I did look at the satellite photographs of Fordo. There are a couple of holes, & it's clear that the surface Earth has shifted. But I find it very difficult to tell what the extent of the damage that was done to Fordo,

And quite frankly, I am going to be surprised if the US intelligence community has a really good read on what happened to Fordo.

We obviously know the capabilities of those weapons and the fact that, yeah, it looks like we put multiple munitions down the same shaft. that's obviously a good sign. But we don't know for certain what wound up happening down at the bottom.

There's also an initial Iranian response, which is that there was damage to Fordo, but that that damage is not irreversible. The Iranian regime doesn't have a very good track record for honesty. & it could be that, yes, that is an admission that there was damage done there.

That could be all subterfuge. The Iranian regime, at this moment in time, has absolutely no incentive to be truthful about what happened in Fordo.

This could be diminishing or trying to downplay the amount of damage that was done to Fordo. The regime has incentives to do both.

It's all about what the regime wants to project to the United States and the rest of the world, and we don't really know what that is at this moment in time.

We should also recognize that even if the United States did wipe out Fordo, finish off Natanz, finish off Esfahan, that doesn't necessarily mean the end of the Iranian nuclear program.

Iran has a tremendous amount of knowledge about how to build nuclear weapons at this point in time. & we have to recognize that even with all of the damage that Israel has done in terms of killing Iranian nuclear scientists,

no one is ever going to be able to assassinate Iran back to nuclear ignorance. It's simply not possible. If the Iranians would like to do so, they will be able to reconstitute again. They have the knowledge of how to do so.

But let's go beyond that. We don't know where Iran's highly enriched uranium is, and the Israelis estimated that they had enough to build 10 nuclear weapons. Beyond that, they have got a lot of uranium feedstock, which they can turn into bomb grade uranium.

They had a huge number of centrifuges that were unaccounted for. They weren't all at Natanz or ferdo, and they also know how to build centrifuges.

And the truth is, it's not that hard to build centrifuges. & let's go one step further that the Iranians announced earlier this month that they had a new top secret enrichment facility, which Western experts have speculated are at this [inaudible] facility, not far from Natanz,

No one knows that that actually is the right site, and no one has been inside because the Iranians have refused to allow the IAEA to even get access to that site, but the Iranians announced that that is another …secret, highly secure enrichment facility beyond Fordo.

And if that facility is fully operational, it's not really clear what even these strikes have accomplished in terms of setting back the program.

Pollack says what US learned after Gulf war & US invasion of Iraq in 2003 was that the Israeli strike on Osirak reactor in Iraq “so infuriated Saddam Hussein that he began pouring resources into Iraq's nuclear program, & that it made far greater progress after the 1981 strike

How do you keep Iran from reconstituting its nuclear program: it's probably going to require some very deft diplomacy, coupled with the threat of force, possibly with some additional force. This is the kind of thing that is going to be so difficult because of…how little trust

So far, the Trump administration has not demonstrated a capacity for that kind of deft diplomacy, mixing threat with diplomacy with actual uses of force.

Perhaps they will rise to the occasion. We should all hope that they will, but this is kind of the situation that we find ourselves in.