JUST IN: The United States just dropped its largest non-nuclear bomb on Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons facility. That sentence contains the entire future of this war.
Satellite imagery from Maxar and Planet Labs, analysed by researchers at the Middlebury Institute and the Institute for Science and International Security, shows significant damage at the Taleghan-2 facility inside Iran’s Parchin military complex following strikes on 9-10 March. The weapon signature is consistent with the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, a 30,000-pound bomb designed to penetrate up to 200 feet of hardened concrete, delivered by B-2 Spirit stealth bombers deployed from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri.
Parchin is not an oil depot. It is not a naval base. It is not a drone warehouse. The IAEA’s November 2011 report identified the site as the location of hydrodynamic experiments consistent with nuclear weapon development, specifically high-explosive testing for implosion-type nuclear initiators, the component that compresses fissile material to achieve critical mass. Israel released 55,000 pages from Iran’s Amad Plan archive in 2018 documenting Parchin’s role. The IAEA detected chemically man-made uranium particles during its sole inspection of the specific site in September 2015. Iran then denied access and undertook sanitisation activities that the IAEA said “undermined verification.”
The war that began as a decapitation strike against a Supreme Leader has crossed into the nuclear domain. Not because a nuclear weapon was used. Because the facility suspected of developing them was struck
The GBU-57 exists for one purpose. It was designed during the Obama administration specifically to hold at risk Iran’s deeply buried nuclear facilities. It weighs more than most fighter aircraft. Only the B-2 can deliver it. And the B-2 flew from Missouri to Iran and back, a round trip of approximately 25,000 kilometres, to put it through the roof of a building that the IAEA spent fifteen years
