David McCloskey

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.

Is that it's in people's brains, which again, hence the need for these assassinations as seen from the Israeli perspective, because you destroy the facilities, but you also have to destroy the people who are critical to- Yeah.

in particular, the weaponization, right?

And we've talked about some of those assassinations on the program.

But when you broaden the scope and you look at, you know, there's probably 25,000 people in the broader program and hundreds to maybe low thousands involved in weaponization.

So when you see numbers of Israeli assassinations of like, okay, they kill 15 or 20 Iranian nuclear scientists or engineers at the outset of the 12-day war last summer,

Yes, that is doing damage to the program, but there are a lot of other people who are involved or could be involved, you know, to replace the people who were killed.

You see the problem now in Operation Epic Fury where the Iranians are still firing ballistic missiles.