Trump has the bomb that could destroy Iran's ‘nuclear mountain'. Israel may not need it

Sydney Morning Herald

5 hours ago

With Israel's 1981 attack on an overground Iraqi nuclear facility in mind, Iran buried Fordow's two enrichment halls half a mile inside the mountains.
Israel doesn't have any MOP munitions. But the US does. An American B-2 stealth bomber would drop a MOP, but it has never been used in actual warfare.
Israel has been blocked by the White House and Pentagon on multiple occasions from getting hold of its own high-powered 'bunker buster'.
Israel is also not known to have any heavy bombers capable of delivering such a payload.
But this doesn't mean the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) do not have a plan for disabling Fordow, or at least rendering the facility useless, as part of Operation Rising Lion.
'It is hard to imagine that Israel entered this fight with no plan at all to try to mitigate the threat posed by this facility,' Justin Crump, chief executive of geopolitical risk firm Sibylline, told the London Telegraph.
'The heart of Iran's potential nuclear capability lies well buried at Fordow, with many regarding the use of multiple advanced US weapons as the only way truly to neutralise the facility.
'However, in recent months, there has been a growing view that Israel could instead use precision strikes on access points, ventilation shafts, and power supplies to at least heavily impact the use of the facility,' he added.
In practice, this more surgical approach could make it virtually impossible for Iran's regime to keep its centrifuges spinning.
Coupled with the fact that the IDF killed at least nine of Tehran's most prominent nuclear scientists, there are questions over whether the knowledge will exist to get them turning again.
Despite the Israeli operation to destroy Iran's nuclear capabilities, Fordow appears to have remained largely untouched.
The IDF has reportedly cooked up a number of strategies that it could use to render the facility useless, if a decision were made to do so.
One plan previously presented to the Obama administration employed transport helicopters to drop Israeli commandos off at the site, let them fight their way in, before rigging it with explosives and bringing it down from the inside.
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Hugely risky and potentially deadly for those involved, it would take a brave decision by Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, to sanction such an attack, although similar tactics were used against a Hezbollah missile factory in Syria last year.
The most logical, and risk-adverse move given Israel's aerial supremacy over Iran, would be to surgically immobilise the facility with strikes on its power supplies, access tunnels and ventilation shafts.
While it wouldn't be entirely destroyed, Fordow would at least temporarily cease to be an operable part of Iran's nuclear programme.
These are considered Israel's strongest cards without Donald Trump sanctioning US involvement in attacks on the facility.
Fallout fear
The US president has shown no signs of reversing a decades-long policy of permitting Israeli ownership, or at least use, of its bunker busters.
He has also made clear that he will steer clear of joining the military campaign. His fear of nuclear fallout is perhaps another reason for his hesitance to drop a bomb on Fordow: Such a strike could hurl an untold amount of contaminated earth and rock into the atmosphere.
The blast at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986, the world's worst radioactive disaster, saw a radiation cloud spread for 77,000 square miles.
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Trump is said to have nuclear nightmares, stemming from his childhood during the Cold War, when schools would train their students to take cover under classroom desks.
He once cited a 'nuclear winter' as the biggest threat to the world in a conversation about climate change with British former prime minister Theresa May.
'It was a terrifying, nightmarish image seared into his mind,' Fiona Hill, a one-time foreign policy aide to the president, previously said.