Oh, so Iran does have an atomic bomb – and they’re threatening to use it, at least according to this social media release from their Iraninarabic_ir X account with the message, “There is a surprise tonight that the world will remember for centuries.”, and a video that is both hilarious and disturbing;

Personally I think they’re bluffing. Does anybody really think they wouldn’t have used a nuke against Israel if they already had one? This reeks of desperation in light of previous reports, not denied by Iran, that they’re reaching out to the USA to get a ceasefire:

Iran has been urgently signaling that it seeks an end to hostilities and resumption of talks over its nuclear programs, sending messages to Israel and the U.S. via Arab intermediaries, Middle Eastern and European officials said.

In the midst of a ferocious Israeli air campaign, Tehran has told Arab officials it would be open to returning to the negotiating table as long as the U.S. doesn’t join the attack, the officials said. Iran also passed messages to Israel saying it is in the interest of both sides to keep the violence contained.

They should have thought about that while negotiations were still ongoing. Having done all the work of clearing the skies of Iranian defences I doubt the Israelis are going to stop now that they can bomb targets with impunity. That includes the launchers being used to shoot missiles at Israel. Once that threat is eliminated, the Mullahs will have nothing left to respond with. 

In other words, they’re on the ropes:

Tehran’s 86-year-old supreme leader will still be fearing assassination, hiding out in ‘as secure a location as they can manage’ as Israel continues to target high ranking officials with deadly precision strikes across the country, onlookers believe. Speaking on the BBC’s Newscast over the weekend, The Economist’s defence editor, Shashank Joshi, assessed that Khamenei would likely avoid any public appearances as his remaining loyalists work desperately to keep him out of Israel’s crosshairs.

“I think they’ll be concerned that Israel has clearly penetrated them inside out, so they will be looking to all possible corners from how to keep him safe, perhaps moving him from place to place,“

Something that’s been obvious for years, as Israel assassinated nuclear scientists inside Iran, and certainly since Israel filched tons of documents on the Iranian nuclear program from under the noses of the IRGC in Tehran a few years ago.

But I guess we do have to take this seriously. When a nation led by Islamist fanatics says they are going to launch a nuke, that’s not something you can just write off as rhetoric. It could also be something less than nuke: a so-called dirty bomb where they wrap their remaining 60% U-235 uranium around the explosive warhead of a ballistic missile headed for TelAviv? No doubt, Israeli and American forces are on high alert, and all possible countermeasures are ready to be used. 

Which leads to the thought that this is yet another miscalculation since it would be the excuse Trump needs to take out the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant (FFEP). That’s buried perhaps 200 feet underground near the ancient city of Qom, probably the most hardened target in the whole of Iran, and Israel lacks both the bunker-buster munitions necessary to destroy it from the air and the heavy bombers needed to deliver them. But someone else does:

[The GBU-57 or MOP (Massive Ordinance Penetrator) weighs] 30,000 pounds, it actually uses less than one-third as much explosive material. The GBU uses a combination of sheer mass, hardened steel, Mach 1 speed, and GPS pinpoint accuracy to penetrate up to 200 feet underground before its tiny computer brain tells the 5,300 pounds of high explosive to go BOOM.
…
Only the B-2 Spirit heavy stealth bomber can carry the GBU-57…..[it’s] just too large for the internal bays of our older bombers. Even our small fleet of Spirits had to be redesigned for it. The bomber’s rotary launcher required modification, new software to integrate the bomber with the bomb, additional avionics to handle the big MOP’s unique characteristics during flight and release.

Those people who think Trump would not do this – including both supporters and opponents, because they mistake his America First rhetoric for Isolationism – must be forgetting what he did back in 2020 to Iran’s No. 1 military guy, General Qassem Soleimani.

This does seem to kill the claim that the nuclear case against Iran is manufactured and that they had no intention of developing a nuclear weapon. As has been pointed out many times there really is no other reasonable explanation for the levels of U-235 enrichment that Iran has sought and achieved.