Deep under a mountain, just a short distance from the Shiite holy city of Qom, an Iranian nuclear facility is in operation that experts believe is capable of enriching uranium to military levels.
The Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant is perhaps the most critical target in Israel’s weeklong bombing campaign against the Islamic Republic.
Common wisdom from intelligence experts and military analysts says that only a GBU-57 A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or MOP, which is a 30,000-pound bunker buster exclusively developed by the U.S. military, is capable of penetrating deep enough into the Earth to destroy the facility.
One MOP would not be capable of penetrating the rock and concrete believed to be protecting Fordow. It would take at least two consecutive bombings, dropped precisely on top of one another, even possibly to get through to the facility itself.
Additionally, the U.S. military is the only force with an aircraft capable of carrying and dropping the MOP. If the bombs are to be deployed, it will almost certainly require the U.S. to get involved in the conflict.
President Donald Trump is keeping a range of U.S. actions on the table, but division within the MAGA-sphere seems to be holding the White House back from charging headlong into Israel’s bombing campaign.
If the U.S. is not willing to drop the MOPs, Israel will need to pursue alternative means of neutralizing Fordow.
Tactical nuclear weapon
The most obvious alternative is the deployment of a tactical nuclear weapon. The political ramifications for such a move, especially in the context of ostensibly seeking to prevent the production of nuclear weapons, would be extreme and could drastically wound Israel’s already crumbling moral legitimacy in the minds of Western nations.
Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Yechiel Leiter said in an interview on Friday that his country has a “number of contingencies” regarding how to destroy the underground compound that do not require dropping a bomb.
“Not everything is a matter of, you know, taking to the skies and bombing from afar,” the ambassador said.
Shaldag 5101
One possibility is a special forces raid carried out on the ground. This would be a difficult and treacherous operation, but it is not entirely without precedent.
Israeli Air Force Unit 5101, also known as Shaldag, conducted a raid on an underground site last year in Masyaf, Syria, operated by Iranian proxies. The site was allegedly developing long-range missile technology capable of making precise strikes in Israel.
A similar raid on Fordow would allow the Israel Defense Forces to secure and then detonate the facility from inside without the need to penetrate the soil, rock, and concrete fortifications.
However, the Syrian facility was not as deeply embedded in the Earth as Fordow, and the Iranian military is better equipped than its Syrian counterpart. The mission would be extremely risky.
The Syria raid also required extensive work from the air force to cripple regional air defenses to allow the Shaldag operatives to assault the facility unhindered.
Other methods
Other methods have been proposed that seek to neutralize the facility without relying on inflicting massive damage at all.
Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton told the Washington Examiner that Israel could “close the entry shaft and air shafts” because “if you can’t breathe, you can’t enrich uranium.”
However, he warned that anything less than completely destroying Fordow would likely require “preventative maintenance every couple months.”
“If the Israelis would do it unilaterally by themselves, they could collapse the air shafts, the tunnels, effectively entombing the facility, and then you’d end up on a constant mission of suppression, if the Iranians tried to access the facility,” Alex Plitsas, an expert with the Atlantic Council, told the Washington Examiner.
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“So you can understand why, in that case, would be the least ideal option, and have to go back and constantly suppress any future activity, as opposed to just trying to take it out with a larger-scale attack,” he continued.
Trump announced on Thursday that he would make a decision about U.S. involvement in the Israel-Iran conflict within two weeks, hoping for a diplomatic path to peace.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Friday that his country is “not seeking negotiations with anyone, especially not with the United States,” until the Israeli assault ceases.
Mike Brest contributed to this report.