Now obviously this would not result in a nuclear weapon, assuming the country is fractured and unstable. But whoever ends up controlling the fordow site now just needs to do a bit of excavation and we are looking at material to make dozens of dirty bombs, potentially falling into the hands of a group as extreme as ISIS. How is burying half a ton of nuclear material and destabilizing the country at all going to lead to safety for the world?

Others gave good reasons but I'll underline most extremist groups are western proxies and even if they made a dirty bomb out of this stuff the damage to the west would be minimal and would be a welcomed excuse for an even more intrusive police state and powers for the nat-sec state as well as control of people and rollbacks of limited freedoms.

Besides that though, the west couldn't invade and hold Iran. But in your hypothetical scenario where it devolves into civil war, they could do one of two things IF somehow they decided such a buried stockpile was a problem. They could 1) hang back and sponsor various groups, maneuver pliant leaders into place for the various factions so no matter who comes out on top controlling that part of Iran they'll have access to move in machinery to excavate and remove it. 2) Just monitor the site and air strike anyone who tries to move in heavy equipment to excavate. They could also heavily mine it, potentially from the air or via special forces or proxies thus acting as a further deterrent.

For the west controlling Iran or at least removing it as an anti-imperialist power is worth an awful lot of risk, far more than would be incurred by such a scenario you outline. Most likely if they did overthrow Iran and a Syria situation developed, one of the resulting factions would agree to sell access to the material and/or the ability to remove it in exchange for things like food aid, weapons, aid, etc.

DPRK. They should get them from the DPRK. Russia has a defense pact with the DPRK who has been sending them tons of shells for their war. The DPRK should be able to purchase s-400 systems at least and re-ship them to Iran if Russia doesn't raise a big stink about it.

s-400 are already sold to various countries. Russia already has deployed s-500 systems themselves against Ukraine and s-600 has been developed and is being fine-tuned. So it's not top of the line and no defense secrets are leaked most likely.

Their number two goal needs to be rooting out all the mossad spies and traitors embedded throughout the country, confiscating all of their stashed weaponry and explosives and setting up networks of checkpoints to inspect trucks.

I have a doubt this will ever be possible to a meaningful degree. They have a contradiction, a very disagreeable one between hardline religious fundamentalists that most ethnic-religious minorities and a huge number of Shia dislike as too conservative, reactionary, and repressive and the liberal reformers whose domestic policy reforms of maybe allow women to show some hair and don't sick the religious morality police on young people dancing to music are very popular BUT who are naive and gullible towards the west and keep getting owned in foreign policy decisions. The liberals get in power and disgruntled hardliners may leak to make them look weak to get back their religious fundamentalist power over their people. Hardliners in power = disgruntled liberals, young people, minorities, etc. Besides that they killed communists, atheists are blackmailable because those are illegal, gay people are blackmailable, etc.

Reminder John Oliver in 1000% onboard with NATO imperialism. Always toes the NATO line, was a huge booster of the Hong Kong attempted color revolution, spews Zenz lies on China, etc, etc. AND is married to a Republican party operative (I don't think it's just for hate-sex).

John Oliver is best seen as CIA. Most media are but him especially because he's very savvy about it and appears progressive on the surface compared to a lot of the "journalist" ghouls.

Iran's problem is the liberal reformers. They gained power for a real reason. That being forcing women to cover their hair and having morality police who religiously police all kinds of small sins and infractions is not what the people want. Unfortunately they had no understanding of imperialism, no understanding of how compromised their neighbors are and how hemmed in they are, no understanding of the west's overarching strategic goals and strategy for their region and a false belief they could negotiate and compromise with them to something mutually beneficial.

I will once again recommend a skim of "The Grand Chessboard" by Brzezinski, it's not just about the oil though that's definitely a nice bonus and pretty important for dollar hegemony and sanctions power. It's really about controlling this crossroads of land power. By occupying and destabilizing this one little strategic region you can block Asia (China), Russia, Africa, and Europe from ever uniting and locking the US out an ocean away via trade, defense, etc. It has been the great fear of the US to see this kind of integration and before them it was the fear of Britain who existed across a channel and separate from Europe and who like the US had a massive naval advantage that was totally undercut by the idea of land-power and overland trade, cooperation, military connections, and transport. It harkens back to the old British strategy used on India which is keep your enemies divided, play them off each other, and in the chaos you exert control and you have absolute power. This is true on both a micro and macro scale. The west seeks to do this in the middle east by sewing terrorists such as ISIS and other "moderate rebel" groups to keep certain areas in chaos (they also do this in Africa) but on a larger scale they seek to keep those aforementioned parts of the world Asia (China), Russia, Africa, Europe divided from one another, the chaos in this region preventing them from uniting.

It is a US hegemonic imperative to control the middle east/west Asia. It will be the last place they'll let go IMO as they're still running on old British empire playbook which says secure the oil but also secure this region to divide your enemies. Only once climate change sets in and makes the region unlivable and therefore denied to their enemies may they begin to fall back to some sort of climate fortress model.

Beware with HP business laptops back in the day they had serious security and you could not reset the BIOS if the password was lost without contacting HP for a special unlock code and going through this whole thing. They shut down providing those (and if you bought it used you almost certainly couldn't provide the documentation to get them to help anyways) so probably models made in the past few years are okay but if you get anything older make sure right away you can access the bios and it's not PW protected before the return period is up or that could cause problems.

They should have stolen better tech then or had some sort of a plan. You can't let the enemy control your skies. You have nothing then. All those missiles are useless because they can suppress your launch abilities. Perhaps not entirely their fault but I just don't think their leadership is competent.

Russia and China both should have stopped cowering from US sanctions after Ukraine started. It's obvious they use selective pressure to prevent these big countries from assisting the smaller anti-imperialist nations and because neither wants to take a personal hit they just stick with the slow ratcheting up of US sanctions on their militaries. For one Russia should have after 1 year of Ukraine and harsh sanctions sold Iran the rights and know-how to build s400 equivalent systems in retaliation for western sanctions. If they had it would have taught the west a lesson about fucking with them and sanctioning them but instead what the west learned is you can sanction them all the way and they'll still be nervous to do anything.

If IRGC purged those people they'd also purge communists. They'd purge women's rights types who just want the freedom to not cover their hair. They would receive spectacular backlash among a young population that doesn't like these backwards reactionary rules and create the forces that would destroy Iran for the imperialists because it would be so unpopular. They need to give up the religious hardline stuff and then purge the people who remain who push for western style democracy. But even they are just ill informed and not necessarily bad people, they murdered the communists who might have educated them with class consciousness.

But that will face popular revolt. The people don't like their islamic hardline (assuming IRGC are hardliners) and want freedom for women not to have to wear headscarfs and deal with the morality police.

If they do that without reform many people will join up with the proxy groups the zionists and US are pouring in weapons to right now and will help plunge the country into civil war, Syria situation and collapse as a power.

The people want the domestic policies of liberal reformism vs the harsh religious rule. They also imagine because of propaganda that there is some way to mend ties with the west and integrate. They also want to not be humiliated and to be able to defend themselves. This is contradiction but this is also expected in a country that ruthlessly suppressed communists.

Exactly. All comes down to Iran having no control of its airspace. Once they lost that they lost the ability to launch missiles as they please as the zionists will obviously spot and bomb them to stop it. The US bombing allegedly used a number of radar-seeking missiles and opened up paths for deeper penetration into Iran by the zionist air force.

Biggest mistake they made was not getting a nuke. Second biggest mistake was not getting proper anti-air capabilities. Third biggest mistake was trusting the west in any way.

Iran has the problem of being run by a mixture of fundamentalists and liberal reformers. The liberals are hopelessly west-brained and always will be. The west keeps stabbing them in the back. The fundamentalists are out-gunned and pressured domestically by the liberal reformers because they offer the population what they want in terms of domestic policies which include the idea of easing their strict islamic rules on things like hair coverings.

They messed this up on so many levels and in so many ways. Their regional alliances are in shambles. They themselves have been shown to be a paper tiger (announcing strikes to the US before-hand so no one gets hurt, not able to maintain missile strikes because no control of air space, US waltzing in and bombing them) and will reap the penalties as the zionist entity and the US will return again and again to peck at them until they fall. They are certainly moving ahead with destabilization plans like Syria and Libya and when those start off in earnest the zionists will start attacking again.

This is humiliation, this is capitulation to the entity and allowing it to continue carrying out its genocide, not even extracting a ceasefire for Gaza out of this. But I suspect many more humiliations are yet to come.

Yeah there seems a good chance they just keep up this air war forever. Start an insurgency (reports of weapons flowing over their borders already), do the Syria thing but faster and harder with ethnic minorities, ISIS recruits from abroad, Ukrainian SBU, etc and start going around tearing apart the country. The zionists using their air power to support the proxy forces and take out and hamper Iranian counter-attacks and eventually maybe it takes a year, maybe it takes 5, maybe 8 but Iran is in disarray and no longer capable of projecting power, being relevant to BRICS+ or the belt and road (no control of its own infrastructure, they'll definitely blow up that Chinese rail link) and at that point it's total control of the region by the US and total encirclement of China and another dagger at Russia's belly. Likely they slate pushing their own extremists through the region up through the Iran/Caspian sea region (Azerbaijan is a NATO/zionist puppet) to start doing terrorism and destabilizing Russia sometime in the 2030s, they then kick off war with China, sanctions, embargo, decoupling all in one as they occupy Russia with a distraction internally giving them primacy to make their move against China alone and buying them a few months of time in which to operate. They may kick off the Russia thing later than that though but it too is slated for a pressure campaign and break-up so that the US may rule the world. PNAC is so obviously telegraphed in many ways.

Yet China seems to believe the trap is being drawn into conflict with the west now before they've set up all the pieces. I hope they see a lot more than I do because from where I sit it does seem like they are humming a song while the west builds its forces and sets up the chessboard in a perfect condition for their victory or at least maximum pain for China to win.

It does seem a real danger of the US and zionists salami-slicing their way up their own escalation ladder while leaving Iran's response muted.

Iran unfortunately doesn't have the deterrence and options that the US has. Their big escalation is their only escalation while the US has a lot of escalations it can choose from. If Iran fires off closing the straits and all that it will mean war and it will mean damage to vital allies like China economically while the west will be better able to absorb the shock (western proles being well trained will only change Republicans for Democrats in response in the mid-terms and only if the gas price hikes last for many months and close enough to the midterms themselves).

This leaves the US much more able to sell Iran on the idea that they don't want to do that so had better not pull that lever as it's not an even escalatory response to the US bombing them.

Iran is surrounded by US vassals who have combined significant armies as well as US bases and air fields.

Frankly I think Iran is slated for a Syria/Libya style civil war/insurgency pushed by the west (at a much faster tempo most likely especially if they can keep Russia distracted in Ukraine they won't be able to help much like in Syria) and these moves are perhaps just to ensure when they collapse they won't have nuclear material angry Iranian loyalists can use for revenge attacks on the zionist entity, its regional pawns or the west itself.

My guess is they intend to salami-slice Iran into irrelevance. They'll regularly launch "necessary" strikes that will weaken Iran, take out IRGC generals and planners, take out missile production, take out nuclear program stuff and just suppress them and turn up the sanctions heat, more hybrid warfare, prepare sectarian factions to rise up into civil war and then launch that sometime in the next 10 years with an eye towards the next 4 years before they attack China. This will mostly be done by the zionists with a heavy assist from the US via refueling, intelligence, re-armament, etc.

It will be Syria and Libya playbook as many including myself have said before. They will use ethnic minorities and they will use surgical strikes to weaken the Iranian government by taking out key figures in fighting this insurgency. ISIS will pop up again conveniently doing the west's work for it, perhaps a branch of Al Qaeda as well.

Frankly it may be Iran is already doomed. They're surrounded by zionist collaborator nations like Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, etc filled with troops who would fight on the side of the US and the entity, filled with anti-air batteries, filled with US troops and bases. Their threats of closing the strait would harm China and other multi-polar powers at least as bad if not much worse than the US and hurting Europe can hardly be seen as a goal as they are gluttons for pain as we've seen with Ukraine and will happy destroy what's left of their industry and transfer the wealth to the US on command. With the collapse of their allies in Syria and Hezbollah/Lebanon and with Hamas already fighting as hard as it can they may simply not have much they can actually do that isn't going all in and provoking the US to immediately destroy as much of their standing military as they can.

Things are looking not great for the resistance. If Iran falls that's another dagger at Russia's belly and contention of the Caspian sea by NATO, it's the final domino in blocking China's belt and road and making it irrelevant for maintaining China as anything but a very regional north-east Asian power very susceptible to a sea blockade and embargo. I feel at this point China is perhaps being foolish or at least recklessly playing right up to the line but maybe they know more than I do. We must also acknowledge Ukraine has held out better than many of the hopium boosters were saying they would even a year and a half into the conflict and there is a chance that their lines never truly break and result in a rout for their army. That Russia by next year perhaps secures the oblasts that were historically Russian and voted to join Russia and at that point sues for peace without denazification, without disarmament of Ukraine, and without a solid commitment from the west they won't eventually try and incorporate that rump state into NATO or reignite the conflict. I can't help but wonder if part of the point of Trumps alleged attempted rapprochement with Russia is just to buy time and fool Russia again like with the Minsk accords, to prevent Putin from committing to an offensive when Ukraine is most weak and western production can't keep up and keep that conflict burning longer without straining NATO arms production.

They told Qatar ahead of time according to reports I've seen. It was a total performance. No intent on actually retaliating, actually punishing the west. Just theatrics for their people of oh look we hit the Americans back (and hit nothing vital, and warned them ahead of time and some or all may have been intercepted).

May be the correct move for now but I have my doubts that Trump is not drawn further into this by the advisors whispering in his ears. It'll be salami-slicing likely.

IF so IMO it'll look like the Americans take out whatever radar and minimal anti-air the Iranians have left to allow the zionists total operational freedom in addition to their existing freedom to come and go as they please without being shot down. The zionists will continue their bombing, they'll find where Iran stored the nuclear material (Bibi already says they know, maybe a lie, maybe not but I'd bet within 12 months they do know), take that out, bomb any remaining nuclear projects, do further assassinations and turn Iran into Lebanon or at least a place where they come and go in the air as the please to kill who they want from the air even if they don't dare send in ground troops. Iran continues firing missiles into the entity, maybe they start running out of their stockpile and have to slow their tempo, maybe they don't. Maybe the zionists take out their production/launch-sites/stockpiles and maybe they don't.

They nuke them first. The US has been itching to use them for decades and will finally have the perfect excuse. You can't really build a nuke while under active attack by a nuclear power (two nuclear powers, one a vassal of the other) who need to destroy you for their plans of maintaining global hegemony. At that point they have nothing to lose from hitting you with a nuke to stop you using yours. You need several nukes BEFORE they launch the war and a way to deliver them to ward them off.

Once the war has started a threat likely won't scare them off and really your only choice is revenge, is firing it at them and killing a bunch of their people because they're already going to be nuking you so you get to die happy you took a million of them with you or whatever.

One thing I'll note is that the US and the zionist entity are likely to target and attempt to take out Iranian missile production and launch sites as well as mobile launchers as the next phase. The zionists are of course annoyed by all the missiles landing in the entity and more than that it is stretching resources thin for the empire firing off all those missiles.

Cynic in me says the US is letting Iran hit the zionists with their advanced missiles in order to study them in order to perfect anti-missile systems for their own future use. They simply need that data and are happy to see some settlers die for it. But once they have that data and once Iran starts hitting them in earnest assuming they have a stockpile and real capability to actively produce enough to meet their needs (a big if, I am a little doubtful but we'll see) they'll move to take out those capabilities meaning it will be harder even if Iran gets a nuke to successfully launch and deliver it. Nuking the entity would drive zionists up a wall with rage but after they nuke Iran back and destroy it totally the settlers will return to the zionist entity and I'm afraid it likely will survive.

This is the problem with not having control of your airspace at all. You can do as Yemen does and produce a small amount and harass them with them but not enough to win a war or inflict enough pain to collapse the entity or drive the US to sue for peace. A destabilized middle east/west Asia suits the US alright as we produce plenty of oil and have Canada as well, it'll fuck Europe and China HARD and drive up costs for your average person but given how much consumption is already driven by the top 10% they may think it really doesn't matter to siphon more wealth to the top and impoverish the proles even harder.

Knew it. Seemed staged.

Third guess they're literally quaking in their boots in fear of Iranian terrorists and figure by posting their sympathies they might be spared the tidal wave of sleeper cells awakening in the US and murdering every other cop which they are positive is a real thing that will happen.

The Iranians have zero control of their skies effectively. Zionists, Americans both come and go as they choose and the most Tehran can do is invent some lies about shooting down F-35s which I am ever more confident did not happen and shoot down a few drones.

Anyways I'm not talking about Chinese planners. I'm not talking to Chinese planners. I'm talking to the loud-mouthed nerds on this website who say these things.

Thanks for all these informative posts that aren't just the same Iranian hopium propaganda that every one else here is spouting.

If they can control your skies, if they can operate unopposed they can dismantle any semblance of an organized military and upend civilian life so badly that people will be more open to regime change. At the very least they can destroy industry and make a lot of people unemployed and desperate and recruitable by foreign intelligence.

"People are in the streets supporting the government though". Yeah and they were for Assad too until they weren't. The Iranian people don't actually like their government that much, they just resent the idea of the zionists or US putting a regime on them more than it but not all who are there will see whoever the west lines up for it as a western puppet and there will be those ethnic and religious minorities especially who see it as liberation and support it. So there is still great danger here. I hope for another mess-up like Ukraine but I'm not convinced yet. This all is still in the early stages and we don't know what if anything the west has in its back pockets ready to pull out.

People will point out Yemen but Yemen started poorer and less developed than Iran when it was attacked and Ansarallah's forces have been built in a certain way that makes them harder to dismantle while Iran still has that centralized command and control, centralized production, etc, etc. Maybe Iran will get there with people who have less to lose but they're not going to get a quick win adapting to that situation and it has a lot of points of failure in the transition possible.

These strikes also further solidify my belief that Iran is lying about shooting down f-35s and has downed zero but the anger from their people is alleviated by these claims whereas the knowledge of total helplessness against foreign air power when you've known this was coming for 20 years would be a rage-inducing moment that would threaten the rule of the government. They're likely also underplaying the damage to Fordow though I suspect they probably did move the material. I tend to think the zionist claim about it being damaged and degraded but not destroyed and not possible to fully destroy is likely correct. Fact is though that facility is now useless given it's been struck once and can be again so it surviving doesn't mean a lot strategically or tactically for Iran though it's a PR win.

The question then becomes where can they hide the nuclear material to continue enrichment. They'd need a facility more hardened than Fordow and it's hard to construct something like that in secret from the satellites and spy networks on any reasonable timescale so most likely it's in a less hardened facility that relies on secrecy. And if that secrecy is broken and I'm sorry to say the zionist entity is very good at spying both human-int and hacking and it gets out to the zionists/US then they can kiss that goodbye.

So a lot of moving pieces. I wish the Iranians the best but they're not as strong as I'd long hoped and if they get into a fight with the US it might be a very long and messy one and it might be one where they're confined to fighting mostly in their borders and lobbing things at the zionist entity which does little to stop US influence and exercise of power over the region.

The problem with trying to gauge the right move is there is too much dishonesty from the US on too many levels to begin to accurately evaluate what their real intentions are.

For one they love salami-slicing tactics where they escalate bit by bite and dare you to hit them back with the spoken or unspoken threat being they'll go all out on you in response and so the calculation is designed to be a bit of a boiling the frog situation where it doesn't seem smart to hit back but they slowly move you up the escalation ladder of accepting more and more violations until they've started to degrade your capabilities to resist and then you risk hitting back too late.

On the other hand this may not be that.

But we must consider by doing this Trump has embraced the neo-con agenda, he has made it and the zionist agenda part of himself. On a personal pride level he's hitting back at MAGA people who are isolationist and defending this move as a Trump move. This seriously risks that he already has or with another push (maybe via Iranian retaliation, maybe without just from zionists in the admin shoving him in the direction they want) fully buys in and doubles down on this shift and on war with Iran.

Iranian planners are trying to thread a needle of avoiding an all-out war with the US where it throws all its might against them as even if they win it won't be before a decade of devastation and death is unleashed on them and their people. But they need to realize the US will not accept a powerful Iran, it's nothing to do with nukes, everything to do with maintaining regional dominance and control and stopping that belt and road which China just opened up to Iran. So without further humiliations and weakening of Iran the US and their zionist proxy seem unlikely to go away. Any peace is likely to be violated by the zionists trying more salami-slicing within 6-12 months or whenever Bibi's next big court date he wants to miss is.

People keep saying this but the US has so far shown they're smart enough to know the range of Iranian missiles and keep their ships significantly out of that. They then use mid-air refueling to supplement the range of their aircraft if needed and because they control the skies completely they can do this.

It's the same thing with the coming conflict with China. The US isn't going to stupidly sail their fleet to within Chinese land missile range, they're going to keep them over the horizon, use mid-air refueling and other tactics like area denial/mining and deny China a kill on anything so prestigious and valuable. They'll seek like any competent planner to draw China's navy out into deep water where they hold the advantage and destroy them there far away from where their land-based missile units can help them. And if China refuses to be drawn then they can say they have them effectively contained.

Frankly more than that I feel the Iranians don't want to seriously anger the US. They want to avoid giving them a 9/11 style "tragedy" or level of destruction to rally around and justify going full sicko-mode on them because you've wounded anglo pride. So I don't think they'll go out of their way to try and smuggle a large missile onto a boat and get it closer to launch an attack like that.