Shownotes Transcript
We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a new world order. And now our first look at the targets they hit inside Iran. Iran has been killing Americans for a long time. Major cities including New York where you are, DC and Los Angeles stepping up patrols near places of worship. The operation President Trump planned was bold,
Was it real? As we record this on the morning of Monday the 23rd of June,
We are a little over 24 hours removed from Operation Midnight Hammer in which US Air Force assets, including most prominently B-2 Spirit stealth heavy bombers, attack the Iranian nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz and Esfahan.
US President Donald Trump has said that as a result of this attack, Iran's nuclear program has been destroyed for good. Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace. Open source satellite pictures, which have already been released of the Fordow site, show six ominous black holes in two tightly clustered groups of three into which deep penetration bunker buster bombs were dropped.
The strike package got in and out, apparently entirely unmolested.
But was it real? Is this really what has happened? Has Iran's nuclear program really been destroyed? There are some suggestions that Iran moved its highly enriched uranium from the Fodo site some days before the US attack. And interestingly, there are no recordings of elevated radiation levels at any of the three nuclear sites, suggesting perhaps that the nuclear material was either not substantially damaged or maybe that it was moved from those locations.
If it was such a devastating blow, why has Iran not responded? US bases and Gulf energy infrastructure are far closer and far easier to strike than Israel, which Iran is still pounding. It's still got the missiles and the means to do that. Iran will decide on how, when and at which level to respond to Americans and this aggression that they did against Iran.
Or was it Iran that wasn't real? Was it Iran that was fake? Was it so beset by corruption and ill-discipline that Israel could establish air supremacy within a single night? And that US air assets can now roam the skies above Iran with complete impunity?
so that Iran could have its entire nuclear program destroyed in a week? Is it so weak that it's now afraid to strike back in case the US escalate further? And what realistic capabilities do they have given just how degraded their military is, the number of high-ranking officials who've been killed, the Ayatollah forced into hiding? By all accounts, Iran appears to be in survival mode. So what was real? Like, was the attack real? Was Iran real? And what's going to be next in this conflict?
This week's multi-polarity episode is going to focus entirely on the Israel-Iran issue, conflict and America's involvement. And we're going to look at what's going to happen next, what the geostrategic and what the economic implications are. So Philip, what do you think was real? What was fake?
I think we basically have very little idea of what actually happened. I mean, on the strike itself, it would be... Well, start from the fact that shortly after the strike, US officials are coming out and saying that the nuclear program has not been wiped out. It's not just reports that are saying that there may be enough uranium to build 10 nuclear weapons or whatever the talking point is. I think that Secretary of State Marco Rubio is saying that.
So the US have done something that's very unusual in that they've gone in and they've deployed some sort of a strike package to supposedly destroy
the Iranian nuclear program and then within 24 hours, maybe less, they've said, oh, it didn't work. And that's just a weird thing to do in general. But it gets weirder when you consider what they've actually claimed that the attack was. The claim is that they've launched 30 cruise missiles which have struck the above-ground nuclear sites. And there is plenty of evidence for that. The above-ground nuclear sites
have been struck. How important those above-ground sites actually are, I don't know, but I'm guessing not very important because the Iranians are pretty cautious about hiding their serious weaponry and their serious nuclear programs and all that.
But it's the second part that's really interesting. The US is saying that a B-2 bomber, that's the kind of classic stealth bomber that we all remember, the hypermodern stealth bomber that's now 30 years old, a little bit more, dropped six bunker busters on a mountain. And what I find very strange about that is that flying a B-2 bomber over Iran is extremely risky.
I'm not saying that you can't do it, but I'd imagine that if the Pentagon was approached with that task, they would say to the administration, "We may be able to do that, but, you know, Iran probably does actually have some air defenses left, and we haven't really run a B-2 against those type of air defenses before. This is not Iraq in the first Gulf War, for example."
And so what you would then say is, well, we can do this if you want, but there's a risk. There's a risk that a B-2 bomber will get shot down, which will be humiliating for the United States. And then on the other side of it, you have the fact that within 24 hours they say that it didn't work.
So that's what weirds me out. I don't get that. I don't get why you'd engage in such a high-risk attack like that, risking a major strategic asset like a B-2 bomber only to come away within 24 hours and basically say that it didn't work. And on top of that, it's incredibly obvious that it wouldn't work.
The Fordow nuclear site is buried under a mountain. So you don't just have to penetrate. These bunker busters are for penetrating hardened defenses, you know? So like maybe a tunnel with concrete on the top of it, something like that, right? Like the Hitler bunker in World War II. That's what they're designed to do. They're not designed to penetrate mountains. Mountains are like...
I don't know if to explain what a mountain is. Everyone knows what a mountain is. It's a big, massive piece of rock, and then you bury the nuclear site under that. So prima facie, like, that's not going to work. It's just not going to work. So I have serious questions about...
what this was all about. Like, I really do. Maybe they did send in a B-2 bomber to drop six bunker-busting munitions on a target that they basically knew it wasn't gonna work on. They were prepped for that and then came out afterwards and said, "Yeah, it didn't work."
But that's a really, really weird thing to do. So maybe we could just start there with how strange the whole thing is. And then maybe we can move on. Because ultimately, I don't think this is really about the nuclear program at all. I think this is about whether the United States gets dragged into a war with Iran. But maybe we can talk about that in a moment. Andrew, what was your impression of the strike? Well, look, I would agree under normal circumstances that it's...
extremely risky to fly these bombers across hostile territory because you know they're awesomely expensive I mean these things cost literally billions and billions of dollars there are very few of them in the US inventory they're quite maintenance heavy as all stealth craft are so if you know if you lose one or two that's a big deal it's more like losing a
one or two destroyers or two aircraft carriers than it is for Losing one or two aircraft I guess the argument is like the the counter-argument to what you said there is that that first blow landed by the Israelis at ten days or so ago the that combination of drone attacks and internal sabotage and
And then, you know, highly precise suppression of enemy air defense operation by the Israelis was so effective that it knocked out a great deal of Iran's air defense. And then the U.S., apparently as part of this operation, sent its own suppression of enemy air defense unit in before the B-2 stealth bombers. So the word is that they essentially created a channel
a safe channel to these sites for the for the bombers themselves to go through so you know I guess that you know is in theory possible if everything that you know we read about the effectiveness of Israel's attacks is true as for being able to destroy this site like I mean I don't know it seems kind of unlikely to me before this attack there was a lot of
fairly well researched stuff going around Twitter saying that individually these bombs were not going to be able to penetrate deep enough to get to this nuclear enrichment site and what they would have to do probably is you know push one of the bunker busters
Hello there, Andy Collingwood here, interjecting, just to let you know that this is a premium episode of Multipolarity the podcast. So if you want to listen to the rest of this, if you want to hear about how China is turning Central Asia into a crucial logistics hub to connect the manufacturing prowess of China's eastern seaboard with the wealth of Western Europe,
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and send us five bucks, send us five quid, and enjoy. Be ahead of the crowd. Be cool. Okay, for patrons, back to the podcast. The regime in Iran knows for sure that they need to have nuclear weapons. It knows a few other things as well about the sort of alliances it needs to build, but we might get onto that later. But it certainly knows for sure that it's going to have to build nuclear weapons, and it's going to start a breakneck program to do that.