining these kind of things.

18:42David:Yeah, I don't think so.

18:43Gordon:So, June of 2025, Israel and the US have decided on a military option to deal with Iran's nuclear program. Although different from Epic Fury, the Israelis hit Iran first, and then we kind of pile on the back end and hit these nuclear facilities. So the Israelis started with Operation Rising Lion, killed dozens of senior officials in the opening salvo, including 14 nuclear scientists. Nine of them are simultaneously killed in something called Operation Narnia.

19:14David:Really?

19:14Gordon:When you peel it back, it's murdering nine people in their homes while they sleep.

19:19David:Can I just say, C.S. Lewis, the author of the Narnia books, would not have approved, I think. You don't think he would approve? I don't think he would approve. Oh, he would definitely not have approved of that. And also, Rising Line, it's a bit like Aslan from the Narnia stories. Anyway, it's an Israeli operation, which does kill a lot of scientists.

19:39Gordon:Well, they're involved in the weaponization program, to be fair. They're involved in work to give the Iranians a nuclear bomb.

19:48David:Capability, but yes.

19:52option you keep hold on now hold on okay so you have here we go i feel that that the gap

19:59Gordon:from and i think we're both in agreement yeah that the iranians did not have a nuclear bomb prior to they don't have one now we don't think yeah and they didn't have one prior to operation midnight hammer and the 12 day war the gap from where they were to a bomb was shortening. Was shortening. And I think when you look at the analysis of the IAEA inspection and verification reports and the IAEA's view on how advanced the weaponization effort was, which admittedly is like they have gaps, right? The Reddians aren't being forthcoming about the weaponization aspects of their nuclear capabilities. We're not talking about a significant amount of additional engineering work.

20:52Gordon:It's a very tight timeline. They were very close in 2003. And it's been 23 years. So presumably, that gap has been closed a bit in the intervening quarter century.

21:09David:I always just think, so this is also, and we'll come back to this when we do Iraq WMD is I'm slightly scarred by the number of times I've heard officials talk about how close a country is to a bomb by using how much enriched uranium they might have or how much material they might have or how long theoretically they might have to get it because it is often used deliberately as a means to kind of justify action or to try and persuade the public and I just think it's always It's worth a little bit of caution when people tell you how close they were to a bomb or that this was enough material for this many bombs.

21:46David:Because it is very different to have some enriched uranium to being able to, and we've talked about this, to being able to have a bomb, to then even being able to have a deliverable bomb, to testing a bomb without getting attacked while you do that, to having a deterrent capability with a bomb. There's a distance there. And I just think it's always worth keeping that in mind. But anyway, I think we do agree. Yeah.

22:08Gordon:And I guess the issue with that, which I think you would agree with, is you're right. It's oversimplifying things to say, oh, well, if you have 440 kilograms of highly enriched uranium, that's roughly the equivalent or the amount you would need for nine or 10 bombs. That's a true statement, but it doesn't mean that you in two weeks can have nine or 10 bombs.

22:27David:Yeah, yeah.

22:28Gordon:But the problem with the weaponization and the delivery side of things is that those are the aspects of the program where you are, by definition, going to have the biggest intelligence gaps. Because the quote-unquote verification that the IAEA or the monitoring that they'd be doing, they're not doing any of that on the weaponization side. I agree with you that political officials, military, even intelligence officials can get over their skis pretty quickly in kind of ringing the bell and saying, oh, well, the Iranians are at the doorstep of a nuclear bomb because they've got this much highly enriched uranium.

23:02Gordon:Like that's overblown. But the reality is you probably won't see that final push, whether it's six months of work, nine months of work, whatever. You probably won't spot that or you have to assume you won't spot that. and you kind of have to use in some ways the fissile material as crude of a strategic warning or proxy as you have to use the fissile material as the indicator of how close you are which is

23:34David:where we've got to actually now because that is right in a way where the debate is focused on but yeah i mean we'd got to midnight hammer haven't we june 2025 in which as you said the israelis start the campaign, but then the US follows through by deciding this is the moment to target these nuclear sites. And this is always what Israel had wanted and needed, because it's only the US which has what are called the massive ordnance penetrators, the GBU-57 bombs, which can get into those buried, hardened nuclear facilities which the Iranians have been protecting.

24:13Gordon:The bunker busters, the massive ordnance penetrators, the MOPs, I guess the MOPS, it's the largest conventional bunker busting bomb in the U.S. arsenal. These things are, I mean, gigantic. They can only be carried by B-2 bombers. I mean, they're essentially designed specifically for targets in Iran and North Korea. Each one weighs about 30 ,000 pounds. Their GPS guide it, they're 20 feet long, and they're designed to reach through about 200 feet of earth or 26 feet of reinforced concrete before they detonate, which is insane. And on June 22nd of last year, the U.S. hits Natanz, enrichment facility, strikes the site with at least two mops in a double tap strike, which amazingly go through the same penetration hole.

25:04Gordon:So they drop one, goes in, and then they drop the second one and guide it into that same hole. on Fordow, which is that site buried in a mountain near Qom, Iran, the US drops 12 of these bombs on the 22nd of June. And this part is wild. They target two specific vulnerability points that have been identified from older schematics and historical satellite imagery. There is a ventilation shaft, which I, as I was researching this, pictured as that exhaust hatch on the first Death Star, Gordon.

25:41David:At the end of Star Wars.

25:42Gordon:At the end of Star Wars episode four, I do hope.

25:45David:Where Luke has to be guided in. Yeah.

25:48Gordon:That's right. So this is where you put the proton torpedo. So there's a ventilation shaft at Fordow that connects to a central hallway and it leads to these kind of two main underground halls. and then there's a kind of a concealed service structure on the other side of the mountain ridge that's located directly above the south end of the centrifuge cascade hall. So essentially what this means is if you get into that ventilation shaft, you can have a massive impact on the facility. So 12 of these bombs are dropped there. And then Esfahan, which is this more upstream, it's involved in the production of fissile material, but it's not an actual enrichment facility.

26:26Gordon:It's hit by several rounds of Israeli strikes before Midnight Hammer. And then during Midnight Hammer, the US sends Tomahawk missiles at this main uranium conversion facility, which collapses all four tunnel entrances to the underground storage complex that's north of the main site. And this is where it's believed that those highly enriched uranium stockpiles are stored and they were moved there prior to Midnight Hammer.

26:55David:Yeah, some people have done some kind of satellite imagery where they think they're spotting the type of canisters, and we'll come back to them, where you would keep that kind of material being taken to that site by the Iranians just ahead of the attack. So Isfahan, even though it's not one of the kind of main production facilities, is thought to be where that highly enriched uranium is now. So stepping back, those strikes last summer certainly massively damaged Iran's centrifuges to enrich more uranium. So it put a lot of them, question mark, all of them out of action, made it harder to, in other words, get more or enrich the uranium further, although it still leaves some unknowns.

27:37David:But the crucial question is that stock of 440 kilograms of highly enriched uranium, which was thought to be in Isfahan, because that was buried there. And we'll come back to that at the end of Midnight Hammer and is thought to still be there. So if we then come up to February of this year, Epic Fury, the nuclear program gets hit again, doesn't it? There are more strikes at Natanz and Isfahan. Israel supposedly also struck at a covert nuclear weapons development compound northeast of Tehran because they were worried that perhaps Iran was relocating some of the weapons development to that facility.

28:14David:But we've seen a very different target set this time in which, as we've all seen, it's been targeting a lot of the missile program, a lot of the military leadership, administrative hubs, even bridges, we should say, and broader scientific establishments. There's been this effort to try and dismantle, I guess, the whole military infrastructure and scientific and engineering infrastructure around the regime, not just the nuclear side, but also missile production. But still, that has left unresolved this issue of the highly enriched uranium.

28:51Gordon:Yeah, because despite all of this destruction, the Iranians still have 440 kilograms, 970 pounds of uranium enriched to 60%. And as we've discussed, that's, you know, enough for 10 nuclear weapons. If you finish the weaponization and pairing of a warhead with a delivery mechanism, all that, but from a just pure how much fissile material do you need, it's enough for probably 10 weapons. And there's a fundamental problem here, which is that you can bomb facilities, you can kill scientists and engineers, but you can't destroy the already enriched fissile material if you can't get to it with a bomb.

29:40Gordon:and we should say under Isfahan, there's been a whole bunch of relatively new underground work that the Iranians have done to harden that facility. And it doesn't seem like we can get there with the mops, right? The bunker busting bombs. And, and we'll come back to this a bit later, this target is not a facility. We are talking about almost a thousand pounds of stuff that would comfortably fit in a single truck. So you can't bomb it, right? They already have this stuff. You can't bomb it. What do you do about that highly enriched uranium?

30:17David:And I guess the answer is the only possibility is if you can't get the uraniums to hand it over, as Pete Hegseth and others have been calling for, you've got to go get it. And that means a ground operation. So let's take a break there. And when we come back, we will look at what a special forces operation on the ground to deal with Iran's nuclear program might really look like. See you after the break.

30:44David:Well, welcome back. We are going to be looking now at this question of whether the US could do a special forces ground raid, a larger version of what they did, I guess, to rescue an airman inside Iran, but this time to go after the highly enriched uranium, this 440 kilograms.

31:05Gordon:970 pounds.

31:06David:Yeah, 970 pounds for those who are dealing with different forms of measurement. But we think we know where it is, but no one's totally sure. But the suggestion is it is in Ispahan, as we've talked about. But I think what's interesting is buried in Ispahan, Because as we've heard, Ispahan has been hit multiple times. And so the idea is this is not stuff just sitting there in a warehouse, but it is buried probably under rock, whatever.

31:35Gordon:And there's probably sharks that have lasers on there, laser beams on their forehead that are -

31:40David:We need James Bond.

31:41Gordon:Yeah, that's right. I do picture a kind of villain's lair that this must be sitting in. Yeah. If it's just in a musty room, it's going to be kind of disappointing, isn't it? Yeah. But it probably is. And you're right that what has probably happened is that it was put in Isfahan prior to the strikes last June, and it's probably been buried there. It does seem that there are tunnels, obviously tunnels that get into this underground complex at Isfahan that probably sealed off with Earth in February. I mean, again, probably to further harden them from the kind of special operations raid we're going to be talking about.

32:22Gordon:But US officials have said that they think there's a very narrow access point through which the material could be retrieved. Now, the other piece to this, though, that I think it just is worth mentioning is it is possible that some of that highly enriched uranium could be still at Natanz, could be at Fordow.

32:42David:Yeah.

32:42Gordon:There's been a lot of confidence on the part of the Trump administration that, you know, we know where this stuff is exactly where it is. I think privately, there's probably less certainty about that. There's also, we should say, over 2 ,000 pounds of highly enriched uranium that's been enriched to 20%.

33:00David:Yeah.

33:00Gordon:And again, the gap from 3 % to 20 % is a lot harder to do than 20 % to 60%. And so even though getting that 20 % up to weapons grade is now much more complicated because you destroyed a lot of the enrichment facilities, that's another piece of the problem too, too, right? Because I think there's a tendency, and we're going to talk about the operation in terms of going after this 970 pounds, 440 kilograms of the stuff that's enriched to 60%, but there's actually a broader and kind of hairier set of problems that I think -

33:33David:There might be more out there.

33:34Gordon:Nobody wants to talk about. So we may not know where all of it is. It might be spread across multiple facilities. It's also, as we've said, it's been a long time since the IAEA has verified its location. So when we talk about 440 kilograms of highly enriched uranium, what is that? That is roughly the volume, if you had it all together, of a large oil drum.

33:53David:So again, this is the

33:54Gordon:culmination of billions of dollars of Iranian R &D and industrial might has led them to create something that could fit inside a large trash can as the centerpiece of this program.

34:09David:And what, about 20 of them? 19 of them? Something like that? Of these tanks?

34:12Gordon:Well, so it's probably a story. It's not all together because it's like, If you were going to put that volume of stuff, it would fill up a large oil drum. But it's probably stored in steel cylinders. And the size of them, you look at the different reports, there's speculation about how big they are. But it's maybe like 20-ish scuba-sized steel tanks.

34:32David:I mean, it's so small, isn't it?

34:34Gordon:This is a small target. As we've said, it's probably buried underground at Isfahan. And again, how do you go get it? There are plans to do this, we should say, before we get into it. The plans exist. I think there have been plans to do this for some time. It's also something that the US military, in particular, some of these special mission units has trained for. Yeah. So the JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command, has spent years preparing to secure or seize Pakistani nuclear weapons in a crisis as one example of just kind of a counter WMD mission. Yeah. Yeah. Squadrons from Delta Force and the SEAL teams have practiced entering these kind of deep underground shelters at a site near Las Vegas, aided in part by the US Army and what they call nuclear disablement teams, which are trained on how you dispose of nuclear material or disable nuclear power plants and reactors.

35:29David:Yeah. And it's worth explaining to people why there are these contingency plans to go after Pakistani nuclear weapons. And they really got developed. I mean, Pakistan, you know, developed the bomb, tested it late 90s. But it was the fear that a kind of Al-Qaeda style takeover of Pakistan in the 2000s. And then they would have control of a nuclear stockpile of the country, which Pakistan had developed to counter India's bomb. And so that's why this mission had been there, just in case of that kind of emergency scenario, that they felt they need to go after Pakistan's weapons specifically. And I think the Pakistanis know that, even if they don't like to talk about it.

36:08David:But yeah, that is a kind of very close parallel, isn't it, of the kind of mission you might be talking about, to go in and go after, in an effectively, in a hostile situation, and get hold of the nuclear material.

36:21Gordon:I also think there's been training done specifically for Iran well before Epic Fury. I think this problem was understood inside the US military and inside JSOC. Like, you know, and for example, I mean, it's not publicly linked to Iran, but these nuclear disablement teams, you know, have done mock raids on nuclear facilities like with the Rangers, for example. There was a 2024 exercise that simulated a raid under fire on a decommissioned facility mocked up like an underground nuclear site. So you kind of read between the lines. I guess it could be North Korea. But the point is these cluster of kind of fairly elite US special mission units paired with some of the technical expertise in the US military establishment on disposing of the stuff, have trained for years on how you might get into one of these underground facilities and extract stuff.

37:14David:Have I ever told you about my top secret mission to extract nuclear material from a reactor?

37:18Gordon:Gordon, how have we done? We've done so many nuclear focused episodes.

37:22David:I have never told you this before. You've never told me this. It's true. I will put a link in it. 2010, 2010. It was from a nuclear reactor in Serbia, which the Serbs had agreed the nuclear material from the reactor could be shipped out by the IAEA and the Americans and taken to all places, Russia, for reprocessing because the fear was that someone could get hold of it and get a nuclear bomb. So I got taken along for the ride and it was a wild ride. So it's my only time in a nuclear reactor.

37:50Gordon:Why were you taken along?

37:52David:But it was really kind of, it was crazy because we went to this reactor and it was all secret that this was happening. So we had to not report on it. until it had finished its journey, because the fear was the material could get hijacked on the way by terrorists who could then have a kind of material for a dirty bomb. So we went to the reactor and they shut down the streets of Belgrade through the night so that this convoy of which we were part could drive out to first to a kind of train station. And then the nuclear material in these big kind of things got loaded on a train and then taken to a port in Slovenia and then goes on this roundabout journey around Europe.

38:26David:So I have actually escorted nuclear material on a top secret mission out of a nuclear reactor which ended up in Russia, which is, if I wanted to make it sound a bit James Bond, but there wasn't any shooting and there wasn't any guns, but it was a wild ride anyway. Anyway, that was a slight digression.

38:44Gordon:What did they ship the nuclear material in?

38:47David:It was in big, big, big containers. And the IAEA did the kind of monitoring of it.

38:52Gordon:That's a technical term.

38:53David:big big big okay i could tell you because i'm looking at it up there were blue big these big blue bomb proof fireproof containers which i think are the similar ones that we were seen moving stuff to isfahan so just to give you a reference point on that serbian route there was only 13 kilograms of highly enriched uranium on it wow so a lot less actually was being taken on that journey so it was enough to fit basically on one truck compared to what we're talking about the 440 kilograms with the iranians who've got left over so it's a pretty substantial amount in these scuba tanks that i like to think of all stacked up in a warehouse buried underground there's a guy

39:31Gordon:a guy smoking the security guy smoking next to him i yeah but don't you so but 13 kilograms like you could fit that on a bicycle like somebody you could have just ridden ridden out with that on

39:41David:your back yeah i think it's a bit heavier than that and i think it's in these it was in these big containers. And there was all this special tracking equipment on it. And it went by boat. It's crazy. That's why we had to keep it secret.

39:55Gordon:I'm glad it's safely in Russia.

39:57David:That's good. I'm glad we got it to safety.

40:00Gordon:Mission accomplished.

40:01David:Mission accomplished from agent Carrera. He does it again. He got the nuclear material to the Russians. Well done. Let's go back to Iran. Let's talk about what it would take, though, to get hold of this material? Because, I mean, you know, we're talking about material buried underground. Someone I spoke to, a former intelligence officer, said if you're going to try and get to it, you probably need miners, as in equivalent people with hard hats and pickaxes. And giant mustaches. This is not a small operation, would it be, you know, to go to this site, assuming it is an Ispahan, and get it, is it?

40:33Gordon:Maybe both of us have used the word raid at multiple points. And, like, raid is not the right word. Because raid implies that you're in and out quickly and it's dangerous, but you can do it fast. That's not really what we're talking about here. So spoiler alert, this would probably be the largest special operation in history. Yeah. And that's according to a former NATO commander. It's risky. I think it's very risky, but I do think it's feasible. And we'll talk about what that means. And it would take some time as we've discussed. So who would go on this operation? Now, you would need a significant amount of operators, SEAL Team 6, Delta Force, these kind of very elite special mission unit guys.

41:22Gordon:For reference, I mean, the rescued airmen we talked about, there were 100 plus.

41:28David:Yeah, 100 operators, yeah.

41:29Gordon:In Venezuela, there were 200 for the Maduro raid. So hundreds and hundreds, this would be more. And then in addition, this is what makes this so different is in addition to the operators, let's assume we're just talking about Isfahan here. This is what you might need for one facility. Hundreds and hundreds of operators and maybe three to four thousand brigade size kind of blocking force, right, which is going to control access to the facility while the operators and some of these technical experts work. So very much unlike Venezuela operation or the raid to get Osama bin Laden, you're talking about a very large number of people involved.

42:07Gordon:As we discussed, the core operators would be kind of, you know, from these tier one units, Delta SEAL Team 6. They both have counter WMD missions and have trained for those. Attached to them would probably be a nuclear disablement team, maybe scientists as well who would come in once the facility is under control. there probably also be additional specialized units, maybe Green Berets, maybe even more, I guess, conventional type units like the 82nd or 101st Airborne Division. And it's possible that there could be Israeli special forces that would supplement these units as well.

42:41David:And it's worth saying some of those airborne forces are or have been on their way to the Gulf. Yes. And I think one of the things that has been noted in terms of the force size that the US has sent to the Gulf. It is not enough to do a ground invasion, you know, in the sense of a full-on war. But if you are talking about having the option for this kind of special operation, then the kind of force which is being sent to the region would be what you need, the kind of brigade-sized force to do the perimeter security. Because I think that's what's so interesting about this, and I think requires a bit of unpacking, is that this is not a mission where you go in, takes a couple of hours, drop the guys, pick them up, go out with the nuclear material.

43:23David:You would actually need to go in for a considerable period to this site to ensure you could get access to it. You would effectively have to set up a base, a perimeter, and hold it against Iranian opposition for some time, wouldn't you?

43:41Gordon:You would. And spoiler alert, you would probably have to be on the ground for at least days. So you're not going to do this in a single period of darkness, like the rescue of the airmen or like the Bin Laden raid or like the Maduro capture. This is happening over a long period of time. So it's probably worth talking about, okay, this force of thousands. How do you get them there? How do you do the infill and how do you get it all set up? So the workhorses would probably be Chinook helicopters flown by the Night Stalkers, the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. In Venezuela, there were at least six, maybe eight.

44:18Gordon:So there'd be a lot more here. You'd probably also have, it's a C-130 variant called the MC-130J Commando. It's basically modified so it can fly at very low altitudes. So it's designed for covert transport and infiltration. And it can also conduct, and this will be really important in this case, conduct aerial refueling of helicopters. So you're going to have a lot of helicopters. You need to have a constant refueling network above this site so that you can maintain air superiority or dominance over a particular area for a long period of time. Now, those C-130 variants, they can carry maybe up to 80 soldiers.

44:53Gordon:And interestingly, Gordon, six of those MC-130Js were conducting training at an RAF base.

45:02David:Mildenhall, yeah.

45:03Gordon:Yeah, possibly indicating preparation for mission. That's also closer to Iran than if they were in the States. So this group might reach Isfahan. Again, Isfahan, by the way, 500 kilometers inland. They could go from ships and bases in the Persian Gulf. And even though the US and Israel have destroyed much of Iran's air defense infrastructure, as we saw from the rescue of the, in particular, the pilot.

45:31David:That can still shoot stuff down. Yeah.

45:33Gordon:So you would need a huge number of supporting air assets to ferry in all these troops and protect them while they work on the ground. Now, Maduro raid, there were 150 plus aircraft in the support package. So it would have to be significantly larger than that.

45:50David:Yeah. And then I guess the point is what you've got to do is effectively either use existing airfields or make your own runway airstrip on which to land them. And to, you know, to place these, because you've got to bring in heavy equipment. I mean, this is the thing, isn't it? You know, you're not just dropping off a few guys from helicopters. You're going to need heavy digging equipment in order to be able to get to this site and the nuclear material, which, again, is really challenging. And to make sure you have control of the skies, that you're taking out any potential incoming Iranian military or, you know, Revolutionary Guards who are in the region are trying to get there.

46:29David:You've got to be kind of taking them out. There's a lot already going on just to get your teams to the site, to create that kind of cordon where you can land a team and hold an airstrip in order to do the extraction or to do the mission.

46:43Gordon:Yeah. I mean, there's multiple Iranian bases that ring Asfahan, the city itself, that would need to be hit. I mean, maybe they already have been. You would think that there would be some amount of missiles, rockets, and drones that would be constantly inbound, and that you would have to deal with probably from an air-to-air standpoint. So you would have to have assets in that kind of support package that can destroy inbound missiles and rockets and drones. You would need real-time satellite coverage. You'd have a whole intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance kind of web of drones and planes and satellite imagery that are going to be looking at this whole thing in real time.

47:22Gordon:A steady relay of dozens and dozens of refueling tankers. to allow for that whole sort of set of that air support package to stay in the air for a long period, like potentially days. Yeah. So it's not a simple thing. Now, that blocking force of maybe a brigade, 3 ,000 to 4 ,000 people, would need to seize the area around Esfahan to establish a cordon so that nothing can come in or out that we don't want. You mentioned the airstrip, right, Gordon? It's possible because there are bases there. The other option is, you know, you could commandeer an existing Iranian facility and use that as your kind of staging point.

48:04Gordon:Or you could create a makeshift airstrip nearby. And as we saw with the rescue of the airmen.

48:09David:That can go wrong.

48:10Gordon:Yeah. That can go wrong. You can get stuck.

48:12David:Yeah.

48:12Gordon:What you probably would do is you would have engineers from what are called combat deployable construction battalions, the CBs, that would go in and be able to make effective runways, right? they could actually do the engineering and construction work in real time. Like they can construct if you have the right length and if you have the right soil and the right setup, they could construct suitable runways in just a couple of days. So if you need to increase the kind of amount of runway capacity, you know, you could do that with engineering work. You mentioned the diggers and the kind of the fact that you're going to have to actually get into one of these facilities, which is buried under potentially hundreds of feet of earth and rubble at this point.

48:54Gordon:So you would need what we'd all recognize as sort of typical construction equipment, earth moving stuff, big tickers, right? Bob the Builder. Right, yeah, kind of.

49:02David:Sorry, that's a very British reference, but yeah.

49:04Gordon:We get it, we get it.

49:05David:Yeah.

49:06Gordon:But you would also need what I think is not commercially available tunneling equipment. Yeah. That would be able to get through reinforced doors. because this is going to be one of the big problems and one of the things that drives the timeline is that underneath all of this rubble, you probably have a situation where the way in is to get through a door, a piece of reinforced metal.

49:36David:Yeah, but not a normal door, I was going to say.

49:38Gordon:It's not a normal door. And it's probably four-ish feet thick. And so what you're basically doing is you're having to bore through a safe underground, essentially. And we'll come back to this. So you need to get all that equipment in, right? So you could parachute some of it in on pallets, or once the airstrip is up, you could land the equipment and then bring it to the site. Now, keep it by this whole time. You're potentially engaged in firefights with Iranian forces who are firing stuff at you or trying to breach the perimeter, right? So just keep that in mind.

50:18David:And this is going to take hours to get even to the points and to drill.

50:23Gordon:So the main blocking force is holding that perimeter. And what you probably have is this kind of the special mission unit. So it could be Delta Force. It could be the SEALs plus this kind of engineering component that go inside. I think it's fascinating because so much of the driver of the timeline comes down to this piece of it. So again, those entrances are buried in earth. How deep is that earth? Well, is it 50 feet? Is it 100 feet? You need to use earth moving equipment to basically tunnel. This is where your comment about miners is spot on because you have to essentially dig a tunnel through the earth.

51:00Gordon:And then you get to the skin of this door. It's not a normal door. It's like the Hoth base doors. It's like 20 to 30 feet wide, 20 to 30 feet tall. It's up to four feet thick. You can't break it down with a battering ram. you can't blow it up it's made of alloys that are resistant to boring and drilling and again that equipment like i actually think it is highly classified tunneling and boring equipment that is going to essentially carve or dig or bore a hole through that door that would be large enough for somebody to walk through so you think about how much force and energy that's taking yeah It could take maybe eight to 12 hours to do that.

51:43Gordon:A long time. It's going to take you more than a single period of darkness to do that. And keep in mind, like, you're not just standing out in the sunshine while this is happening. You're already at the bottom of a very deep dark hole. You're wearing night vision goggles because it's pitch black down there. This is brutal.

51:59David:Yeah.

51:59Gordon:Brutal work. You've got 80 plus pounds of the usual kit. Because again, you'd have to assume at some point someone might be shooting at you. So you've got body armor on. you've got those goggles one of the guys i spoke to you know had some sense of the planning for these types of missions said it's like it's more like working on an oil rig and it actually it made me think of of the film armageddon gordon classic bruce willis isn't it bruce willis ben affleck owen wilson young owen wilson where they're they're drilling a hole on an asteroid hurtling

52:31David:through space that's more of what this is like exactly it's it's it's not a normal military operation and as you said this means we are talking about not just hours but potentially days when you think about trying to get down there and in comparison i mean the whole maduro operation took about 30 minutes bin laden raid 40 minutes i mean this is completely different so then you get finally to your target maybe under fire who knows is it booby trapped i guess that's possible i mean We don't entirely know how much the Iranians have prepared for this eventuality and what kind of things they've done, but you've got to now get in there and work out how you're going to get it out.

53:16Gordon:And I don't think anyone is quite sure how these facilities are laid out. We probably have some sense, but again, it's this problem of like, you know, the IAEA had inspected stuff years ago. It's like, well, do you have a layout from 2023? Yeah. Is that still right? It's going to change. You know? So as operators, you know, you get through the hole, let's say.

53:39David:Yeah. And you're in. Yeah.

53:41Gordon:You're underground. Yeah. And you're deep underground, potentially. So communications are a problem. Not only is it a problem that you can't see.

53:49David:But your radios are not going to work back to whoever's running the mission. So you're kind of on your own.

53:54Gordon:There's probably been a solution created for this, but I think it is safe to say that communicating and surviving underground is really hard.

54:04David:And Isfahan is pretty big, isn't it? I mean, we think. It's big. This is not like a one warehouse target.

54:11Gordon:The underground facility at Isfahan is thought to be about 20 ,000 square meters, which is about 215 ,000 square feet. That is roughly the size of the hardened facility that NORAD has at Cheyenne Mountain. It's bigger than a Walmart super center. Wow, that big. I don't know if that means anything to you, Gordon. And it's basically four American football fields of floor space.

54:36David:Three football fields for our English, British, non-American, international listeners, by the way. Three soccer fields. Three soccer fields. So yeah, we're in this kind of crazy underground place, buried in a mountain or buried deep underground, I guess. You don't necessarily have a map of what it looks like now. Maybe they do. Maybe they've managed to steal one. Maybe they've managed to kind of use some ground penetrating radar to work out where it is. But then you've got to find your way to wherever this highly rich uranium is held. Again, have you got the intelligence to know exactly where it is?

55:08David:And can you be sure if you spot a bunch of big scuba tanks or trash cans, can you be sure that they are the real thing? Because without wishing to give the Iranians any ideas, and I'm sure they may have thought of this already, I'd be tempted to put some dummy ones in there, hide them all over the place, put in 300 trash cans or scuba, you know, scuba tank size things and let people work out which ones have got the real stuff in and which one have them and have them in different rooms.

55:39Gordon:As I was researching this, Gordon, I did have this question that I haven't seen any answer to and I wanted to put it to you, which is when you get through the hole, get through the door, what do you think's in there right now?

55:50David:Part of me wonders if the whole thing is kind of buried half buried buildings or what you you're wondering whether it's like Indiana Jones Raids of the Lost Art Warehouse with lots of kind of boxes endlessly and you're going to open up all the boxes and go, oh, that one's got the Ark of the Covenant. That one's got the highly enriched uranium. I don't know. I have no idea. I don't think anyone does, do they? Apart from maybe the Iranians.

56:10Gordon:Yeah. I kept thinking when you get in there, is it just an abandoned, is it like an abandoned warehouse where the lights are off, but otherwise you're kind of moving around and able to navigate through there.

56:21David:You've got to find it and confirm that it's the right stuff. Right. We all know you can use the equivalent of a Geiger couch or something like that to establish what it is.

56:29Gordon:Well, and so then you're faced with what do you do with this stuff, assuming you can find it, right? So if you blow it up, which is kind of a bad option, it would basically splatter everywhere. It would release a toxic hydrogen fluoride. You probably wouldn't want to do that in the facility because you also might not be totally sure you could. You'd want to have full certainty that you had destroyed all of it if you're going to take this risk, right? One of the other options that's been raised is that you could kind of dilute it. or sabotage it on site, which is doing something called downblending.

57:03David:That strikes me as difficult. That strikes me as to be sure that you've downblended it and that it couldn't be upblended, whatever the correct phrase is. Enriched.

57:14Gordon:I believe enriched is the phrase.

57:16David:Going back to his highly technical, I'm showing the limits of my nucleology, doesn't strike me as straightforward and probably not quick. To be a successful operation, you want to say you've got it. I mean, that's what, if you go back to Pete Hegseth and others' comments is that they want to extract it, which again is certainly more ambitious than the option of just kind of blowing up a room. You've gone down, now you've got to go back up through whatever hole you've drilled, carrying what we think are maybe up to 20 tanks of highly enriched uranium.

57:46Gordon:Yeah, there's a whole, I guess, piece to this on the equipment side, which is, well, how do you move that stuff up the tunnel? I mean, there's a whole engineering and kind of construction piece to this that's front and center. But again, as you extract it, and whether that's going out on a Chinook helicopter or a bunch of C-130s, those planes could be shot at.

58:05David:Either the Iranians recover it, or it blows up and disperses in a radioactive cloud, which would not be great, not just for Iran, but the region, I guess.

58:15Gordon:And another complication is that if moisture enters the cylinders during transport, that could interact with the uranium gas to actually produce a toxic, I'll read this directly so I get it right, urinal fluoride and hydrofluoric acid gas, which might cause an explosion. So you could have, you have a handling concern consistently, which I think is why you have these engineers from their disablement team or the department of energy or somebody who understands how to handle this stuff safely. And then once you've gotten it all out, then it could be eventually downblended in the US or elsewhere.

58:51David:Well, you could put it on a convoy with me and take it to Russia.

58:55Gordon:Or take it to the Gordon Carrera.

58:58David:The Gordon Carrera option. I'll guard it.

59:00Gordon:The Carrera option where it ends up in Moscow. But all of that we've described is like, that is what, when we talk about what would it take to actually destroy or eliminate Iran's nuclear capabilities, what we have just described at one facility is probably not even the answer to that question.

59:17David:It doesn't necessarily get everything. Yeah.

59:19Gordon:It doesn't necessarily get everything, but that is a big piece of it.

59:22David:Okay. So as we wrap up, I guess the point we've made, it's not easy if anyone had to work that one out. So maybe the question is, I mean, I'm not a great fan of predictions, but do we think it's going to happen? My view, it's an option.

59:38Gordon:Oh, you got to be more. Come on, Gordon. That's weak sauce.

59:41David:No. Okay. Okay. More than an option, I think Trump and his team are actively preparing to do it if they feel they need to. They are preparing to do it, but that is very different from giving the go-ahead. Sure. They are clearly getting everything in position that if they feel they have to do it, they will do it. But I think it does come down to, are there other options? Will the Iranians? The Iranians aren't going to give this up easily. Do you think they would give it up at all? I find it really hard to see. They want to maintain the right to enrich uranium. That's something they've said all along for peaceful purposes, which we've discussed, is something many would dispute.

1:00:16David:So I find it very hard to imagine they do that. I mean, there were other options in the past, which is you could put it under IAEA supervision and downblend it. There are things you could probably do and find ways to negotiate some way of giving the Iranians some room to say, well, we've still got it, but it's for the Americans to say, well, it's no longer dangerous. So I don't know. What do you think?

1:00:41Gordon:Well, as we should say, and we have the Hegseth comments from yesterday, the 8th of April, in late March, the White House press secretary's set of mission to retrieve the highly enriched uranium is an option on the table. So very much to your point. I mean, it is under consideration. I will venture a guess and say that I think it will happen.

1:00:59David:Wow.

1:01:00Gordon:Potentially after maybe a period of kind of stabbing in the dark diplomatically to see if one of the options you just presented, like the Iranians turning it over to the IAEA might pan out, which I don't think it will. I realize I'm going out on a limb here with this prediction, but I think Trump will do it. And I think he will do it because unlike the destruction or attempted destruction of Iran's ballistic missile force, its Navy, or the regime going after 20-ish scuba tanks of stuff, you can do that. You can get that.

1:01:40David:And then you can claim a big win.

1:01:42Gordon:You can say, look, every president for the past 25 years has tried to figure out a way to deal with Iran's nuclear program. I solved it. Now, I think what we're seeing is like, on the regime side, on the military political objectives that have been set or thrown out there to justify the conflict, you can claim victory on them. It's harder, I think.

1:02:06David:Yeah. Although with this administration, I think they will claim victory with whatever they get. And they have. And they have. And they already have, even though the Straits of Vermeer are kind of barely open, if at all. So I think I kind of agree with you that it would give them something they could definitively claim as success without having changed the regime. But boy, the risks are high. But I also think The nightmare for both the US, Israel, and the whole region is you leave in power an angry, hardened Iranian regime run primarily by the Revolutionary Guards.

1:02:43Gordon:Which is where we're headed, to be clear.

1:02:46David:But who've seen that perhaps the only deterrent that they could develop against future attack is to have a nuclear bomb. You've basically created an incentive for Iran to do what it's not done before, which is race and do whatever it can to get a nuclear bomb. Because it's the only thing, as per the North Korean example, that can protect it in its mind from future attack. And you think they may try and do that. Then that would drive you towards thinking, we need to resolve that nuclear question and try and get the nuclear material. And that might be the only way of doing it. Yeah.

1:03:18Gordon:So there's the question of, do we think it's going to happen? And I'm saying yes. I think you're saying maybe. Is that as far as you know? I'm hedging. You're hedging. Well, so here's a second question, which is, do you think it should happen?

1:03:34David:I'm not sure. Should is such a weird word because I kind of think I would like there to be a nice diplomatic solution in which Iran agreed to give up maybe Italian rich uranium.

1:03:44Gordon:Let's say you attempt that and don't get it. Don't get the diplomatic solution.

1:03:47David:As I said, I think the US and Israel have created a situation because there was a lid to some extent on the program with the JCPOA, the Iran deal. That lid's been taken off. That has created now a dynamic where there may not be many options to solve it if, as I said, Iran does race for a bomb now. But it is also, I think you have to acknowledge, partly a situation created by policy choices from the US and Israel who pushed to get rid of that deal, which was imperfect, completely agree, but at least had some kind of lid on that program.

1:04:20Gordon:But if you just looked at it from today, if you were an advisor to President Trump, which this podcast might be a good jumping off point for you to get a job in the White House, would you advise him to...

1:04:32David:Well, what's interesting is I think there'll be people around him who will say do it because I think he's a risk taker. There are people around him who are very determined to deal with Iran.

1:04:42Gordon:I would advise him to do it. The reason for that is because there's a lot of the war aims that have been tossed out there, I think are unrealistic, probably not going to generate. In the very first podcast we did after the start of Epic Fury, the emergency episode, what I said was, I think the return on investment here is likely to be pretty low. It's not that it's zero. It's not that it's zero, but it's that -

1:05:10David:Yeah, you damaged the Iranian military, but you've hardened the regime and not fundamentally changed it.

1:05:16Gordon:And you've destroyed a lot of its infrastructure and its defense industrial base and a lot of its military capacity, but it's still there and it can constitute a lot of that stuff. But when you zoom all the way out and you think about what are American strategic interests with respect to that part of the world and in particular Iran, I think that it is in our interest that the Iranians do not have a nuclear weapon or a nuclear capability. And I think it's in our interest that the Strait of Hormuz be opened and that there be a free flow of oil and goods out of the Persian Gulf. What I fear is that if we don't actually go and get this highly enriched uranium, that we'll have ended the conflict, having a self-inflicted wound by the Iranians having closed the strait for a long period of time.

1:06:11Gordon:We will have made some progress on degrading their program, but we will not have taken the closest thing that we have to a kill shot, which is getting all of this highly enriched uranium that they've spent decades producing and making it much, much, much harder for them to, in the future, get a weapon because we've destroyed so much of the enrichment infrastructure and we've taken the stuff they've already enriched. If we don't do that, I worry that what is already, I think, a low ROI on this conflict is going to be even lower.

1:06:45David:And I guess maybe we should end with me summarising David's views as they will either give it to us or we will take it out. Which is, I never thought David McCloskey and Pistol Pete Hegseth would be so aligned. But I think basically you're in tune there with the Secretary of War. That would be my guess. But I do take your point that the options have narrowed, as they say. But David, I think that's been a really fascinating kind of insight into what that raid might look like and the really hard options now facing those who are worried about Iran's nuclear program. Just a reminder, though, that we also have something very interesting, which is going to kind of talk a little bit more about this, a live stream with David Ignatius, who is a top columnist with some of the best sources, I think, on the US intelligence community for the Washington Post and also writes novels as well.

1:07:37David:Another one of these people who writes novels. another one of these

1:07:40Gordon:these strange people strange people

1:07:42David:who seem to write fiction make stuff up which is going to be Friday 17th of April on YouTube the link is in the episode description that's 5pm British Standard Time 11am Central Time on Friday the 17th with David Ignatius but just a reminder do sign up for the club we've got a great series coming up on lots of things but including Iraq WMD with some really interesting can we tease the guests no let's not tease them left let's save it let's save it Some very exciting guests who were directly involved, it's fair to say, on Iraq WMD. Also, Steak Knife, Northern Ireland. We've got some guests, Patrick Radden-Keefe, Peter Taylor, amongst others, talking about that.

1:08:20Gordon:It's one of the most cheerful series we've ever done, right? The brutality of intelligence work and murder and the troubles. It is fascinating. And it's a fascinating story about the complexities of agent handling or not handling agents who are doing really nasty things.

1:08:35David:Yeah, that's right. So do join us for those. do sign up at the rest is classified.com sign up for a newsletter as well but otherwise see you next time we'll see you next time