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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

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And inside those facilities there is a shitload of nasty stuff that could create what sjw call toxic working environment.

The activity of U-235 seems to be around 80MBq/kg. Not something to keep under your pillow, but also not something where any reasonably quantity will kill you within minutes.

Sure, for the centrifuges, you need UF6, but even that becomes solid below 56 degree centigrade.

To get to that you would also require hydrofluoric acid and fluorine, both of which are definitely nasty, but also things you can clean up even if you care about the environment or the life expectancy of your cleaners, which likely are not issues for Iran.

Hitting the enriched uranium would be hard in any case. The Iranians anticipated the possibility of an attack, so the obvious thing to do would be to dig a kilometer long tunnel, and have a few people whose job it is to carry the good stuff to a randomly selected point in the tunnel every half hour. Unless half of your guards work for Mossad (in which case you have a bigger problem), this should work well enough.

I think the main thing to hit would be the centrifuges. They are not very portable, require a ton of power and supervision and are nothing that the Iranians can easily mass-produce, so losing them would really hurt them.

Of course, we do not know if the attacks actually hit them.

In the long run, I expect the Iranians to win this one, because it is much easier for them to tunnel through another few 100m of bedrock than it will be for the US to bomb through that.

The alternative would be to settle for bombing the entrances of access tunnels whenever they pop up, but that would be a long-term commitment.