Middle East: the technology stopper

By Richard North - June 16, 2025

For a very long time, UK media publishers have known that foreign affairs don’t sell newspapers, or drive ratings in the broadcast media. In their preferences for news coverage, the British public – in common with many other national audiences throughout the world – is remarkably parochial.

Therefore, findings of the most recent YouGov poll on Iran – published the same day as the first Israeli strikes, but before they had been reported – come as no surprise.

Asking the question, “In the event of a full scale war between Israel and Iran, which side, if either, do you think the UK should back?”, a mere 5 percent supported Iran, but when it came to Israel, only 19 percent called for the backing of this embattled nation.

By far the largest cohort, running at 50 percent, expressed support for neither side, while 25 percent were indifferent or unknowing. On that basis, a full three-quarters of respondents are not invested in the affairs of the region.

To judge from my current Twitter timeline, that hasn’t changed very much. By far the greatest volume of posts relate to Starmer’s recent U-turn on Pakistani rape gangs, with his announcement that he will, after all, commission a national inquiry, despite having earlier dismissed calls as a “far-right bandwagon”.

That, of course, is an issue which is of concern to this blog and one on which I will report in due course. For the moment, though, I will stay with Iran as we enter the third night of the Israeli operation.

To do so reflects this blog’s genesis as a commentary on EU affairs, and also the special interests of my original co-author, Helen Szamuely, whose Hungarian antecedents conferred in her a wider world-view than your average Brit.

But there are two other issues which keep me focused on the events in what I hope some day we will again be calling Persia. The first is that I have always fostered a special interest in the technology of war and, in this conflict – like Ukraine – technology is very much to the fore.

The second issue again strikes back to our roots, where EUReferendum was set up primarily to address the shortcomings of the media in reporting EU affairs, and I subsequently also ran a parallel blog entitled Defence of the Realm to cover similar inadequacies in the defence field.

It is these two latter aspects which are keeping me engaged, especially in the context of much of the current media reporting which – as I remarked earlier – are treating the attacks as a sort of tit-for-tat battle, as if this was a war being fought on conventional grounds, losing sight of the Israelis’ primary objective.

The particular theme of interest is the complex operational and technical problems confronting the IDF in securing the destruction of Iran’s nuclear weapon production facilities, especially those in the Fordow and the Natanz facilities, buried as they are deep in reinforced bunkers.

There has been some recognition of the difficulty of the challenges presented, which have geopolitical implications; many commentators argue that Israel cannot complete the task without direct US assistance, which would mean that Trump would have to authorise the intervention of US forces in the war, transforming a regional conflict into one with global dimensions – more so than it is already.

Latest in the accumulating ranks of naysayers is the Financial Times – somewhat late to the fray – which ran a piece yesterday headed: “The nuclear mountain that haunts Israel”, telling us that “Buried half a kilometre underground, Iran’s Fordow enrichment facility is the ultimate test of Israeli air power”.

The depth is probably an exaggeration but nonetheless, the point is well made, that the destruction of this site is undoubtedly the ultimate test of Israeli air power, yet this paper – in common with previous analyses – calls in serried ranks of experts to argue that the task is beyond the Israeli capability.

As with the Associated Press, the paper also refers to the new-build facility at Natanz, “an even deeper and better protected facility”, driven into Kūh-e Kolang Gaz Lā, also known as Pickaxe mountain, a few kilometres south of the main Natanz facility.

While Fordow is thought to have two tunnel entrances, the FT says, Pickaxe has at least four, making it harder to seal off entrances by bombing. Its underground halls also have more floorspace.

Some, we are told, fear the facility, which Iran has so far barred the IAEA from inspecting, could even be used to assemble a nuclear weapon while Iran was under attack.
One of those harbouring such fears is Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a US think-tank, whom the paper cites as saying: “A key question is whether Iran will, or maybe already has, secreted fissile material into Pickaxe, or some other unknown facility”.

This poses yet another conundrum for the Israelis and one which, since the start of the operation poses the intriguing question as to why the superbly capable IAF seems to have taken on an objective which, according to the all the experts cited, is probably beyond its means to achieve.

The Wall Street Journal makes a particular point of this, suggesting that the lack of an Israeli capability, with the means apparently reserved to the US, gives president Trump leverage to broker a deal with Iran.

On the basis that if the Ayatollahs refuse to play ball, Trump could give Israel the military capability to destroy Fordow and Natanz, fulfilling the US strategic and moral interest in destroying Iran’s nuclear threat and ensuring a rapid Israeli victory.

None of the commentators, incidentally, have mentioned the more advanced “bunker buster” bomb, the GBU-72A, which is within the Israeli capability to deliver, and only a few have referred tangentially to the newly-developed “drilling strategy”, using multiple bombs to achieve a greater penetration than is possible with a single munition.

However, as attacks continued through the day yesterday, there was very little to suggest that the Israelis were any closer to reaching their objective, at least until later in the day when the Telegraph and others reported a claim by prime minister Netanyahu that his forces had “destroyed that main facility at Natanz”, referred to as “the main enrichment facility”.

Details, though, were sparse, and satellite photographs of the site unhelpful, as there was no indication as to whether the destruction was limited to surface buildings or whether the underground bunkers had been breached.

There was more definitive news of the site in Isfahan, where Iran converts raw uranium into uranium feed gases for enrichment. The IDF claimed a successful strike and the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed that the facility had sustained considerable damage.

Although there were unconfirmed reports that Fordow too had been attacked, no details were forthcoming through the day. Nevertheless, a break seemed to come with a report of a “massive blast”, producing a 2.5 magnitude earthquake in vicinity of the Fordow plant, coinciding with observations of a “massive explosion” seen from the Tehran-Qom road near the facility.

The inferences, however, were as obvious as they were wrong. Later reports identified the location of the explosion as the Qom Munitions Storage, some 10 miles west of the Fordow facility, which had been taken out by Israeli air strikes.

With the Fordow facility apparently remaining undamaged, that leaves what the WSJ calls the “Fordow Imperative” wide open, with no indication of whether or when the destruction of this site can bring the war to an end, or whether the technical and operational difficulties will be the means used to pressure Israel into stopping the war prematurely.

So much then for the tendency of historians to discount technology in determining the outcomes of conflicts, but here it seems, the key issue is the capability of a bomb, which may determine the course of the war.