ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
President Trump said again today that an American strike had devastated a key Iranian nuclear facility deep inside a mountain.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It was called obliteration. No other military on Earth could've done it.
SHAPIRO: Trump says obliteration. And in a new statement, CIA Director John Ratcliffe says the overall weapons program was, quote, "severely damaged." But others in the intelligence community seem less sure. One earlier classified assessment says with low confidence that the strike may have done only limited damage to one key facility. Joining me to discuss what we know is NPR science and security correspondent Geoff Brumfiel. Hi, Geoff.
GEOFF BRUMFIEL, BYLINE: Hi, Ari.
SHAPIRO: In the run-up to these strikes, the thinking was that only American bombs could reach this facility, called Fordo. Are we now learning that maybe not even they could do the job?
BRUMFIEL: Well, it's true American bombs were the only ones with a shot at it, and in particular this 30,000-pound, precision-guided bunker buster. So America delivered a dozen of them by B-2 stealth bomber, and satellite imagery suggests the strike was perfectly executed by the pilots. The bombs were dropped in these tight clusters in two parts of the site, one likely directly above Fordo's uranium centrifuges, and the other was probably a ventilation shaft that would've been a potential vulnerability. But even though the military conducted the strike flawlessly, it might not have worked. And the reason comes down to geology.
SHAPIRO: What's so special about the geology?
BRUMFIEL: So in some sense, this is the simplest physics imaginable. You have a really big bomb, and it hits the ground. And how far it goes into the ground depends on a couple of factors. A big one is how hard the ground is. I spoke to Raymond Jeanloz, a scientist at the University of California at Berkeley who was part of a study on bunker busters nearly 20 years ago. Here's what he said.
RAYMOND JEANLOZ: It depends enormously on the kind of rock.
BRUMFIEL: And natural voids and fractures in the rock can also have a huge effect, scattering the energy of the bomb. Today, President Trump actually said that the U.S. believed the rock was made of granite. That, of course, is pretty hard. And we know the Iranians dug their tunnels as deep as they could. Jeanloz says that this is a basic problem for all bunker buster weapons.
JEANLOZ: It's cheaper and easier for someone to dig deeper than it is to penetrate through that depth.
BRUMFIEL: Again, this mission appears to have been perfectly executed. But they never tried it before, and it's possible it just didn't work.
SHAPIRO: The intelligence assessment we have is early. There's likely going to be more information coming out. But what are the consequences if this was not a success and it did not take out this nuclear site?
BRUMFIEL: Well, Fordo is an important site to the Iranians, to be sure. But every expert I've spoken to so far agrees that, honestly, it may not matter. There's no way to completely eliminate Iran's nuclear program with bombs. There are just too many other facilities, too many places to hide equipment and uranium. Here's Chris Ford. He was a former assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation during the first Trump administration.
CHRIS FORD: If you really want to have reasonable confidence in a solution over time, you need to have an agreement with some kind of cooperative verification and ongoing monitoring.
BRUMFIEL: In other words, regardless of whether Fordo was destroyed, the U.S. still needs to make some sort of nuclear deal with Iran if it wants to be sure it's not going to get a bomb. And Trump said there are plans to meet with the Iranians next week, but he doesn't seem to care if the two sides reach an agreement.
SHAPIRO: NPR's Geoff Brumfiel. Thank you.
BRUMFIEL: Thank you.
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