Mission Accomplished
By 
In his short address Saturday night on the strikes against Iran, President Trump said “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.”
Of course, at that point it’s unlikely that the military had a firm assessment of the damage done by the strikes. But Trump had tried negotiating, he had threatened Iran, Iran had not bowed to his magnificence, and so “obliterated” they were.
Not so fast. Satellite photos are becoming publicly available, and, besides the enrichment facilities, there’s 400 kg of 60% enriched uranium somewhere in Iran. That was the point of hitting Esfahan, which is where it was last seen by IAEA inspectors. But we don’t know where it is.
Trump’s bragging on Truth Social alerted the Iranians.
The president, said one military official, was the “biggest threat to opsec,” or operational security, that the planning faced. (NYT)
Trucks were seen at the sites.
Part of what the trucks were doing was covering the entrances with soil to protect them from bombing. They may also have removed equipment and the enriched uranium, which is in the form of UF6, stored in cylinders about the size of scuba tanks. That would be easy to move.
Jeffrey Lewis and his students track all the sites they find that may have to do with nuclear weapons proliferation. The strike missed a lot of those. A few posts from his thread. He lists more sites.
It looks like the Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs) hit their targets, but it’s impossible to know how much damage they did to the deep underground centrifuge halls. The fact that we see so little damage on the surface suggests that the explosive energy was confined to those halls, which may indicate significant destruction.
And now Qatar, which hosts the largest US base in the region, has closed its airspace in anticipation of an attack. Retaliation begins.
But Keith Kellogg is feeling good.