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this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2025
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Please tell me none of these bombs were nukes...
Fucking amazing.
PNAC gets its way in the end, despite at least 40% of Trump's rise to political prominence being due to him being one of the few Republicans to criticize... you know, all the pointless meddling and wars in the ME.
... And Trump is almost single handedly responsible for all of this.
He tore up the nuke deal Obama made. He massively mismanaged every element of the Israeli/Palestine situation. Fucking stepson Kushner's gonna figure it out, don't worry.
Oh yeah lets piss off everyone and move the embassy to Jerusalem.
Beyond contemptible.
The man is a demon.
Kefka?
Is Trump Kefka, or is that an insult to Kefka?
Fucking childish demon clown that just wants to blow up the whole world so he can feel special.
Trump is not single handedly responsible for jack shit. Get the fick outta here with this great man theory nonsense. Almost every single democrat has been in lock step supporting this shit.
Hear hear. Great man theory is absurd. If Kamala was at the helm I guarantee it wouldn't be any different, only libs wouldn't protest because slay kween we came we saw he died
It is the superstructure, it is the machine of capitalism that needs to feed. Watch oil futures on Monday and remind me who is the greatest producer of crude and LNG today?
There's a reason I said almost singlehandedly.
Would you prefer 'played a pivotal role'?
Yes, a lot of Democrats went along with the revocation of the agreement, and then failed to get a new agreement in place during the Biden admin, after Trump and the Reps also failed to get a new deal in Trump's first term, despite that being one of Trump's campaign promises.
But Trump, as the head of state, signed an executive memorandum that cancelled it.
Which is a thing that a US President can actually do unilaterally, whereas drafting or accepting a new deal, an international treaty, has to go through Congress.
Its... kind of a massive flaw in the US Consitutional framework, that a President effectively has an incredible veto power when it comes to international agreements.
https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/presidential-power-to-terminate-international-agreements
Could/Should the Dems have reformed this, threw a massive shit fit about this?
Absolutely yes.
But in this particular instance... the whole scenario really actually does hinge on the President being singly able to do something extreme, with no real, effective, balanced check on that power.
I do not need to invoke or subscribe to Great Man Theory to point all this out.
Trump is a symptom of many greater, unchecked sicknesses and decay and corruption in American politics and society... he is simply the fraudulent idiot man-child r*pist that the masses of frustrated, hateful, intolerant, anti-intellectual bigots projected their yearning for spite and revenge onto, and empowered.
not a flaw, this is a feature of US power
While the masses that supported the regime change in Libya that Obama and Hillary were pushing with straight up KKK level propaganda ("Gaddafi handing out viagra for mass rapes" + "Gaddafi recruiting mercenaries from sub-Saharan Africa" = real migrant workers from Chad were getting hanged from bridges by the "rebels for democracy") and is currently a slave market are what? Unfrustrated, tolerant, intellectual, classy liberals?
The entire US middle class on both sides turns to a cheerleader for the military industrial complex with only slightly different narratives to support it each time. The presidents are puppets of economic forces, snap out of it.
I love your solution-oriented mindset, but just feel the need to clarify one point. This is what the US has always stood for, it's always been a wretched hell-empire run by rich ghouls willing to drown the world in blood. Those of us who want to get along and not kill everybody, we're the traitors, just factually speaking. And that's a good thing
They were not.
Hitting nuclear facilities with conventional weapons is just dirty bombs with extra steps. These attacks are a number of international high crimes, including the nonproliferation treaty.
Well, at least for once, something could actually be worse.
But of course tomorrow will happen so then that metric gets reset.
The worst war crime of your life so far
Trump II has felt like W Bush III this problem is bigger than him.
I'd rather not be in the world of ruin timeline.
It's the perfect crime. They bombed nuclear sites, which means there are going to be radiation spikes regardless of what kind of bombs they dropped, which means they could drop small nukes and probably get away with it.
That's not how it works. You can tell the difference between radiation from a nuclear weapon and a conventional bomb used on radioactive materials. If they used nukes they won't be able to cover it up for very long.
There's different isotopes in the fallout, different radio spectrometry or whatever, but I think they could lie and say that the reason it looks like a conventional nuclear weapon is because Iran was hiding a nuke and they blew it up.
A nuclear detonation is a very delicate and precisely controlled process. It doesn't just happen because a bomb goes off near the nuke. So sure, they can say anything, but there will be obvious evidence.
Speaking of saying anything, I'm going to look for reliable confirmation that this even happened. I'm not taking Trump's fucking tweet for it.
What gives you the idea that Trump gives any fucks about lying?
What gives you the idea that I have any such idea? I find that quite puzzling.
Sure, in fantasyland
What's so fantastical about the US using a tactical nuke and then lying about it?
Looks like that didn't happen here, but I see no reason that it couldn't.
Because nuclear detonations are very different to conventional ones, and every major power has satellites monitoring for them. They can’t be hidden. Hell, any university or weather service within 3,000 miles would be able to detect it.
Even conventional detonations on top of nuclear reactors or nuclear stockpiles?
Yes. Different blast pattern, different fallout pattern, different isotopes, different seismic signature, different sound wave pattern…
Yes. Only in fantasy land. As Logi above said, nuclear detonation is an extremely precise, controlled process that has very specific conditions to achieve successfully. Even an actual fission bomb only manages to consume a fraction of the radioactive material.
The only thing someone would achieve by denotating a conventional explosive near a reactor or nuclear stockpile is spreading highly radioactive dust around. That does not nor will ever look like uncontrolled nuclear fission, let alone a detonation from a thermonuclear warhead.
The US doesn't have small enough nuclear penetrators to even try hiding something anyway, they can use tactical warheads as bunker busters but they can't be meaningfully hidden. Meanwhile all these Iranian installations have been built with conventional bunker busters in mind so the existing American GBUs that must have been used may not have caused much real damage after all even if they double tapped the exact same spot.
Iran claim no radiation leak or contamination because they moved the uranium before the strikes and nothing was stored there
*immense relief*
They knew this was happening, we all knew. I hope this is not just a claim. It's not like you can just take nuclear material home in a jiffy.
There is aerial photo on the AlJazeera website right now from a day or two before the strike with like 8 trucks moving it
See this is exactly what I am worried about.
The Fordow site is simply under too big of a fucking mountain for even our largest conventional penetrator bombs to actually significantly fuck up... unless you basically were able to pull off multiples of those bombs hitting the exact same point from nearly the same angle...
GPS guided bombs are accurate, but not that accurate... you'd have to throw like 20% to 40% of the entire US stockpile of these fuckoff huge conventional penetrator bombs to literally dig a hole through the mountain.
... Or, you drop one tactical nuke.
fucking not good
...
like this is what those air radar images were showing from 24/48 hrs ago.
That was probably the US's entire fucking B2 Bomber Fleet deploying.
...
EDIT:
Yep 24 to 48 hrs later and...
Apparently around a dozen 30,000 lb, GBU57s were used, there are at least 3 distinct impact sites visible from Sat Imagery...
And oh hey well, a whole bunch of people are now claiming that... did these do damage?
Sure yes.
Did they 'utterly obliterate' the entire site?
Not according to Israel, and a good number of others.
So... 1) thank God they did not actually use a tac. nuke.
Anything for a Nobel peace prize.
I can totally see Trump just having a bunch of random bombs dropped in the general area, declaring victory and telling everyone to fuck off though.
Iran will not dispute the strike was effective, and neither will Israel.
JDAM is supposed to have a circular error probable of 5m and it's an upgrade kit from 25 years ago. I can definitely believe that a much newer purpose-built weapon can do better than that. The idea of hitting the same spot with multiple bombs might not actually be that unlikely
Yeah but we have bombs that can do about what a small one would do without using radioactive materials. If they want to nuke them with Trump they'd go for something big and spectacular, like when he dropped the massive moab
If you are talking about conventional bombs that are comparable to a small nuke in a ground burst or air burst scenario, yes.
But not for ground penetration, no.
A conventional explosive displaces, creates a pressure wave that fractures and shatters things, but that pressure wave behaves differently when applied to different materials.
A nuke creates a ball of plasma that is so hot that it evaporates everything inside the primary blast radius, and then also a pressure wave when that miniature sun displaces things and wants to expand outward in every direction.
A 20 kt nuke will make an all incinerating fireball approximately 200m in diameter... so that means everything in a 100m radius from the point of impact, is now plasma... and then on top of that you get the massive pressure wave extending damage further beyond that.
Nukes are considerably more effective as deep pemetrator weapons than conventional explosives are.
The GBU 57 MOP, going off publically available info, can destroy earth (meaning soil) 60m under its point of impact... but only about 18m under reinforced concrete.
A mountain, with a reinforced bunker complex under it, is going to be a lot closer to reinforced concrete than it is to soil in some dry lakebed testing range.
And Fordow is roughly 80m, possibly more, underground.
So... the tactical nuke can basically guaranteed do that mission in one accurate hit, whereas with GBU 57s, you'd need a number of them, and you would have to basically drill a bore hole by dropping successive bombs into the same hole.
And uh, last note, the MOAB is just shy of 22,000 lbs, has a blast rating of about 11 tons of TNT. Its not a ground penetrator though, it is thermobaric, a fuel air bomb.
The GBU 57 MOP is a 30,000 lb bomb, and... rough math works out to about... maybe 1 kiloton, max, probably less?
I guess we'll have to wait for Warthunder to add the B2 and GBU 57 and then eventually someone will leak the real specs.