> "Prior to tonight’s airstrikes on the three Iranian nuclear-associated facilities, Maxar collected high-resolution satellite imagery on June 19th and June 20th of the Fordow fuel enrichment facility that revealed unusual truck and vehicular activity near the entrance to the underground military complex. On June 19th, a group of 16 cargo trucks were positioned along the access road that leads to the tunnel entrance of the facility. Subsequent imagery on June 20th revealed that most of the trucks had repositioned approximately one kilometer northwest along the access road; however, additional trucks and several bulldozers were seen near the entrance to the main facility and one truck was positioned immediately next to the main tunnel entrance."
> Care to elaborate? A random person doubting things doesn't help other people or bringing a discussion forward.
I don't know if you noticed, but what you are arguing for is in fact for mindlessly accepting unverified claims and extrapolate them to an optimal outcome. This is the opposite of critical thinking, and goes well beyond wishful thinking.
Meanwhile, if you pay attention to OP's point, you'll understand that Iran's nuclear sites have been continuously designed and developed for decades, while subjected to an almost evolutionary pressure, to continue operations even after withstanding direct attacks in scenarios matching exactly Trump's attacks.
In the very least, you must assess the effect of those strikes before making any sort of claim.
Another factor which it seems you somehow missed was the fact that Russia, another nuclear-capable totalitarian regime, is nowadays heavily dependent on Iran to conduct it's imperialist agenda. If Russia was negotiating handing over nuclear capabilities to North Korea in exchange for supporting it's war effort, do you believe Russia now has no interest to speed up Iran's nuclear weapons programmes?
Weird that Iran, an oil exporter with huge potential for solar, would expend so much energy on protecting a purportedly civilian nuclear program. I'm sure it's nothing.
This isn't really relevant but I'm only making one comment in this post so I'll say it here: young folks don't remember decades of Iranian state sponsored terrorism and do not understand the context of conflict in the middle east.
Conflict in the Middle East is entirely rooted in Israeli ethnic cleansing campaigns and western adventurism and protections of Israeli interests. If Iran went away tomorrow, the region would still have massive support for violent movements targeting Israel.
People are angry because their totalitarian governments invest in bombs and supporting terror and can't build functioning economies. Weird that you wouldn't factor that in. Sure, it's entirely Israel's fault... Oy vey.
To be frank, it wouldn't be a surprise for Trump to claim "total obliteration" while having achieved nothing substantial.
This would also be a very convenient way to break the current impasse: Trump can claim victory and brag about US weapons, Iranians can continue their program virtually unscathed, perhaps after bombing some minor evacuated US base for show.
After the dust settles, Iran can withdraw fron NNPT and the next day have Pakistan ship them a bomb. Peace (via MAD) achieved! Maybe we should even give Donald his Nobel prize for that.
The US, Israel and possibly Britain will install a no-fly zone over Iran. Israel is going to be entirely unwilling to allow Iran to go right back to building again what just got destroyed. This was a once in decades shot for Israel to take against Iran, in its very weakened state (with its proxies out of commission, Syria knocked over, and Russia very preoccupied). They'll attempt the post Gulf War I approach against Iraq (as an invasion will never be on the table). Sanctions and no-fly zone. They'll retain control over Iran's sky and in doing so will be free to bomb as they see fit if Iran attempts to build or re-start something like Fordow. If they attempt to install new air defenses, they'll simply bomb them. Whether that one bombing took care of Fordow is going to be moot, they'll hit it ten more times if that's what it takes, and destroy anything that attempts to move in or out of there. Israel can't maintain a no-fly zone over Iran so the US will be enlisted to do the heavy lifting on that.
I’d be somewhat skeptical of how much can be achieved just by bombing. It didn’t do much to stop the Nazi war machine in WWII. We have better munitions now, but we also have a lot fewer of them, and the US public won’t tolerate 121,000 dead airmen, either.
aiding regime change would be much easier, and would solve all these problems better. At some point in the next few days, the regime will be so weakened that the Iranian people will overthrow it themselves
The IRGC is unlikely to let the regime fall so easily. They'll kill a lot of Iranians to stop that from happening. The Iranian people have limited means to fight at present. The no-fly zone and sanctions approach will be used to attempt to strangle the regime over the coming years. It'll take a small miracle for the regime to fall anytime soon, it's not that weak yet (imo) despite what the propaganda is claiming.
Israel can bomb the IRGC and Basij bases, police and prisons (release political prisoners). They can collapse the regime, restrict its movement, eliminate chain of command. From there the Iranian people can raise and topple the regime
This is quite interesting to me - how long can Isreal really continue with such intensity ?
The distance between Israel and Iran is huge - it must be extremely expensive to operate the air bridge allowing their air force to operate as it did last week.
But I would be really surprised if they can go on like that for a month.
This seems wildly implausible. I've never heard of this happening as the result of foreign attacks. And also, any new regime is very unlikely to be more pro Israel or the US.
The US negotiators in Iraq in ‘91 stupidly didn’t enforce a total no-fly zone, allowing the use of helicopters by the regime. Saddam used helicopter gunships to mow down the would-be revolutionaries attempting regime change. Israel won’t make the same mistake.
91 also happened in a brief period where Russia was holding back from supplying end-of-line military hardware to anyone who wanted to take a shot at the United States and its clients.
In one month if the Iranian government has not been overthrown by its own people what will you do? Will you change your beliefs or will the goalpost move?
I don't know that it can be confirmed, but Iran is claiming that the US tipped them off. This is a fairly standard tactic, and it makes more sense here. This is something that would satisfy both the pro-war crowd and the group that is pro-Israel or anti-Iran, but not necessarily pro-war. We get to show our strength and support for our allies without really committing.
This would be a really risky strategy as it will push the Iranians into a corner with potentially large impacts on the oil price (which will change US public opinion).
That sounds to me like the US seriously needs to promote non-petroleum sources of energy. If not for the environment, for their own national sovereignity.
The thing is, the United States is self sufficient in petroleum. But domestic prices will go up to reflect the effect on world supply.
Arguably the same could happen given widespread use of non petroleum sources of energy. Prices will go up to reflect the marginal cost of hydrocarbon based energy, even if that use is minimal, until the point where the energy network is completely decoupled from those markets.
This happened in the United Kingdom after the invasion of Ukraine. More wind was used as gas became more expensive. But the price of electricity from wind also went up.
As Sun Tzu famously said: "You really should back your enemy in a corner and ask them for negotiations. Having someone's feet on hot coals really speeds it up. And if they break it, it's a case for using nukes against them. "
Fordow is widely reported to be significantly deeper than GBU-57 can penetrate (which is just 60 meters). The only way they penetrate is landing two of them in the exact same hole (think Robin Hood splitting an arrow with another arrow). Off by just a little and it winds up with it's own separate 60m hole.
CEP with GPS for our most accurate glide bombs is 5 meters. But GPS jamming is cheap and easy and the best precision we get in that case is 30 meters CEP.
GPU-57 gets its power from gravity. Reaching that 60 meter maximum penetration requires dropping the bomb from maximum elevation, but without GPS, that further increases the CEP.
With just 6 bombs, it seems unlikely that they could reliably penetrate. Actual penetration would likely require nuclear penetrators, but those also break the nuclear prohibition and open Pandora's box in places like Ukraine.
A great example of the problem is Yemen. We tried to get the Houthi to stop by dropping bunker busters on their tunnel systems and completely failed. We were forced to reach a ceasefire agreement (one that likely went up in smoke last night).
The layout of Fordow from what we’ve seen is not a single site. Depending on how many runs they did maybe it is all but destroyed or maybe it’s 1/3 destroyed. I’m sure Israel’s intelligence on it is pretty accurate (probably not public at this point)
I would be surprised if the size doesn't matter in this case. On the one hand, tiny black holes tend to be rather short-lived. On the other, I suppose some threshold mass/energy is needed to generate a child universe that doesn't collapse immediately.
It's kind of insulting to the reader that they explain P complexity class without using the word polynomial ("all problems that can be solved in a reasonable amount of time")
Be generous - it saves a lot of time. Once you say "polynomial" readers will think, "like, ANY polynomial, even like n^100?!" and you'll have to explain, yes, but that's STILL better than exponential, etc. They avoided all of that
Quanta targets people who are above average. So I don't think it is too much for them to give a sentence or two stating that. Or even a little graphic could do wonders. I don't think it would take much time or effort to make a graphic like the one on wikipedia[0] and just throw in some equations within the ring. You can easily simplify too, by removing NL and merging EXP. Hell, look at the graphics here[1]. That's much more work.
I don't think Quanta should be afraid of showing math to people. That's really their whole purpose. Even if I think they've made some egregious mistakes that make them untrustable...[2]
I suppose my point is that the readers who will wonder about this are a) very likely to know about complexity classes already, or b)capable of learning about it themselves. Perhaps a simple link to something like https://complexityzoo.net/Petting_Zoo would have been a nice middle-ground.
Edit: Aaronson even mentions the n^100 problem in the section about P!
I disagree and even think that this is besides the point. It is hard to wonder about what you don't know to wonder about. It is the job of the communicator to prime that and provide any critical information that the reader is not expected to know about. Without some basic explanation here then these terms might as well be black boxes to readers.
The point is that a single line[0] and a minimal graphic could substantially improve the reader's comprehension while simultaneously providing them the necessary nomenclature to find relevant material to further increase their understanding.
Look at this line:
| One of the most important classes goes by the humble name “P.”
It tells us almost nothing, except of its importance. Only to be followed by
| Roughly speaking, it encompasses all problems that can be solved in a reasonable amount of time. An analogous complexity class for space is dubbed “PSPACE.”
This tells us nothing... My first thought would by "why not PTIME and PSPACE" if I didn't already know what was going on.
The whole work is about bridging these two concepts! How can we understand that if we don't know what we're building a bridge between? It's like reporting on a bridge being built connecting England and France but just calling it a bridge. Is it important? Sounds like it by the way they talk, but how can you even know the impact of such a thing when not given such critical context? You get tremendous amounts of additional context with the addition of so few words.
"Perhaps someone told Zelensky that Trump doesn’t read much, and reacts to images".
This redneck has no empathy whatsoever and it's not fit to lick Zelenskyy boots.
What he should read is Vonnegut and especially a chapter from Cat's Cradle "Why Americans are hated". I've always thought that Vonnegut was too pesimistic about the US. Now I think he was too optimistic.
This is what US intelligence has been saying for years (as opposed to Israel who has vested interest in denying this).
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