cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/32212238
By MEE staff Published date: 24 June 2025 22:12 BST
Last update:~17:20 EDT"CNN reported on Tuesday that an initial assessment of the strikes by the US Defence Intelligence Agency was that the main components of Iran’s nuclear programme were intact and likely only set back by months.
This flies in the face of Trump saying that the US air strikes “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear programme. The White House trumpeted its bombing of Iran’s Fordow, Isfahan and Natanz enrichment complexes as a major military feat that surprised Iran."
Almost as though the Iranians built a bunker deep inside a mountain for this exact contingency.
Perhaps someone should have asked the question “do we have a weapon that can hit a nuclear facility under a mountain?” BEFORE blowing millions trying to bomb a nuclear facility under a mountain. World is run by a bunch of morons.
I’m pretty sure that the military understands in general that the bunker busters don’t really work all that well.
I think the more relevant factors in this calculation are (1) B2 is a technology from the 1980s, (2) B2 still looks fricken cool, (3) Tomahawk was also a big deal in the 1980s, (4) Israel already did all of the work suppressing air defenses, and finally (5) the big parade the week before kinda sucked.
Almost like the Trump admin is a nonstop authoritarian propaganda machine.
B2 looks cool AF
The spectacle is more important than the consequences.
There are engineers, smarter than both of us combined, that worked on these weapons. These are problems smart men have worked on for decades.
Given the expense, and rare usage, we only had a few dozen. How would you test such weapons? And this is key, without the intelligence of their effectiveness getting out. People are going to notice when you blow up fucking mountains.
In any case, we’ll gain some solid intelligence from this mission. Not that I supported it, quite the contrary, but we’ll learn a thing or three.
You are not smart for making fun of this thing. But if it makes you feel better?
I think it would be trivial for the US to bury some bunkers in the desert, choke them full of cameras and sensors and test their bombs on them.
There is no reason why this kind of weapon would be needed to be “life tested” to understand its effects.
Systems that directly compete with defensive systems, weapons on soldiers, tactics and so on need to be tested in actual combat sure.
The only thjng the US learned here is that Iran is not capable of shooting down B2s, which isnt all that surprising.
Im sure these weapons were designed to be quite effective at what they were intended to do, which is almost assuredly not blowing up mountains.