Iran, Bunker Busters and Empire First
When it comes to the dangerous misgovernance of our tottering American Republic, there is no more deadly combination imaginable than–
- The sweeping unchecked powers of the imperial presidency.
- A $1 trillion per year war machine which is organized mainly for conduct of wars of invasion and occupation and the propagation of Empire and which stands at the unilateral beck and call of the POTUS.
- An Oval Office occupied by a blustering Caesarean bully sporting an undersized brain enveloped in a gargantuan ego.
That gets us to the stupidest thing that Washington has done since LBJ’s idiotic escalation of the war on Vietnam. We are referring, of course, to Donald Trump’s impending military attack on Iran when there is not a scintilla of justification for it based on the homeland security of America.
As we amplified in part 1, the mullahs do not have a single warship, bomber or missile that can inflict damage on a single American citizen domiciled anywhere from sea-to-shinning-sea. Yet countering an imminent military threat is the only possible excuse for a peaceful, constitutional republic to initiate war beyond its borders.
In this context, we make reference to the Vietnam War for good reason. It was an utterly unjustified, pointless, mindless and infinitely iniquitous exercise of military destruction. It resulted in the waste of $1.6 trillion in US treasure (2025 $), 58,000 dead and 305,000 wounded US soldiers and the death of 2-3 million Vietnamese under a vicious outpouring of made in America bombs, napalm and bullets. And all in the name of the groundless “domino theory”.
But just think about the barking idiocy of the domino theory. As it happened, the latter was repeated over and over in LBJ’s speeches, Congressional actions in behalf of sending more money and more bodies to the US war machine in Southeast Asia and in the bogus screeds and editorial canards of the compliant Washington press.
As the War Party had it, Red China was an existential threat to America’s liberty and prosperity, and if Vietnam were to fall into its grip the untoward implications for America’s future would have been all the more grim. And that’s to say nothing of the fact that both red dominoes were held to be under the sway of demonic plans from Moscow to ultimately enslave the entirety of the human race itself.
Alas, 60-years later no bigger joke can be found in the entire history of the world. The Soviet Union collapsed under the destructive weight of its own centralized, lugubrious and economically suffocating communist state; China went the red capitalist route under Mr. Deng and his heirs and assigns; and Vietnam escaped from the napalm-fumigation of its jungles into the booming prosperity of its present role as the supplier of choice to Walmart and Amazon, which between them sold $1.5 trillion worth of goods in 2025.
As it happened, in fact, upwards of $576 billion or nearly 18% of America’s $3.3 trillion of imported goods in 2024 came from the two erstwhile red dominoes of China and Vietnam. So rather than ushering in America’s demise, the red dominoes that survived the Washington war machine have actually become the 24/7 helpmate of every household—-men, women, children and the lame, halt and blind, too—accross the length and breadth of the nation.
With respect to this sweeping helpmate reality, the table below tells you all you need to know. The fact is, 85% or more of the cell phones, laptops, video games and toys imported to the USA come from China and Vietnam. Likewise, 80% of footwear, 77% of baby carriages/strollers, 75% of luggage, 60% of furniture and 56% of apparel imports also are shipped from these two once and former red dominoes. In all, from nearly $1 trillion of total imports in the top 25 commodities shown below for 2024, fully $662 billion or 73% were sourced in China and Vietnam.
Yet with neither knowledge nor imagination with respect to what was actually to transpire, to paraphrase Tacitus, Washington attempted to turn a jungle into a burned out desert and call it peace.
Even more to the point:Is not the case for war against Iran even more threadbare?
By what twisted, demented form of logic do the neocons and Sunday afternoon warriors on the Potomac imply that save for the fires of war the mullahs will be ruling America 60 years from now? Or even be anything but a bad historical footnote in the history books of Iran itself?
In short, just one look at the table below should provide a sobering roadblock in the way of the Donald’s current mad rush to war against Iran: If the denizens of the Washington War Party can be so stupid as is screamingly evident with respect to their insane military misadventure in Southeast Asia, why should anyone believe them now?
That is, we are talking about to an even smaller spec of no count territory on the farther side of the planet that accounts for just 0.36% of global GDP, hardly 1% of the human population and which is ruled by addle-brained clerical fanatics who will surely wear out their welcome with the long-suffering Iranian people in due course, just as did the Stalinist cretins of Moscow.
2024 US Imports of Goods From China/Vietnam As % of Total Imports In 25 Everyday Categories ($ in billions)
Indeed, the irony is palpable. On the very day that the Supreme Court has ruled that the Donald can’t unilaterally tax into oblivion the cheap goods flowing from these fallen red dominoes, he is breathing heavily and loudly in anticipation of launching hell from the skies against yet another nation that has no capacity to harm the peace, security and liberty of the American homeland.
But, no, we do not think he’ll do the TACO shtick this time and stand down again. That’s because he is listening to his two blood-boys, Jared Kushner and Marco Rubio, who give the idea of out-sourcing your foreign policy to a foreign capital a wholly new definition. They are both mesmerized by Bibi Netanyahu’s warped view of the middle eastern world and therefore cannot even recognize the screaming fact that Iran poses no military threat to the American Homeland in any way, shape or form.
The fact is, Bibi Netanyahu has made a four-decade political career out of falsely demonizing the medieval clerics who rule Iran and repeatedly lying in front of the US Congress, the UN and every other forum he can muster that Iran is months away from a nuke and is therefore an existential threat to Israel’s very existence.
Except it was a bald-faced, ALL CAPs, insidious lie.
Thus, the most recent publicly available U.S. intelligence judgment on Iran’s nuclear weapons program, as of late 2024 from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), reported as follows:
“The Intelligence Community continues to assess that as of 26 September 2024, Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.”
This aligns with consistent prior phrasing in annual assessments and congressional testimonies, such as DNI Tulsi Gabbard’s March 2025 statement on the Annual Threat Assessment:
“The IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.”
This classic “no active program” judgment, in turn, originated in the declassified 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which concluded with high confidence:
“….in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program”.
Moreover, with moderate-to-high confidence the IC continued to assess that the halt has persisted. Assessments through the 2010s and early 2020s generally held that no restart had occurred. So the truth couldn’t be starker. The Iranians have no nukes, are seeking no nukes and the mullahs have forbid the pursuit of such nukes—even as they have decreed that the nation’s defensive missiles shall have a range of no more than 2,000 kilometers, thereby stating in flashing technicolor that they intend no harm to any citizen of the United States.
Yet and yet. The three clowns pictured are fixing to start an another utterly pointless war that no one can apparently stop because our badly discombobulated constitutional order has enabled a headstrong mad man to exercise unfettered powers that only kings, emperors and totalitarian dictators previously possessed.
Yet here we are. We have observed on multiple occasions that Donald J. Trump is an unhinged, egomaniacal Caesarist who knows no limits to his pursuit of power, glory and pelf, too. The fact that he is fixing once again to bring military death and destruction raining down upon the Iranian people is surely evidence of the truth of that characterization.
To repeat, Iran poses no military threat whatsoever to the USA as we amplified in chapter and verse in Part 1. Yet the Donald even now will soon be instructing world oil producers in Clint Eastwood fashion to “not even think about” failing to pump whatever it takes to compensate for the drastic shortfall of supply that is sure to result from his impending blunderbuss attack on the second largest Persian Gulf producer.
For want of being misunderstood, last time he unleashed the bombers the Donald even issued this warning in ALL CAPS. And that’s was surely because even he knows the Trump-O-Nomics economic con job just plain can’t stand oil above $70 per barrel!
“EVERYONE, KEEP OIL PRICES DOWN. I’M WATCHING! YOU’RE PLAYING RIGHT INTO THE HANDS OF THE ENEMY. DON’T DO IT!”
Well, Holy Moly, who made Donald Trump or any other president of the USA the petroleum czar of the planet? And besides, when you look at the slate of global oil producers virtually all the spare production capacity is chock-a-bloc inside the two-mile wide shipping lanes of the Strait of Hormuz.
So again, is this madman really so foolish as to initiate kinetic actions which would virtually guarantee that the two-mile wide channel depicted below becomes a foaming inferno of sunken iron and flaming hydrocarbons? As of this moment, it surely appears to be the case.
Indeed, it might well be wondered who this ALL CAPS bellicosity was directed at. At the present time, 25 million barrels per day of petroleum (crude plus natural gas liquids) is produced at locations inside the narrow neck of the Strait of Hormuz. That’s one-quarter of the global supply.
If Iranian production of 4.8 million barrels per day were to be eliminated or substantially impaired or if tanker traffic through Hormuz were to slow sharply due to soaring insurance rates or cautionary behavior of tanker operators, then who might the Donald be planning to threaten if they don’t open the taps on any idle capacity?
According to Goldman Sachs, even a 1.75 mb/d cutback of Iranian supply alone, which would amount to just 35% of its current production, would raise the world oil price to $90 per barrel. Were larger outages to occur in Iran or due to blockage of the Strait of Hormuz, it would be Katie-bar-the-door time with a return to triple digit ($100 +) world oil prices.
Moreover, if the Saudis or the UAE—the two Gulf producers with material spare capacity—were to decide out of an abundance of caution to take the price windfall and hold production constant, exactly how would the Donald make good on the above ALL CAPS threat? Bomb them, too?
Moreover, outside the Hormuz choke point the five largest non-US producers are Russia, China, Canada, Mexico and Nigeria, which between them account for 25.2 mb/d or actually slightly more than the Persian Gulf producers. But given all the barking that the Donald has already done at these five during the past 12 months, including bombing Nigeria for not playing nice with its Christian minority, we wonder if they would answer the demand to open the taps wider. Or failing that, whether the Donald would be up for sending the B-2s in their direction as well.
Of course, there is always “drill, baby drill” in the USA. Yet at nearly 22 million barrels per day—including 13.5 mb/d of crude oil and shale plus another 8 mb/d of natural gas liquids, lease condensates and refinery gains—US production of petroleum liquids is already at the tippy-top of the historic charts and at near-term industry capacity. For example, during the last showdown with Iran in 2015, when the JCPOA was negotiated, USA liquid petroleum production was one-third lower at 14.3 mb/d.
In short, the above ALL CAPS post is just one more reminder that the Donald is sliding by the seat of his ample britches as he huffs and puffs his way right into another self-inflicted Persian Gulf oil crisis. That’s because any prolongation of the War on Iran jointly initiated by the world’s two great megalomaniacs—Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu—has very serious potential to spill-over into an interruption of the 25.0 mb/d of petroleum that flows through the Strait of Hormuz.
The latter could readily happen, of course, whether owing to soaring insurance rates, tanker diversions or a break-out of actual kinetic conflict if tit-for-tat exchanges should go astray. Given the very high short-run inelasticity of petroleum demand, any serious supply disruption–even 10% of the throughput at Hormuz—would generate $100+ per barrel oil prices in a heartbeat.
And then, of course, the madman who makes no never mind about the Constitution’s delegation of the war powers to the Congress, would respond with an all out war on Iran. And do so for every reason of egomaniacal satisfaction and no reason of homeland security whatsoever.
Current Global Petroleum Production
That’s right. Washington’s utterly unnecessary attacks now threatens hundreds of billions—even trillions—of economic harm to global oil importers, but it is implicit in the Donald’s current dangerous actions that it would be their job to clear up the mess!
This is so absurd as to put us in mind of the 12-year who killed both of his parents, and then threw himself upon the mercy of the court on the grounds that he was an orphan!
As we insisted in Part 1, there is absolutely zero reason for attacking Iran—even owing to the nuclear issue. That’s because with or without uranium enrichment–or even HEU (highly enriched uranium) for a bomb—Iran is no threat whatsoever to the Homeland Security of America.
Indeed, in the very worst imaginable case—where Tehran manages to fabricate a primitive nuclear bomb or two—they have nothing remotely capable of delivering it to the US homeland: To remind, Iran’s longest range missile has an arc of 2,000 kilometers at maximum, but the nearest US shore is 10,000 kilometers from Tehran.
To be sure, the world–including the Iranian people themselves—would be far better off if Iran or any other current nonnuclear country never got the bomb. The irony, however, is that Iran does not want the bomb, but it is being driven in that direction by the relentless pressures, demonizations and attacks from the War Capital of the World on the banks of the Potomac and its accomplices in Israel.
For want of doubt, just consider that by all present accounts, very little if any of the 409 kilograms of 60% enriched uranium that Iran was alleged to posses was destroyed by Trump’s June bombing. And it’s also likely that most of Iran’s modern high yield IR-6 centrifuges were not destroyed deep in their mountain bunkers at Fordow, as well.
As to the near bomb-grade material, arms control expert Jeffrey Lewis showed that the 400+ Kg of 60% material had been moved to underground tunnels near the Isfahan Uranium Conversion Facility. Despite extensive Israeli and US attacks the facility, there does not seem to have been any effort to destroy these tunnels or the material that was in them.
In any event, as a NPT (nonproliferation treaty) signatory and operator of a 3,000 megawatt civilian nuclear reactor at Bushehr, Iran was allowed to have the 7,582 kilograms of civilian reactor grade enriched uranium that the IAEA last certified, as well as the 1,257 kilograms of medical grade uranium (20%).
What was really up for debate was just the 409 kilograms of 60% enriched material in its possession that could be spun to 90% weapons grade in a relatively short time. But for crying out loud, it is goddamn obvious to anyone not looking for an excuse for war that Iran had produced this material as of last June as a bargaining chip. That is, in order to get a new nuke deal with Washington to replace the one the Donald himself unilaterally cancelled in 2018, and thereby pave the way for lifting the brutal and demented economic sanctions that Washington has again imposed on Iran.
Iran’s Enriched Uranium Stockpiles As Of May 2025
The proof of the bargaining chip pudding could not be more evident in the graph below. During the 10-year run-up to the 2015 nuke deal with the Obama Administration, the Iranians increased their enriched uranium stock piles to just slightly below the current level, to about 9,000 kilograms. But in an almost mirror image of the present, only about 350 kilograms of that material was enriched to the 60% purity level or the threshold of weapons grade HEUs.
That is to say, it was generated as a bargaining chip, and that was exactly its fate. Upon activation of the JCPOA in 2015, all of the 60% material was destroyed as certified by the IAEA.
At the same time, the total stockpile of civilian grade material was also reduced by 97% to de minimis working levels, as further certified by the IAEA. Indeed, Iran ended up retaining only 300 kilograms of its 9,000 kilogram stockpile—an amount that could have been readily stored in the Donald’s wine cellar at Mar-a-Lago.
As it happened, of course, the Donald recklessly canceled the deal in May 2018 on the grounds that it had to be a bad deal by definition because he didn’t negotiate it!
Of course, that foolish move only caused the Iranians to restart the stockpiling process yet again, as is so explicitly depicted by the green line in the graph below.
The irony, therefore, is that after the Donald’s feckless bombing campaign the Iranians likely have close to 100% of the 9,248 kilograms (including the 409 Kg of 60% material) held before June still in tact. That’s based on pretty convincing satellite photos showing that all of the Donald’s amateur “art of the deal” head fakery last June about “two weeks to decide” before the actual the bombing runs enabled the Iranians to drive trucks up to the Nantanz and Fordow facilities and remove the stockpiles to safe sites elsewhere.
Stated differently, Obama negotiated the Iran enriched stockpile to down by about 97%, while the Donald bombed roughly the same level of stockpile from 9,000+ kilograms to, well @ 9,000 kilograms!
That same is likely true for the halls of centrifuges at Nantanz and Fordow. Under the 2015 deal, Iran had agreed to reduce the number of centrifuges by 70% from 20,000 to 6,000 and actually did so after the deal took effect. Moreover, it effective enrichment capacity had been reduced by significantly more because the remaining Natanz centrifuges consisted exclusively of its most rudimentary, outdated equipment—that is, slow, low-yield first-generation IR-1 knockoffs of 1970s European models.
Not only was Iran not allowed to build or develop newer higher yield centrifuge models, but even the old slow-pokes remaining were permitted to enrich uranium to a limit of only 3.75% purity. That is to say, to the generation of fissile material for power plants that is not remotely capable of reaching bomb grade concentrations of 90%.
Equally importantly, the agreement eliminated enrichment activity entirely at Fordow. The latter was Iran’s only truly advanced, hardened site that could withstand an onslaught of Israeli bombs or US bunker busters, and it was agreed that zero enrichment activity would take place there, subject to full IAEA inspection.
Instead, Fordow became a small time underground science lab devoted to medical isotope research and was crawling with international inspectors. In effectively decommissioning Fordow and thereby eliminating any capacity to cheat—what Iran got in return was at best a fig leave of salve for its national pride.
That is, again, until Donald Trump ixnayed the deal that the Obama team had so painstakingly negotiated. Subsequently, of course, the Iranians restarted enrichment activities at Fordow, and instead of zero slow-poke IR-1 centrifuges, it installed a phalanx of high speed IR-60 models.
And yet, and yet. The dust still has still not settled on the receipts from June’s bomb-a-thon, but there is every indication that it did not achieve the 70% reduction in centrifuge machines obtained peacefully in the 2015 deal.
Nor is the tiresome neocon-Israeli claim that the JCPOA was fatally defective persuasive in the slightest. That’s just Warfare State propaganda, repeated over and over by the subservient corporate press.
For instance, take the case of the heavy water reactor at Arak. For years, the War Party had falsely argued: because “plutonium”.
That is, the civilian nuclear reactor being built there was of Canadian “heavy water” design rather than GE or Westinghouse “light water” model. Accordingly, when finished it would have generated plutonium as a waste product rather than conventional spent nuclear fuel rods.
In truth, the Iranians couldn’t have bombed a beehive with the Arak plutonium because you need a reprocessing plant to convert it into bomb grade material. Needless to say, Iran had no such plant, no plan to build one, and no prospect for getting the requisite technology and equipment.
But even that bogeyman was dispatched by the Obama nuke deal that the Donald saw fit to shitcan the first time around. The 2015 deal required Iran to destroy or export the heavy water reactor core of its existing plant and replace it with a core that cannot produce material which can be reprocessed into weapons grade plutonium. All of these requirements were subject to rigorous international inspection and, in fact, were actually complied with before Trump cancelled the deal.
Of course, Iran’s reward for compliance was that Israel bombed the Arak facility during last June’s raids, apparently to destroy a plutonium source that had already been dismantled.
Perhaps that was just to make sure…..that Iran would never want to negotiate with Washington again.
Beyond that, Iran had also agreed to and had complied with a robust program of inspections to prevent smuggling of materials into the country to illicit sites outside of the framework facilities. That encompassed imports of nuclear fuel cycle equipment and materials, including so-called “dual use” items which are essentially civilian imports that could be repurposed to nuclear uses, even peaceful domestic power generation.
In short, even a Houdini could not have secretly broken-out of the box contained in the 2015 agreement and then confronted the world with some kind of fait accompli threat to use the bomb.
To do so would have required diversion of thousands of tons of domestically produced or imported uranium and the illicit milling and upgrading of such material at secret fuel preparation plants. It would also have involved the secret construction of new, hidden enrichment operations of such massive scale that they could house more than 10,000 new centrifuges. It would have also required the building of these massive spinning arrays from tens of thousands of components smuggled into the country and transported to remote hidden enrichment operations—all undetected by the massive complex of spy satellites overhead and covert US and Israeli intelligence agency operatives on the ground in Iran.
Finally, it would have required the activation from scratch of a weaponization program which has been dormant according to the US National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) for more than a decade. And then, that the Iranian regime—–after cobbling together one or two bombs without testing them or their launch vehicles—would nevertheless have been willing to threaten to use them sight unseen.
So what we had in the JCPOA was an end to any prospect that the Iranians would abandon the Ayatollah’s own fatwa against nuclear weaponization. There was also zero 60% enriched material left; stockpiles of permitted enriched uranium were reduced to de minimis working levels; and an airtight international inspection regime was in place. They only thing left was a residual enrichment capacity to supply the Bushehr nuclear power plant with enriched uranium from an Iran-based source.
And, indeed, after several decades of drastic economic sanctions and periodic military attacks by both Israel and Washington, why would the Iranians not insist on having their own enrichment capacity, as is guaranteed to signatories by the NPT in any event? Otherwise, Bushehr could have been shutdown at whim by a Washington fatwa against enriched uranium exports to Iran.
What the Donald has single-handed accomplished in his two turns at bat, therefore, is to replace that workable JCPOA arrangement with an Iranian government that now more than ever will endeavor to have a nuclear bomb insurance policy.
That is, Iran still has plenty of enriched uranium and probably a goodly hall full of centrifuges. It also has a supreme leader in the Ayatollah, who may be thanking his lucky stars that he did not receive the 2025 Muammar Gaddafi reward for trying to cooperate with Washington in yet another round of negotiations after the JCPOA double-cross. And even then only after the Gaddafi treatment was actually bestowed upon his chief negotiator and top generals by the Donald’s confederates in Israel last spring.
And this complete madness gets us to the real issue underlying the Donald’s current unhinged race to war. To wit, the USA should not even posses military capacities and offensive weapons like the bunker busters used last June by the dangerous cowboy currently domiciled in the Oval Office.
What we have going is now an extreme version of “kill them from the sky warfare” that Sunday afternoon warriors have been advocating ever since the infantry butchery of Vietnam. Indeed, from JD Vance on down the talking point is no boots on the ground—-we will just keep pursuing “peace through strength” via raining lethal ordnance from the sky via bunker busters when necessary or waves of Tomahawk cruise missiles, from safe launch hideaways below the surface.
The issue of whether this kind of bloodless warfare (on our side) can actually succeed militarily is an open question and a debate for another time.
But here’s the thing. We don’t need bunker busters to effect an invincible triad strategic deterrent because the proven logic and efficacy of MAD (mutually assured destruction) is that the certainty of a devastating anti-city retaliation stops an attack before it happens. Taking out the other side’s ICBM’s with bunker busters, in fact, would destabilize the equation and endanger the deterrence and peace because by design they would function as counter-force weapons in the strategic nuclear arena.
As for an ironclad fortress defense of the American homeland from conventional military attack, bunker busters are useless. What you need, instead, is fusillades of drones, cruise missiles, fighter jets and attack submarines stationed in the American Homeland to protect the shorelines and airspace from conventional military invasion.
That is to say, the War Capital of the World bivouacked on the Potomac has outfitted the Oval Office with a War Machine that is mainly designed for the pursuit of Empire, not the maintenance of Homeland Security. And now the American people have mistakenly elected a brash, ill-informed Caesarist, whose unquenchable ego is bound and determined to use them.
https://davidstockman.substack.com/p/iran-bunker-busters-and-empire-first