Chapter 1: What are the options for addressing Iran's nuclear program?
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Where is Iran's nuclear material after it's been targeted in operations Midnight Hammer and Epic Fury? And what would it take to get hold of it and end Iran's nuclear program for good? Well, welcome to The Rest is Classified. I'm Gordon Carrera. And I'm David McCloskey.
And David, we're in the second of these two episodes looking at the issue of Iran's nuclear program, how to deal with it, what to do about Iran's highly enriched uranium.
Last time, I guess we set up a little bit about the nuclear program and some of the early options to deal with it, particularly with the historical lens of how Israel in particular had targeted Iraq and Syria's nuclear program, which was different though, wasn't it?
And we talked a bit about that and how they were more discrete programs, basically two reactors which could be taken out, which could be dealt with by a single bombing run effectively.
And spoiler alert, the answer for what to do now about Iran's nuclear capabilities is not going to be a single bombing run. And so we'd also talked last time about this very complicated and high stakes rescue mission to go and rescue a downed U.S. airman in Iran that took place last week. And we should say again, we're recording this second episode online. April the 9th.
And that rescue was this complicated mission to bring a bunch of special mission unit operators from the SEAL teams and Delta Force into this airstrip, fly out in helicopters to go and bring this airman back and get him out.
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Chapter 2: How did past operations against nuclear sites in Iraq and Syria inform current strategies?
That is going to be some of the context that we'll also bring to the story about what an operation to go after some of Iran's key nuclear capabilities might look like. But I think before we get there, Gordon, it makes sense to kind of start at the beginning of Trump 2.0, 2025, because as we said last time, we have this problem. which is that the Iranians are continuing to enrich uranium.
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Chapter 3: What challenges does the US face in targeting Iran's nuclear capabilities?
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And as we talked about a bit last time, it's not so much that the Iranians are racing for a bomb. We'll come back to that. But what they're trying to do is bring down what's called the breakout time, which is the time between making a political decision to go for a bomb and actually being able to have one and to kind of reduce that time.
And at one point it had been talked about in years and then it was in months. But you get to the point where a couple of years ago, 2023, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs was saying it was down to days to have enough fissile material for one bomb. That is different from actually having a full-out nuclear capability, and it's different from actually being able to have an actual nuclear weapon.
This is worth dwelling on because I think there is a bit of confusion about this, isn't there? 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?
It's not. And, you know, in preparing for these episodes, I was struck, Gordon, at how even having done a significant amount of very deep reading on the topic, how it can get very confusing and technical very, very quickly. Yeah. And so I think it's important to kind of break out, well, what constitutes a nuclear weapons program? And there are basically three legs to this piece of furniture.
One of them is the production of the fissile material. That is what most of the Iranian conversation, the public conversation is about. It is how much highly enriched uranium at what enrichment level do the Iranians have? So it's the production of the fissile material. The second component is weaponization.
I mean, I'm tempted, Gordon, to have you give us another science lesson about... Yeah, go back to our Klaus Fuchs episodes if you want those. Go back to our Klaus Fuchs episodes. But you can't just take... a big square of highly enriched uranium and like toss it out of an airplane, right?
I mean... No, you have to turn it into a bomb.
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of Iran's highly enriched uranium stockpile?
Yeah. It might hit someone on the head. If it fell in the water, it might get somebody sick. 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, 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?
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.
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Chapter 5: What would a US ground operation to retrieve nuclear material look like?
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.
And it's worth saying, as you go through what it has got, that that is a difficult target as well, isn't it? If you're talking about destruction, this is not like destroying one big domed reactor like in Iraq. You're talking about relatively small research sites which can be used to do some of the studies in metallurgy to make the components for a bomb. And you're talking about people.
So you're talking about a lot of different sites. And that is a harder target set, isn't it?
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.
25 years, maybe, yeah.
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.
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Chapter 6: How do logistics and planning impact a potential military raid in Iran?
which have got ranges of 1,000 to 2,000 kilometers, which can reach targets in the Middle East. Now, there was this very interesting moment a few weeks back where they did fire a missile at Diego Garcia, this UK-US base, quite controversial military base in some ways. Didn't hit and one got intercepted.
Raised questions about whether they actually have a longer range missile capability, but some people think what had actually happened was that they'd actually just taken out some of the payload so that the missile would go further. But it's led to at least some debate about what the extent of Iran's range might be in terms of striking targets. Could it hit European targets?
But I think it's worth saying that they certainly are developing those kinds of missiles, but that is different from actually having worked out how to build a nuclear warhead and put a nuclear warhead on a missile.
So they are not at that stage, despite the fact they've certainly got a pretty extensive missile program, which also poses a pretty big challenge if you're trying to destroy the capability to deliver something.
You see the problem now in Operation Epic Fury where the Iranians are still firing ballistic missiles. Despite all of the assaults on the launchers, on the missile stockpiles, on these underground missile cities, at the upstream manufacturing and production capabilities, the Iranians are firing them at a severely reduced pace, but they're still firing them.
Still doing it, yeah.
you know, you have an issue of just there's a huge amount of stuff that you would need to destroy. And in this case, I mean, on the missile program, I mean, you're talking about dozens and dozens of facilities that are involved, right? In every kind of, you know, piece of the production pipeline all the way up to the
up to launch, not counting all these dispersed launch positions or support installations and a bunch of stuff that we don't know about. And I mean, I think this is part of why the US Israeli campaign hit thousands of targets in the opening days of Epic Fury, because there's just so much, there's so much to hit.
And, you know, if you put all of that together, the production of fissile material, the weaponization, and the delivery, I think it's helpful to kind of marry all of this and say, where were we on the eve of Midnight Hammer?
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Chapter 7: What risks are associated with extracting highly enriched uranium from Iran?
Well, it's research for a bomb.
Yeah, it's research for a bomb. But you need to get up to 90%, really, for a weapon. As we said, I think last time, the hard work is at the early stages. And the more, if you like, of the highly enriched uranium you've got, the easier it is to remove the less highly enriched and to enrich it further. So it gets easier the higher you go up the scale.
So 440 kilograms of 60% enriched uranium is technically enough for, I think, 9 to 10 nuclear weapons, maybe, something like that. It's a significant amount. We're going to be coming back to that 440 kilograms because it isn't the entirety of the Iranian nuclear program, but it feels like that's where the political debate is centered, is on that material and what has happened to that material.
We know about that from the last time it was inspected from the IAEA, which was actually quite a few years ago, I think 2022, 2023.
This isn't new information, right? It's years old.
It's years old, but that's the last time it was kind of independently checked. And that's what Iran is thought to have had. So that is a key aspect of the program that we're looking at. But actually, when it comes to delivery systems and weaponization, we've talked about that, that they're not necessarily there yet. But it does mean that the gap between...
How long it would take Iran to become a nuclear state has been shrinking if it took that decision. And that gap has been shrinking, particularly since the joint nuclear deal was pulled out of by the Americans, to a shorter period, which then increased the pressure to do something which led to those strikes June 2025, which of course, as we know, David, obliterated the program.
Totally, totally obliterated it, which is why Pete Hegseth is saying, well, actually, you need to hand over all this other stuff or we'll come get it. I have to say, Gordon, I don't like being in a position of having to give you compliments.
It's a very uncomfortable position for me, but I should tell listeners, and I'm man enough to do this, that I put Gordon Carrera on the spot here with that little science explanation.
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Chapter 8: Will the US take action against Iran's nuclear program, and what might that entail?
The rest is science, yeah. Vsauce and Hannah Fry step back. I don't think so.
You're going to be in Vsauce's chair before you know it, explaining these kind of things.
Yeah, I don't think so.
So, June of 2025, Israel and the US have... decided on a military option to deal with Iran's nuclear program. Different from Epic Fury, the Israelis hit Iran first, and then we kind of pile on the back end and hit these nuclear facilities. So the Israelis started with Operation Rising Lion, killed dozens of senior officials in the opening salvo, including 14 nuclear scientists.
Nine of them are simultaneously killed in something called Operation Narnia.
Really?
When you peel it back, it's murdering nine people in their homes while they sleep.
Can I just say, C.S. Lewis, the author of the Narnia books, would not have approved, I think.
You don't think he would approve?
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