Why the Bunker Busters Worked*

* Well, at least probably worked. We don't know for sure yet.

There was a lot of hand-wringing about whether our GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators (aka bunker busters) would actually work. I read many so-called analyses that it would require multiple MOPs to drill down to get a bomb inside the facility. Fordow is about 260-290 feet underground, and the MOP has a published penetration depth of 200 feet. The theory was that you would have to drop a couple of bombs down the same hole to get one inside the facility.

However, I read a far more insightful analysis by a physicist (at a link I can no longer find) that the way the MOPs work is to create shockwaves inside the mountain that would collapse the caverns that had been excavated inside. The Mossad stole the Iranian nuclear archive in 2018, and it helpfully included the design documents for Fordow. Then we used the design of the facility and the composition of the mountain material to build a computer model. With the model, we could determine the optimal number and placement of MOPs that would create shockwaves inside the mountain that would collapse the caverns.

What really mattered was not getting a MOP inside the cavern. We knew the precise location and timing of when and where we needed to drop them. The pattern of the six holes into which we put 12 MOPs was no accident. Thus, Trump could be quite certain, even without a formal bomb damage assessment, immediately after the strike that Fordow had been obliterated.