SPECIAL EPISODE | Answering Your Questions on the U.S. Airstrikes on Iran, With Erin Dumbacher

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox. I'm Jim Lindsay, the Mary and David Boies distinguished senior fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. This past weekend, the United States launched Operation Midnight Hammer, which used more than a hundred and twenty-five aircraft and seventy-five precision guided weapons to attack three nuclear facilities in Iran. So we're bringing you a special episode to answer the questions you have asked us about the attack, what it accomplished, and where the conflict might go from here.

To help answer these questions, I asked Erin Dumbacher to join me. Erin is the Stanton Nuclear Security senior fellow here at the Council. She is an expert on international security and technology policy, especially when it comes to nuclear issues. Erin recently concluded a stint in the Department of Defense in the Office of the Undersecretary for Policies, Force Development, and Emerging Capabilities Office. Erin, thank you for joining on this special episode of The President's Inbox.

DUMBACHER:
I'm pleased to be here. Thank you.

LINDSAY:
Let's jump right into it. Describe for me, if you can, Operation Midnight Hammer. What U.S. forces were used, and what precisely did they attack?

DUMBACHER:
The Pentagon has said that the United States Air Force dropped fourteen thirty-thousand-pound bunker buster bombs—

LINDSAY:
These are the GBU-57s, the massive ordnance penetrator.

DUMBACHER:
That's right, and they've also said it was the first ever use of this weapon operationally. The U.S. Navy also fired thirty cruise missiles. We've seen these before. These are Tomahawks or "TLAMs" attack cruise missiles, likely from an Ohio-class guided missile nuclear submarine. They were fired at three sites in Iran:, Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz. There were six B2 bombers, or six or seven, and they each dropped two thirty-thousand-pound bombs on Fordow. Two also went to the Natanz site. I should note, you mentioned just the total number of aircraft involved in this. There were dozens of tankers and refueling aircraft also involved in this.

LINDSAY:
The B-52s did a thirty-seven hour round trip.

DUMBACHER:
The B-2s did, yes, probably thirty-six hours total in flight from start to stop. To do that, you must refuel those bombers. They took off from Missouri, they returned to Missouri. The massive ordnance penetrator, the MOP, it's designed to defeat what the Pentagon calls "hard and deeply buried targets." It was designed explicitly by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which is, you might know, the organization that thinks the most about nuclear weapons, among them, alongside of course the military services. They've said that the design of the bomb was specific for bunker and tunnel facilities. This is a massive, massive bomb. It's likely twenty-feet-plus long, there's over five thousand pounds of explosive material in each of them, and the sites that they were targeting, and all signs point to they've successfully targeted them, the Fordow site, for example, is built to withstand conventional weapons, but perhaps not these conventional weapons.

LINDSAY:
You've already answered one of the questions we got from the audience. Deirdre Long asked, is the U.S. only going to use air supremacy or will the fleet have any important role? So the United States Navy, particularly the Submariner force, played a role there. One of the interesting things about the reports on the attack, Erin, is that there has been no news coverage, no reporting that the B-52s encountered anti-aircraft fire, drone attack, what have you. So I want to go to a question from @SoulKnights who asked, did Iran remove their air defenses to let the U.S. do this?

DUMBACHER:
It's an interesting question. The B-2 bombers likely undertook this mission in part because there was expectations that either through Israeli bombing or other means, they would not encounter significant missile defense.

LINDSAY:
We know that the Israeli Air Force has disabled large portions of Iran's air defenses.

DUMBACHER:
Yes. The specifics of whether or not these particular B-2s did or would've encountered them, that will all be something the Pentagon keeps fairly quiet.

LINDSAY:
In that sense, the Air Force was flying into an environment in which there was a low expectation. In essence, air defenses had already been suppressed, which is one of the first things you would do in a military attack. And I also understand fighters attended the B-52s in case they encountered any issue. In terms of the attack itself, I think there's a question about what it is that the United States was seeking to destroy, and we've got a question from @PlanetJane_, and she asks, is it certain there were weapons? Were there weapons on the ground?

DUMBACHER:
At the Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan sites? It's a very good question. Backing up slightly, multiple U.S. administrations have tried for decades to come up with solutions to the risk of Iran developing a nuclear weapon without having to bomb Iran. There have been diplomatic efforts. Parts of those diplomatic efforts, for example, the Iran deal, are known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which the United States under the first Trump administration pulled out of in 2018. Under some of those diplomatic endeavors, the International Atomic Energy Agency was able to send in inspectors and verify where Iran might have fissile material that they could convert into a nuclear weapon. Those inspectors, by the way, are still on the ground in Iran according to the IAEA. That doesn't mean that the Iranians are granting them access, full access to all of the sites to verify exactly what is there. So just a few days before the Israeli bombing campaign began, the IAEA inspectors verified some, but not all of the various sites around Iran where fissile material was and had been enriched.

LINDSAY:
When people start talking about fissile material and going after facilities that have fissile material, I think it's reasonable to wonder what happens when those bombs land on places that have fissile material. And @GingerParrot asks, is it significant or out of the ordinary that there have been no reports of radiation?

DUMBACHER:
Very good question. It's important to think about a distinction between facilities like Fordow, Natanz, what we understand about them, and nuclear power plants that have active reactors. So the radiological risk of targeting a nuclear power plant or the power to that nuclear power plant is actually much greater from a radiological perspective than an enrichment facility like what we've been discussing. So there's a few reasons for that. One of them is that you can think of these facilities really as like chemical industrial plants. Now, very sophisticated, but they're industrial facilities. There's chemicals there, there's some fissile material, and if targeted, some of the best scientists out there say that the radiological release outside of the facilities would be fairly low, and in fact, the IAEA Director General has confirmed using I think Iranian supplied information that there's been no off-site radiological impact from the targeting of these enrichment sites. It would be a very different story if we were talking about, for example, the Bushehr nuclear power plant having been targeted by bombs.

LINDSAY:
Which, just to be clear, has not been targeted.

DUMBACHER:
Has not.

LINDSAY:
By the United States or by the Israelis. So it's clear that the United States was targeting facilities that produce the fissile material to make weapons. We don't believe that Iran actually has weapons. Maybe close to it, and that was one of the rationales or arguments for the attack, and there has been no release of radiation. So let's talk about results, because that's obviously in the days since the attack been the big news story, and we got a question from @LadyNoRegrets. Did Iran's military capability get fully neutralized as Trump stated?

DUMBACHER:
This is one of the key questions that I unfortunately don't think we will have a full answer to for some time. The consensus—

LINDSAY:
I'm going to stop you right there, Erin. Are you surprised that we don't know five days after the attack what the results were?

DUMBACHER:
No. I'm not at all surprised that we don't know yet.

LINDSAY:
I'm not surprised either, but I think it's important for people to understand that these after-action reports take a while, and you draw on lots of sources to figure out what actually happened.

DUMBACHER:
You need lots of sources to get ground truth, and what we saw first actually was overhead imagery and some of that in the public domain, and that can tell you from a photographic perspective what might have been happening after the bombing and before, you can compare. That's not the same thing as retaining or maintaining custody of fissile material or inspectors on the ground counting how many centrifuges are still working, anything like that.

LINDSAY:
Plus obviously with Fordow, it's deeply buried underground, which is why the GBU-57 was dropped on the site, because the argument was that conventional weapons or smaller bombs wouldn't do it. Only the United States has this huge mother of all bombs.

DUMBACHER:
And the Fordow site is reported to even itself be three hundred feet underground. Who knows what the reinforcements there look like? Concrete, et cetera. And even this ordinance that, again, is impressive, is not necessarily able to reach that low, which is also why I think some of the open source imagery starts to chart out where the location of the bombs hitting having been near doors or access points to tunnels, things like that.

LINDSAY:
In all likelihood, destroyed easy access to those sites, as best we can tell. And I think it's important to note that it wasn't a matter of dropping one bomb on Fordow. Several were dropped on Fordow because it is buried three hundred feet underground. So we've now had this split in the assessments, so walk me through this question of obliteration. That's even a term of art when we talk about battle assessments.

DUMBACHER:
Yeah. So two things can be true at the same time. Both the tactical and operational brilliance of the United States military was very much on display here. The B-2 bombers, yes, tanker pilots, operational teams that support all of them, the Navy. It's also clear from open source imagery that three sites, they suffered enormous damage and there's likely rubble. If you think about the components of a nuclear weapons program though, you should be thinking about four categories. So know-how and expertise, fissile and other materials that you need to feed into enrichment or reprocess, industrial and chemical facilities with the centrifuges, for example, that we've heard so much about. And then you need the ability to take that material, for example, highly enriched uranium, and actually weaponize it or put it on top of a ballistic missile or something even more crude. So across those four categories, Israel had targeted some but perhaps not all of the nuclear scientists and operators that worked in some of these facilities, so there's likely still some know-how and expertise in the country. Fissile materials, the IAEA had been trying to get a handle on where the four hundred kilograms of sixty percent enriched uranium was. Open source researchers think they spotted trucks at the Fordow site a few days before the bombings. There are also reports on Saturday of the bombers having taken flight, so it's possible if open source researchers could see that they were in flight, then perhaps the Iranians also had some time to prepare.

LINDSAY:
One would have to imagine, if the Iranian military establishment was even moderately competent, that they had been planning for some time how they might evacuate fissile material in very short notice.

DUMBACHER:
This year is not the first year that they have probably thought about the risk of U.S. bombing of these sites.

LINDSAY:
Just like the United States military has been thinking about bombing these sites for a number of years. This is not something that they whipped up last Friday afternoon.

DUMBACHER:
Right. Evidence points to this not being a new plan and that the pilots of the bombers having trained for this, et cetera, et cetera.

LINDSAY:
Okay, so how significant is it that we're hearing reports that the Iranians may have removed as much as four hundred kilograms, so eight hundred pounds worth of enriched uranium? When you do that, what do you do with it?

DUMBACHER:
There are reports that they have spread it across the country in small quantities in other underground facilities.

LINDSAY:
So disperse it in other places, make it hard to find.

DUMBACHER:
Disperse it, but make it hard to bomb again. It's fair to say that Fordow, Natanz, Isfahan, these are the largest of the Iranian nuclear sites, but again, international inspectors haven't had full access to everything they've wanted to see in recent months and years, which means that there's a variety of options if you're the Iranians and you want to hide weaponization of your nuclear material.

LINDSAY:
So let's get back to this question of damage. I think everyone would agree, there has been significant damage to these facilities. I don't know if it escalates to being obliterated. I will note, there was much talk about this preliminary defense intelligence agency report that was leaked which said that the Iranian nuclear weapons program could be reconstituted in a matter of months, though that report came with the qualifier that this was a low confidence assessment. CIA director John Radcliffe then came out with an announcement saying that the strikes had severely damaged the facilities that were the targets. I guess it takes us back to this general question of whether or not you can damage these particular facilities. How do you know how much time you've pushed the Iranian nuclear ambitions back?

DUMBACHER:
This is another reason why I think these assessments will not come out with truth in the first just few days. The variety of sources you would need to get a good handle on that is diverse. So the question about whether or not the Iranians could rebuild a nuclear program after this bombing, those four elements, those four categories are what you would need. You would need some sort of industrial and chemical facility to enrich what that four hundred of sixty percent uranium is currently at or was at when the IEEA last saw it, but that doesn't necessarily mean you would have to build another Natanz or another Fordow. You could build something smaller, you could build something underground, and if you have the know-how and some of the raw materials, depending on the Iranian regime's goal, let's say if they are in fact shooting for a nuclear weapon, then one could say a matter of months to develop something fairly crude and years to do more.

LINDSAY:
Well, I think the important point here is that there's a lot of variability and uncertainty about it, and part of it depends upon what do you mean by building a weapon? It's one thing to have a weapon that can fit in an intercontinental ballistic missile, which the Iranians don't have. But mating up a warhead to a missile is an incredibly complicated feat. Using fissile material to create a crude device that could be delivered by a boat or by a truck is a different sort of technical challenge. But I guess what I want to do is move from this question of assessments about how much Iran's nuclear program has been pushed back to the question of intent. We've been talking about capability. I want to focus on intent, because several of the questions we got from people really wanted to ask about what the strikes mean for Iran's desire to get a nuclear weapon. For example, @BlueMilkGirl asked, will it make it more likely for Iran to try to have a successful nuclear ability? And @SweetTeaFemme put the same question but looked at it from the other direction: could the strikes have the chance to dissuade Iran from pursuing a nuke? What do you think this attack means for Iranian intentions?

DUMBACHER:
We don't know how the Iranians will react to this bombing in the medium to long-term. We saw some short-term responses in terms of I think it was fourteen ballistic missiles fired at the U.S. base in Qatar. Medium and longer term, I would ask the listener, if you're in the Iranians case and you want to avoid regime change, and for decades, you have been developing a nuclear program as a sign of your regime's modernity among other things, would you be willing to give it up quickly? The sticking point in prior negotiations between the U.S. and partners with Iran has always been about whether or not Iran can maintain an enrichment capability. So the real question for the Iranians and for the Americans if there's future negotiations is whether or not the international community and the United States and Israel are willing to live with an Iran that might have some materials and any potentially enrichment capabilities. I do think that there are ripple effects of the bombing that should be considered too. Think about other countries around the world who might have some nuclear materials for energy purposes, might be what political scientists have called hedging states, sort of at the threshold or could very quickly convert into a nuclear weapons state if they chose to. If you're in their shoes, do you hide your activities moving forward? Are you public about them moving forward? Are you as transparent with the IAEA as Iran has been on and off over the years? I think that there are some potential chilling effects on the international nuclear nonproliferation regime that the U.S. has been a leader in for decades to try to say you can have nuclear materials for energy and for peaceful purposes, but you cannot convert it to weapons, and the way we assure that is that you work with this international cohort of experts, the IAEA. If you're a country in the future thinking about how you might like to avoid military incursions, including very large bombs, do you commit to that transparency?

LINDSAY:
I do think this is an interesting point. It's been often discussed in the national security community, which is for countries that are bystanders to this watching, what are the lessons that they draw for their own experience? And again, it gets back to the argument that would the United States or Israel have attacked Iran if Iran possessed a nuclear weapon? And again, that gets to the incentives that countries may have to pursue nuclear weapons programs even if the United States or other great powers are deeply opposed. Again, the argument, for example, if Ukraine had not given away its nuclear force that it inherited from the Soviet Union, would we be looking at the kind of war we have today? So that's a big question. And I do think the question is are there still opportunities for a negotiated outcome here? Now, the Iranian regime has made very clear, "We have no interest in negotiating. The United States as been duplicitous. What it has done is an unpardonable affront to Iranian sovereignty," but I would regard much of that as cheap talk. There's always a possibility to do a deal. We'll see if that exists, but I do think you put your finger on the point that's really difficult, which is does Iran get to have any enrichment capability? And that could be very hard to finesse because either you do or you don't. You don't kind of get to have an enrichment capability.

DUMBACHER:
I think that's right, and let me just note too here, in order to have nuclear power and nuclear research, and for medical and healthcare purposes, for example, you do not need sixty percent enriched uranium. Low enriched uranium will suffice in the five percent range.

LINDSAY:
Well, which is why it was pretty clear that you couldn't reconcile Iran's claims of not wanting or not seeking a nuclear weapon with its enrichment behavior, because you don't need sixty percent, as you point out.

DUMBACHER:
I think it's also notable, the Trump administration had made diplomatic overtures in the weeks before the Israeli campaign, and it's possible that the Iranians were also thinking about what they might need to have as leverage in those negotiations.

LINDSAY:
Let's talk a little bit about potential Iranian retaliation. You noted that the Iranians attacked a U.S. base in Qatar. I will note that the number of ballistic missiles the Iranians fired off was very small, and they apparently let the Qataris know that this attack was coming. In a sense, it was more performative than anything else, but a number of people have asked about possible Iranian retaliation. For example, @Morning_Dove_ asked, what do you consider likely targets for Iran's response? @StrawberryTone asked, to what degree are American service members vulnerable to Iranian strikes around the region? @LemonDead asked, is there a higher risk of a terrorist attack on American soil? How do you think about the possibility that Iran will retaliate? And I wouldn't assume that the fact that Iran has had a minimal retaliation in the first days after the attack means that they won't retaliate down the road, but how do you think about that, Erin?

DUMBACHER:
I absolutely agree that we should not just think that this has been a one and done and the fourteen missiles against the base are the end of the story. There are U.S. service members in the region. My first question and instinct when I saw the news was what are the force protection mechanisms to protect those forces? Both, of course, for all of the obvious reasons, but also because if U.S. service members were to be harmed, this whole conflict could escalate. There's options for economic retaliation from the Iranian side. It could be closing the Straits of Hormuz through which much global trade passes, and then there's the terrorism or proxy risk. The question about higher risk of terrorist attack on American soil all depends on, again, Iranian intent of course, but we have seen the Department of Homeland Security issue a warning for cybersecurity of U.S. critical infrastructure against potential Iranian responses, I should say.

LINDSAY:
And the Iranians have very good hackers, as best we can tell.

DUMBACHER:
That has been made clear in recent hacks, yes. So these questions also hinge quite a bit on Iranian missile capabilities that are left and that remain after the Israeli and U.S. bombing. Do they have the potential to sustain some armed conflict? I don't know the answer to that today. I think you're right, that we will start to see this play out in the weeks and months ahead. To the prior question, there's also the potential that the Iranians could race to develop a nuclear weapon at this stage in response to the bombing, which would be another path of retaliation, if you will.

LINDSAY:
I think it's important to stress, Erin, that if you look at the Iranian military establishment, it has been taking a beating over the last year. The Israeli attacks have severely depleted their supplies, their air defenses, destroyed the ability to replenish those things. The Iranians have been firing off missiles, but that gets you back into the question of how quickly can you replenish your stockpiles? That can be a real challenge, particularly in an environment which you're worried about further attacks. My sense is if the Iranians chose to try to block the Strait of Hormuz, they would do so using mines, which presumably they have a reasonable store up. However, there's a real downside to the Iranians in trying to shut off the Strait of Hormuz because even if it doesn't bring the United States into direct conflict with Iran, and I can't imagine the Trump administration would allow the Persian Gulf to be shut off. The international oil, tweny percent of the world's oil goes through the Strait. It's a real problem for some of the countries that are close to Iran, the Chinese in particular, who depend upon being able to get oil coming out of the Persian Gulf.

DUMBACHER:
That brings us to another consideration, which is if the Iranians do seek to rebuild their military, will they get any outside help, be it from prior partners like the Russians or others?

LINDSAY:
The challenge you're going to have, the Russians have their military industrial complex running at a hundred percent, but those weapons are going to Ukraine. I can't imagine they're going to go to Iran. And the Chinese, even with their "partnership with no limits" with Russia, has not provided Russia overtly with completed or assembled weapons. Hard to see them doing it in the case of Iran. That, I guess, leads to some geopolitical questions, one of them coming from @Being_Judged. Can even more countries get involved now? How about China, other nuclear powers? It's been a lot of talk, Erin, about this axis of autocracies or axis of upheaval, this cooperation with Russia and Iran, North Korea, China, but we don't see them rushing to Iran's aid. In fact, President Putin made clear that the treaty of friendship they have with Iran doesn't mean that they have a mutual defense pact. How do you think about the geopolitical fallout?

DUMBACHER:
I do think it's interesting that we haven't seen more involvement or activity from the Russians and the Chinese in response to these bombings. I would remind the listeners that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was in fact joint. It had multiple nuclear powers at the table helping to bring Iran along and to find a diplomatic solution to the question of whether or not Iran maintains a peaceful nuclear program. I think it's too soon to tell whether or not the Chinese and the Russians and other nuclear powers, and even frankly non-nuclear powers in the region, some of the Arab states, what actions they might take in response to this. Some of the questions to watch for are, again, does anyone share capabilities with the Iranians? Does any of the Gulf states, for example, impose particular pressure to join or find a diplomatic solution moving forward? Some have even proposed regional-wide nuclear power access and production to help manage the risk a little bit across the whole region, such that they could also benefit from nuclear power, but too soon to tell.

LINDSAY:
This is an interesting issue because when we talk about Iran and Russia and China and their collaboration, the so-called axis of autocracies or axis of upheaval, on this particular issue, their interests do not align. The Russians and the Chinese aren't eager to see Iran becoming a nuclear power. That could pose potential problems for them, particularly for the Russians. So again, I think it's important to understand that these countries may have overlapping interests, they don't have identical interests. In some cases, they're in great conflict. Erin, I want to end by asking a question a number of people who wrote in asked about, and it's a really unfair question because it's asking you to tell people what is going to happen in the future. And this is an instance in which there's a lot of contingency. What are the decisions that leaders on each side make through all the specific framing that came from @NothingLeftTo, who asked, what are the chances of this incident becoming another long-lasting war in the Middle East?

DUMBACHER:
Difficult to have any definitive answers this early, I would say. It very much depends on Iranian next steps, I think. Do they in fact race for a bomb? Do they believe they need to maintain some sort of enrichment capability? Do they enter diplomatic negotiations in good faith at all at this point? The global effects and certainly the regional effects here have potential for all sorts of escalation to bring in additional activities, not just from the United States, but from others in the region. Continued Israeli bombardments, for example, are also—

LINDSAY:
Well, that's the question whether the current ceasefire is going to hold.

DUMBACHER:
That's right.

LINDSAY:
President Trump made his displeasure quite clear when the Israelis attacked Iran after the ceasefire went into effect.

DUMBACHER:
That's right, and a ceasefire is also not the end of a war. It is a pause, by definition, a pause in the war, and to find some sort of peaceful resolution, both parties have to find something that's mutually enticing to them to say, "We will lay down our arms." Finding what those enticing opportunities are, both from a U.S. perspective, from an Israeli perspective, and of course, also from an Iranian perspective will be the major question moving forward,

LINDSAY:
Looking at this issue that most Americans want foreign policy problems to be solved, when in fact, most foreign policy problems are things that you manage, one positive thing in terms of the current dynamics is something you mentioned, which is that Iran is greatly weakened. So it's unlikely, though not impossible, that the Iranians are going to look to escalate this conflict. My guess is they will probably look for ways to reconstitute their abilities, because they are particularly weakened right now.

DUMBACHER:
There are a lot of potential pathways here. Some of the other questions on the U.S. and Israeli side, in the immediate aftermath of the bombing, there were some experts and pundits asking whether or not we should push further to prompt regime change within Iran, so what are the national interests here from the United States and from the Israeli side? I would argue that they're very much in the place of maintaining and assuring that Iran does not have the capability to achieve a nuclear weapon. I believe that the only way we could verify that is through international partners and through willingness of the Iranians to participate in the International Atomic Energy Agency's inspections and safeguards processes.

LINDSAY:
Well, obviously, regime change opens up a whole other set of questions, but I think we're going to bring the conversation to a close here and end this special episode of The President's Inbox. My guest has been Erin Dumbacher, the Stanton Nuclear Security senior fellow here at the Council. Erin, thank you very much for joining me.

DUMBACHER:
Thank you.

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify or wherever you listen, and leave us a review. We love the feedback. A transcript of our conversation is available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on CFR.org. As always, opinions expressed on The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. Today's episode was produced by Justin Schuster, with recording engineer Elijah Gonzalez, and director of podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.