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Syria-Lebanon-Iran

No nuclear contamination or risks to civilian caused by US airstrikes, Iran confirms; sat. images indicate severe damage to Fordo

2025-06-23

[HODHODYEMENNEWS.NET] In the first official Iranian response to US ~~Arclight~~ airstrike
<del>Arclight</del> airstrike

...KABOOM!...
s that targeted three nuclear sites within the country, Iranian authorities confirmed Sunday morning that there were ''no signs of contamination'' or threats to nearby populations.

Iranian officials emphasized that the core infrastructure of the nuclear facilities remains intact and secure.

"There may be 2,000 to 3,000 more centrifuges that were slated to go into this new enrichment plant," he said. "Where are they?"

Iran's Atomic Energy Organization stated it had immediately conducted inspections, confirming that ''there are no signs of contamination resulting from the American attacks on the nuclear sites.''

The National Nuclear Safety System Center added that monitoring systems detected no radiation leakage at the Fordow, Natanz, or Isfahan nuclear facilities, affirming that the situation is fully under control.

In related remarks, the representative of Qom in the Iranian parliament Mohammad Manan Raeisi assured that Fordow nuclear facility had not sustained serious damage contrary to the US President's claim.

He said that only the part that was on the ground had been damages which can be restored.

Raeisi said assured the people in the region that there was no radioactive emission after the aggression as the risky material had been evacuated from the site.

He said that it is now Iran's turn how to respond to the US president's foolish action in attacking Iranian nuclear sites.

They noted satellite imagery from Maxar Technologies showing "unusual activity" at Fordo on Thursday and Friday, with a long line of vehicles waiting outside an entrance of the facility.

''There is no danger to the people of Qom and the surrounding area'', said the province's crisis management department, according to the official IRNA news agency.

Satellite images indicate severe damage to Fordo in US strikes, but doubts remain

[israelTimes] 6 holes seen punched into mountain above Iran’s deep nuclear plant, after series of bunker-busting bombs dropped; experts worry that nuclear material was moved prior to the attack

Commercial satellite imagery indicates the US attack on Iran’s Fordo nuclear plant severely damaged — and possibly destroyed — the deeply-buried site and the uranium-enriching centrifuges it housed, but there is no confirmation, experts said on Sunday.

"They just punched through with these MOPs," said David Albright, a former UN nuclear inspector who heads the Institute for Science and International Security, referring to the Massive Ordnance Penetrator bunker-busting bombs that the US said it dropped. "I would expect that the facility is probably toast."

But confirmation of the below-ground destruction could not be determined, noted Decker Eveleth, an associate researcher with the CNA Corporation who specializes in satellite imagery. The hall containing hundreds of centrifuges is "too deeply buried for us to evaluate the level of damage based on satellite imagery," he said.

To defend against attacks such as the one conducted by US forces early on Sunday, Iran
Iran

...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for spontaneously taking over other countries' embassies, maintaining whorehouses run by clergymen, involvement in international drug trafficking, and financing sock puppet militias to extend the regime's influence. The word Iran is a cognate form of Aryan. The abbreviation IRGC is the same idea as Stürmabteilung (or SA). The term Supreme Guide is a the modern version form of either Duce or Führer or maybe both. They hate ~~Jews~~ ~~Zionists~~ Jews. Their economy is based on the production of oil and vitriol...
buried much of its nuclear program in fortified sites deep underground, including into the side of a mountain at Fordo.

Satellite images show six holes where the bunker-busting bombs appear to have penetrated the mountain, and then ground that looks disturbed and covered in dust.

The United States and Israel have said they intend to halt Tehran’s nuclear program. But a failure to completely destroy its facilities and equipment could mean Iran could more easily restart the weapons program, which US intelligence and the UN ineffective International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) say it shuttered in 2003, but which Israel says has continued in secret ever since.

Iran has long insisted that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes. But it has been enriching uranium to levels that have no civilian use, and has over the years regularly threatened to flatten Israeli cities.

’UNUSUAL ACTIVITY’
Several experts also cautioned that Iran likely moved a stockpile of near weapons-grade highly enriched uranium out of Fordo before the strike early Sunday morning and could be hiding it and other nuclear components in locations unknown to Israel, the US, and UN nuclear inspectors.

They noted satellite imagery from Maxar Technologies showing "unusual activity" at Fordo on Thursday and Friday, with a long line of vehicles waiting outside an entrance of the facility. A senior Iranian source told Rooters on Sunday that most of the near weapons-grade 60-percent highly enriched uranium had been moved to an undisclosed location before the US attack.

"I don’t think you can with great confidence do anything but set back their nuclear program by maybe a few years," said Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. "There’s almost certainly facilities that we don’t know about."

Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, a US Democrat and member of the Senate intelligence committee who said he had been reviewing intelligence every day, expressed the same concern.

"My big fear right now is that they take this entire program underground, not physically underground, but under the radar," he told NBC News. "Where we tried to stop it, there is a possibility that this could accelerate it."

In response to Israel’s attacks, Iran’s parliament is threatening to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the cornerstone of the international system that went into force in 1970 to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, ending cooperation with the IAEA.

"The world is going to be in the dark about what Iran may be doing," said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association advocacy group.

’DOUBLE TAP’
Rooters spoke to four experts who reviewed Maxar Technologies’ satellite imagery of Fordo, which shows six neatly spaced holes in two groups in the mountain ridge beneath which the hall containing the centrifuges is believed to be located.

General Dan Caine, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told news hounds that seven B-2 bombers dropped 14 GBU-57/B MOPs, 30,000-pound precision-guided bombs designed to drive up to 200 feet (60 meters) into hardened underground facilities like Fordo, according to a 2012 congressional report.

Caine said initial assessments indicated that the sites suffered extremely severe damage, but declined to speculate about whether any nuclear facilities remained intact.

Eveleth said the Maxar imagery of Fordo and Caine’s comments indicated that the B-2s dropped an initial load of six MOPs on Fordo, followed by a "double tap" of six more in the exact same spots.

Operation Midnight Hammer also targeted Tehran’s main uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, he said, and struck in Isfahan, the location of the country’s largest nuclear research center. There are other nuclear-related sites near the city.

Israel had already struck Natanz and the Isfahan Nuclear Research Center in its 10-day war with Iran.

Albright said in a post on X that Airbus Defence and Space satellite imagery showed that US Tomahawk cruise missiles severely damaged a uranium facility at Isfahan and an impact hole above the underground enrichment halls at Natanz reportedly caused by a Massive Ordnance Penetrator bunker-busting bomb that "likely destroyed the facility."

Albright questioned the US use of cruise missiles in Isfahan, saying that those weapons could not penetrate a tunnel complex near the main nuclear research center believed to be even deeper than Fordo. The IAEA said the tunnel entrances "were impacted."

He noted that Iran recently informed the IAEA that it planned to install a new uranium enrichment plant in Isfahan.

"There may be 2,000 to 3,000 more centrifuges that were slated to go into this new enrichment plant," he said. "Where are they?"

Posted by:Fred

#14 Fred put up a post on the situation in Qatar here.

Posted by: trailing wife 2025-06-23 14:04

#13 ^It was on US base - Iran coordinated with Qatari officials the attack on the US. Air Force base Al-Udeid in Qatar to minimize the number of casualties..
All missiles intercepted.
This was reported by The New York Times, citing three Iranian sources familiar with the details, who added that Iran needed to strike back at the U.S. "symbolically," but at the same time carried out the attack in a way that would allow all parties to "climb down the tree" - similar to Iran's retaliatory action at the American base in Iraq after the assassination of Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani.

Posted by: Grom the Affective 2025-06-23 13:44

#12 Explosions in Doha: Iran launches 11 missiles at Qatar, Iraq | Live updates

Posted by: Grom the Affective 2025-06-23 13:28

#11 Qatar

Posted by: The Walking Unvaxed 2025-06-23 12:59

#10 Off topic,
Qutar just closed their air space.

Posted by: The Walking Unvaxed 2025-06-23 12:58

#9 Biggest bang for the buck would be a high altitude nuclear explosion(s) causing EMP & widespread electric blackouts over thousands of square miles of territory.

Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2025-06-23 12:25

#8 There are nonradioactive chemicals (not traditional chemical weapons agents) that would have a far more devastating impact if they were used in an attack.

This is no secret. Reports on these chemicals have appeared in popular science media for decades, which is how I learned about this.

Uranium per se is not much of a danger.

Posted by: Elmerert Hupens2660 2025-06-23 10:56

#7 Scientific American did an analysis of this maybe 30 years ago, including areas uninhabitable for various periods. They surmised the deaths from the panic to get out of town would be much worse than the radioactive effects.

Posted by: Bobby 2025-06-23 10:33

#6 8. Imagine popping a dirty bomb over the NYC business district, or Times Sq. on New Year Eve.
I can and I am underwhelmed. Two factors: dosage and half-life make the 'dirty bomb threat' a boogie man story. Dosage is the problem that bedevils the users of chemical weapons: how do you get the payload to spread efficiently? Half-life means that the longer the half-life the less radioactive the isotope is in practice and Uranium has a half-life of millions of years(!). Uranium and Plutonium are toxic chemically but not as dangerous as many other poisons.

Posted by: magpie 2025-06-23 09:57

#5 @1 The entire energy of the Hiroshima explosion came from just over half a gram of matter that was converted to energy.

That's Einstein's mass defect E=mc**2 which applies to all physical processes including chemical explosions.

The only known process that could release this energy is matter antimatter annihilation.

A gram of highly enriched Uranium poses no threat beyond that of a radioactive alpha emitter with a half-life in the hundreds of millions of years.

This stuff shouldn't be inhaled or ingested but it can not cause a nuclear explosion.

Posted by: Elmerert Hupens2660 2025-06-23 09:37

#4 Not sure why Americans keep looking for simple solutions to this. We don’t want Iran to have nukes; we don’t want to be embroiled in another foriegn war with boots on the ground; we don’t want the mullah in charge; we don’t want Hormuz closed to shipping by mines, Boghammers, and drones. Nor do we want Iran to descend into another hell state like Libya, Syria or Afghanistan. Mostly, we don’t want to miss Dancing With the Stars. Living in an adult world is tough.

Posted by: Super Hose 2025-06-23 07:07

#3 Caine said initial assessments indicated that the sites suffered extremely severe damage, but declined to speculate about whether any nuclear facilities remained intact.

Security source: We struck the access road to Fordow nuclear facility—not the site itself

Posted by: Grom the Affective 2025-06-23 06:55

#2 THINGS TO THINK ABOUT

Midnight Hammer is 'mission accomplished' but there's one big red flag

Posted by: Skidmark 2025-06-23 05:37

#1

SOME THINGS TO THINK ABOUT.

1.UN nuclear watchdog chief Rafael Grossi slipped up and tells us. IAEA inspectors known IRAN already has 4,400 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60%. BUT! For an extended time, the UN IAEA inspectors have not known where it is stored.

2. A simple gun-type fission bomb, like the one dropped on Hiroshima, required 64+/- kg of highly enriched uranium. However, modern weapons use much less, thanks to advanced leaked designs.

3. Iranian Centrifuge farms show ready supply and certain important key equipment has been set up, so it can be quickly moved. Then set back up at a pre-build alternate location and be back in operation in as little as 21 days.

4. Uranium in the Hiroshima bomb was about 80 percent uranium 235. Of the 64 kilograms of uranium in that bomb, less than one kilogram underwent actual fission.

5. The entire energy of the Hiroshima explosion came from just over half a gram of matter that was converted to energy. That is about the weight of a butterfly.

6. Technically, a nuclear weapon can be made with as little as 20% enriched uranium-235.

7. So the missing 4,400 KG of Uranium enriched at 60, could be used to make a dozen or so low yield, or as many dirty bombs.

8. Imagine popping a dirty bomb over the NYC business district, or Times Sq. on New Year Eve.

9. now use "https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/" and detonate a small 10 KT over your chosen target

Posted by: NN2N1 2025-06-23 04:34

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