Gordon Carrera

And I think people can talk about this breakout time and they can talk about, well, you know, the breakout time to have enough nuclear material for a bomb is days or they've got enough nuclear material for a bomb.

But that isn't the same as actually having a bomb, is it?

I mean... No, you have to turn it into a bomb.

Yeah, that's right.

And so you're talking about a big program with lots of people and lots of facilities, which also makes this issue of targeting it, once it becomes big and dispersed, as the Iranian one has been, because it's been there for decades, harder.

So you've got particularly, I guess, you've got three sites that are well known, Natanz, Bordeaux and Isfahan.

Natanz, we talked about last time, is the primary enrichment facility.

about 220 kilometers south of Tehran, with these underground halls built a little bit below ground, 40 to 50 meters.

So they're pretty well protected by reinforced concrete.

Then Fordow, you have a second site, which is built into a mountain.

and was the Iranians kept secret for many years, but was discovered by Western intelligence in 2009.

And that is even more protected from any potential attack.

Again, here, this is Iran learning the lessons of what they saw happen in Iraq and Syria with other programs.

And then there's Isfahan, which is home to a facility which converts the gas, which is fed into the centrifuges.

And which also, and this is also important for our story, has got underground storage tunnels.

And these are going to be an important part of whether the US could get hold of the material now.

So that is the, I guess that's the infrastructure of the sites as we understand them.

But if we kind of maybe quickly look at the process and how far Iran had moved on this process, whether it's weaponization, because we know about the enriched material and we know that they put together this 400 kilograms, something like that.

of pretty highly enriched uranium, which is one of the issues.

But some of the other areas of weaponization and delivery, it's a little bit different, isn't it?