Would the Israelis exploit their air supremacy over Iran to airlift in a battalion of paratroopers and special forces to directly attack the buried Fordow nuclear enrichment facility? But can Israel's enemy cast a nuclear vote in this contest?
Is the only way to destroy Iran's Fordow nuclear enrichment facility buried deep under a mountain to use American MOP carried by a B-2 bomber?
Decades ago I read a military fiction book (Vortex) about an American Ranger regiment that dropped on the South African nuclear facility to seize that country's nukes. So maybe this is a concept that has just been floating around out there that Israelis could have picked up. It seems unlikely, but who knows?
Israel would have to have improved on America's Desert One debacle attempting to dispatch ground forces deep inside Iran. Is there room to land C-130s close enough to make an assault viable? Are forces already infiltrated/recruited? And how large must the force be? Could helicopters staged through Saudi Arabia pull the raiding party out?
And what would a ground attack need to do to destroy Fordow? It is deeply buried to defend against air attack. Is it designed to hold off a ground attack? Would attackers need to advance deep underground? Or could ground attackers succeed by sealing off anybody underground by blowing the entries and air shafts?
Or maybe with air supremacy Israel can drop precision bombs on the same point again and again and again to drill down to the facility, making an American massive MOP carried by a B-2 unneeded.
Given that Israel did indeed find a way to generate enough strikes to hit Iran as I predicted years ago, maybe Israel has its own version of the MOP and they figured out how to roll out of the back of a transport plane.
Although I will say again that I worry Iran already has some nukes.
I promoted this from an update to this post.
UPDATE: Iran's missile barrages have gotten much smaller.
UPDATE: China sent a couple cargo planes into Iran. What was transported? And was the mission to move something important to Iran? Or something important out of Iran? Could China have evacuated Iranian nuclear warheads? Or evacuated Chinese personnel of some sort?
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NOTE: I made the image with Bing.
