The press has had a field day since an anti-Trumper inside the U.S. intelligence community leaked a preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency assessment of the B-2 bomber strike on Iran's deeply-buried uranium enrichment site at Fordo.
The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, and others all selectively cited the preliminary report, labelled "low confidence" (a caveat they of course omitted to tell their readers), which said the strikes may only have inflicted moderate damage on Fordo.
To counter that, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth brought out the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, who gave an in-depth description of the attacks and the 16 years of preparation, intelligence, and weapons design that went into them.
Among the astonishing things we learned from General Caine was that the GBU-57 deep-penetrating bomb used to attack the Iranian enrichment site had been specifically designed for precisely this task.
The GBU-57 was not just some off-the-shelf bomb that the Pentagon decided to use in hopes it would work: it was designed to take out Fordo, and tested hundreds of times in realistic environments to evaluate how well it would accomplish that task.
General Caine also revealed that the United States has been tracking Fordo since it first learned the Iranians were going to build a deeply-buried nuclear plant in 2009, and assigned two officers from the Pentagon’s Defense Thread Reduction Agency (DTRA) to monitor it.
"In 2009, a [DTRA] officer was brought into a vault at an undisclosed location and briefed on something going on in Iran," Caine said. "He was shown some photos and some highly classified intelligence of what looked like a major construction project in the mountains of Iran. He was tasked to study this facility, work with the intelligence community to understand it, and he was soon joined by an additional teammate."
The two studied satellite photographs of the site during construction, equipping, and operations over the next fifteen years.
They studied the excavation equipment, the tailings, and the size of the ventilation shafts. Eventually they came to the conclusion that the United States had no conventional weapon that could penetrate the 250 feet of granite protecting the underground production halls and destroy them.
"They began a journey to work with industry and other tacticians to develop the GBU-57," Caine revealed. "They tested it over and over again, tried different options, tried more after that -- they accomplished hundreds of test shots and dropped many full-scale weapons against extremely realistic targets, for a single purpose: kill this target at the time and place of our nation's choosing."
Think about that for a second. For over fifteen years the United States has been tracking this one particular site in Iran, because it was crystal clear to most analysts that it was dedicated to making a nuclear weapon.
And yet, the intelligence community as a whole continued to assess, as Tulsi Gabbard told Congress in March, that Iran did not have a nuclear weapons program.
Either that was a massive subterfuge, or our intelligence community is peopled by political creatures who actually want to see Iran develop a nuclear weapon. Neither option is very pretty.
General Caine made clear that the military doesn't do its own bomb-damage assessments, so he refrained from qualifying the success of Operation Midnight Hammer, leaving that for the intelligence community.
But he could say with confidence what he knew: the weapons were "built, tested and delivered properly; they were released on-speed and on-parameter; they were all guided to their intended targets; and the weapons all functioned as designed," he said.
"We know that the trailing jets saw the first weapons function, and the pilot stated, 'this was the brightest explosion that I've ever seen. It literally looked like daylight,'" Caine said.
Fordo's weakness was its ventilation system. General Caine explained that the Iranians covered the main ventilation shafts with fresh "caps" of cement to thwart an attack just two days before the B-2s struck.
But the U.S. was ready for them.
"The cap was forcibly removed by the first weapon," he said, "and the main shaft was uncovered. Weapons two, three, four, five, were tasked to enter the main shaft, move down into the complex at greater than one thousand feet per second, and explode in the mission space," Pentagon jargon for the main uranium centrifuge enrichment hall 240 feet below ground.
"Weapon number six was designed as a flex weapon, to allow us to cover if one of the preceding jets, or one of the preceding weapons, did not work," he said.
Six weapons were launched on each of the ventilation shafts, twelve in all, for a total of 360,000 pounds of steel and high explosive.
"Unlike a surface bomb, you won't see a surface crater," he explained, because they are designed to penetrate deeply before exploding.
"All six weapons, at each vent at Fordo, went exactly where they were intended to go," Caine said.
If anyone wants to see just how much damage the U.S. inflicted on Iran's premier uranium enrichment facility, they were going to need a pretty big shovel, Secretary Hegseth added.
Meanwhile, the Israelis revealed their own list of targets destroyed.
In the twelve-day campaign they crippled another enrichment plant at Natanz, the uranium conversion plant in Isfahan, and took out more than half of Iran's long-range missile launchers.
They destroyed missile and drone production plants, pulverized multiple facilities where Iran was producing uranium enrichment centrifuges, as well as the secret bomb plant at Parchin, just south of Tehran, that the Iranians repeatedly refused to allow international inspectors to view.
In addition, they eliminated the top dozen nuclear weapons designers and engineers in Iran, and another dozen top military leaders in charge of the nuclear and missile programs. While they were at it, they leveled a dozen IRGC and bassij bases, and blew open the door of the regime's main political prison, Evin.
In any ordinary sense of the word, the U.S. and Israel have obliterated Iran's nuclear weapons program. Any attempt by the Iranian regime to reconstitute it in the coming years would constitute a transparent effort to acquire nuclear weapons.
The legend of Iran's "civilian" nuclear program was buried once and for all during the 12-Day war. The days of pretending Iran had benign intentions are over.
Timmerman is a senior fellow at the America First Policy Institute. His latest work of non-fiction, The Iran House: Tales of Revolution, Persecution, War, and Intrigue, was recently published by Bombardier Books and is available through kentimmerman.com
Image: USAF