Jeffrey Lewis

Why am I so unimpressed by these strikes? Israel and the US have failed to target significant elements of Iran's nuclear materials and production infrastructure. RISING LION and MIDNIGHT HAMMER are tactically brilliant, but may turn out to be strategic failures. 🧵 1/17

Think of treaties as like vaccines -- more effective than quack cures but deeply unpopular among the stupidest people on earth.

Starting to think the play here is to destabilize the regime more than cripple the nuclear program. It’s quite a bet by the Israelis.

This is a great idea.

We need to go through the images carefully, but Kim Jong Un seems to have visited the new uranium enrichment facility identified by the @iaeaorg.bsky.social last year and located by @slair.bsky.social and yours truly at: 39.786° N, 125.759° E.

It’s such a strange payload — the spread is too large and the fragments too few/big to do much damage unless you are very, very unlucky. Makes somewhat more sense as a nuclear delivery method.

For everyone who thinks the recent explosion near Beit Shemesh in Israel is "too big" to be a static test of a solid rocket motor ... rockets require tons of thrust (literally) to reach space. Watch a US test, for example.

This appears to be a static test of a solid-rocket motor. Same thing happened in 2021; same reaction from people.

An interesting wrinkle to @mgerrydoyle.bsky.socials story is that Dark Eagle can also range Moscow from Israel, Jordan and the Gulf. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

All of this.

Obviously someone ran out of cocktails and Claude tokens. 😬

Iran did not have a stockpile of highly enriched uranium until after Trump withdrew from the JCPOA because Iran was prohibited from doing so and under monitoring, Trump is the arsonist taking credit for putting out the fire he started.