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Early US Intel assessment suggests strikes on Iran did not destroy nuclear sites

(www.cnn.com)
122 points jbegley | 3 comments | 24 Jun 25 19:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.598s | source
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gip ◴[24 Jun 25 20:37 UTC] No.44370761[source]▶
The status of Iran’s nuclear sites (and more importantly, its stockpile of enriched uranium) is anyone’s guess at this point. It’s likely that no one truly knows, not even the Iranians. It will take significantly more time to get a clear answer.

That said, it may not matter much. Restarting their nuclear program in secret would likely be far more difficult now and would almost certainly be detected. Ideally, a political agreement will soon render the issue moot.

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1. Animats ◴[24 Jun 25 21:04 UTC] No.44371046[source]▶
> The status of Iran’s nuclear sites (and more importantly, its stockpile of enriched uranium) is anyone’s guess at this point. It’s likely that no one truly knows, not even the Iranians.

The project is dispersed and hardened enough that a single attack probably wont' be a decisive blow.

The surprising thing is that Iran doesn't have an atomic bomb yet. Enrichment is the hard part. Building an A-bomb from enriched uranium is not that difficult. The technology is 80 years old and most of it is well known. It's no worse than building, say, an auto engine from scratch, something racing shops do routinely.

H-bombs are another matter. Those are hard.

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2. alkyon ◴[25 Jun 25 00:14 UTC] No.44372434[source]▶
They suspended they nuclear program 20 years ago. Still they keep enriching uranium as a kind of insurance policy.

This is what US intelligence has been saying for years (as opposed to Israel who has vested interest in denying this).

3. dilyevsky ◴[26 Jun 25 07:07 UTC] No.44384947[source]▶
What makes h-bomb so hard? It seems like the Teller–Ulam design is shockingly well publicized and ussr, china and even north korea have figured it out in just a few years. I would presume with modern computer modeling techniques it's not so hard to retrace those same footsteps.

They also got designs passed down from pakistan and former soviet "consulters" so that couldve easily included the h-bomb as well