When joint In the early hours of Sunday local time, states bombed Iran, targeting three facilities of the country’s nuclear ambitions: the Fudo Uranium Enrichment Plant, the Natanz Nuclear Facility and the Isfahan Nuclear Technology Center. Newly released satellite images show the impact of the attack – at least visible on the ground.
The brunt of the bombing was focused on Fordow, where American forces abandoned twelve GBU-57 giant ordnance penetrators in part of its Midnight Hammer Operation. These 30,000-pound “Bunker-Buster” bombs are designed to penetrate deep into the earth before they are detonated. The Fuduo complex is about 260 feet underground.
The gap is some uncertainty about how much damage the Fudo site has been. President Donald Trump shared his truth after an attack on the “Fordow’s disappearance” social media, and later said in a televised speech: “Iran’s main nuclear abundance facilities have completely permeated.” However, his own army was somewhat cautious about the results in a briefing on Sunday morning. “It’s too early for me to comment on things that may or may still not be,” said Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Satellite images can only tell you a lot of structures located below the surface of the ground. However, the image is before and after it is the best public information about the impact of the bomb.
“What we’re seeing is six craters, two and three clusters, with 12 large-scale ordnance infiltrators,” said Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Non-Diffusion Program at the James Martin Non-Diffusion Research Center at the Middlebury Institute. “The idea is that you run into the same location over and over to dig.”
The specific location of these craters is also important, said Joseph Rodgers, deputy director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and deputy director of the Nuclear Issues Project. Although there appears to be no entrance tunnel targeting the Fordo complex, based on satellite images of early buildings on site, the U.S. bombs landed on a possible ventilation shaft.
“The reason you’re targeting the ventilation shaft is that it’s a more direct way to the core components of the underground facility,” Rogers said.
Given how the underground Fudo is built, this direct route is particularly important. Lewis said the U.S. military relies on the facility as “basically computer models,” telling them “how much pressure might be under before seriously damaging everything inside, even a potentially collapsed facility.” By bombing a specific target area, the U.S. does not need to be able to penetrate the entire 260-foot bomb to cause significant damage.
“They probably aren’t going to get into the facility all the time. They might just want to get close to it and crush it with shock waves,” Lewis said. “If you send a shock wave big enough in the facility, it will kill people, destroy things, damage its integrity.”
