Iran's foreign minister claimed Sunday that Tehran no longer enriches uranium at any site anywhere in the country, "because our facilities — our enrichment facilities — have been attacked."
Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi gave what Politico called "the most direct response yet from the Iranian government regarding its nuclear program." Or perhaps I should say, its current lack of a nuclear program.
Hence the "non-bombshell" in the headline... sorry, for the bad joke on a serious topic.
Yet there are still caveats.
Did the government quit enriching uranium because its enrichment facilities were either destroyed or rendered unusable/unreachable courtesy of Operation Midnight Hammer? Is Iran still enriching uranium in secret? Has Iran chosen to stop enriching uranium because the regime turned over a new leaf?
The first option strikes me as the most likely, although if the second option turned out to be correct, exactly nobody would be shocked. I only included the third option because I enjoy absurdities even more than I enjoy complete lists of options.
Now that we've covered the newsy stuff and the analytical stuff, let me take just a moment more of your time to share the nightmarish stakes involved.
Former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani — remember him? — as chairman of Iran's Expediency Discernment Council (whatever that is) in 2003 warned that "the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything."
"However," he continued, the inevitable Israeli nuclear retaliation "will only harm the Islamic world." He elaborated that Israel's small size made it vulnerable to "one or two" such strikes.
Two bombs, no Israel.
But was Rafsanjani correct?
Oh, hell yes.
I asked both ChatGPT and Grok to outline two genocidal scenarios. In the first, Iran possesses only simple first-generation fission weapons (Hiroshima-class) with 12–25 kiloton yields. In the second, Iran has managed to build modern two-stage thermonuclear weapons with much larger, 100–500 kiloton yields. In both scenarios, Iran's objective isn't merely to cause casualties and destruction, but to hinder international relief efforts and expatriation of surviving Israelis — without concern for Muslim casualties.
GPT explained that "All numbers are approximate and come from open-source demographic and yield-effect modeling," and neither engine used classified data. Both selected Tel Aviv as the primary target, and either Haifa (for two low-yield bombs) or Jerusalem (for two high-yield bombs) as the secondary.
The results were so similar that I won't bother differentiating between Grok and GPT's answers, but the short version is that even two Hiroshima-class bombs, properly targeted and delivered, would pretty much end Israel.
Here are the results:
"In both cases the 'two-bomb country' formulation holds," Grok concluded, "but the thermonuclear scenario turns Israel into a pre-modern wasteland even with geographically 'missed' areas,' while the crude fission scenario still achieves strategic paralysis through targeted destruction of the only two places that matter for ingress, egress, and national cohesion."
It seems unlikely that any surviving Jews would choose to stay.
As I said, this is real nightmare stuff — and the reason Netanyahu and Trump both chose a brief air war rather than live under it.
How effective that brief bombing campaign was, only Tehran knows for sure.
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