David McCloskey

But it's not... You got to turn it into a bomb.

And that is...

work on high explosives, electronics, advanced metallurgy, material science, all of these very specialized kind of areas of study and machining and fabrication to actually create the warhead.

And then the third component of a weapons program is the delivery mechanism, because that warhead has to be fitted onto something that can then be delivered to your target, and in this case,

It's almost certainly a ballistic missile.

So it's not one site and it's not just the production of the fissile material, which again is where we focus so much of our time and energy publicly.

Yeah, I think the focus on the production of the fissile material makes some sense because the biggest, most well-known sites are all, I mean, the ones you just read out, Natanz, Fordow, Isfahan, are all involved in the production of the fissile material, the production of the highly enriched uranium that would be necessary to include in a bomb.

But the weaponization piece, the delivery mechanism piece, they're much harder intelligence questions to answer, I think, and they're easier to hide from the outside.

I think what we do know is that Iran had not assembled a complete nuclear weapon before Operation Midnight Hammer last summer.

On weaponization in particular, it gets confusing quickly, doesn't it?

Because Iran, and there were very famous declassified or leaked US intelligence assessments that came out that said that Iran had stopped most of the weaponization work back in 2003.

Recently, it seems that the CIA assessments have shifted a little bit from kind of Iran is not doing weaponization work to something that's a bit more hedged.

But what is certain is that Iran had preserved the institutional knowledge and retained the personnel, at least the personnel that haven't been killed by the Israelis, and maintained the facilities to kind of weaponize on a compressed timeline if, and this is the crucial point, if a political decision was made to do that final sprint to actually having the bomb.

It's much harder.

And we're talking when you spread this out and think about, yeah, the facilities where you're doing the geophysics testing, the high explosive testing, the detonator development, places where you do the component manufacturing.

You're talking about dozens of facilities.

And you're talking about a lot of people.

I mean, the other angle to this that's difficult to deal with is that a lot of the capability...

winds up becoming over time, because now this is a very old-ish program at this point.

It's been around for a while.