Iran’s Fordow nuclear enrichment facility is a sprawling military complex dug deep within a mountain base, shielding it from nearly every country’s military but one: the United States. Should President Donald Trump decide to join Israel’s military campaign, an attack on Fordow could eradicate decades of nuclear know-how, crippling Tehran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon, according to former U.S. officials, military analysts, and regional experts.
Only the United States possesses the advanced bunker-buster bombs required to penetrate deep into Fordow’s mountain terrain, thereby wiping out a complex underground facility where Tehran is believed to store its most sensitive nuclear equipment. The heavily guarded site contains five above-ground entrances, according to recent satellite images. They lead into labyrinthine passageways that reach up to 300 feet below ground, fortifying the site against most conventional weapons in Israel’s arsenal.
To effectively pierce the bunker, the United States would need to deploy cutting-edge B-2 stealth bombers armed with Massive Ordnance Penetrators—a 30,000 pound precision-guided bomb designed specifically to obliterate deeply buried targets. Such a strike, experts say, would be relatively easy for the American armed forces now that Israel has demolished Iran’s air defenses and taken control of its airspace.
“Assuming the Israelis are correct and Iran’s air defenses have been rendered inoperable, and the intelligence on the facilities is well established, this mission shouldn’t be overly difficult or risky,” Bill Roggio, a veteran military strategist who edits the Long War Journal, a publication tracking conflicts in the Middle East, told the Washington Free Beacon. “The U.S. will likely send in supporting aircraft to provide anti-aircraft missile defense suppression just in case.”
The United States would likely need multiple strikes to completely destroy Fordow, or at least damage the site so thoroughly that the facility is no longer operable, Roggio said. In any case, the United States’ chief objective should be full elimination “to ensure the Iranians cannot repair it.”
A U.S.-led air campaign could set Tehran’s nuclear program back by a decade or even more, according to Roggio and other experts who spoke to the Free Beacon on Tuesday after President Donald Trump signaled he is open to joining Israel’s fight. It took Iran more than seven years to build Fordow, but just a handful of targeted strikes with bunker-buster bombs would erase that work.
In a second, less destructive scenario, American forces could concentrate fire on Fordow’s entrances, effectively entombing the site and those hiding within.
Any effort to bring these facilities back online would pose a monumental challenge for Tehran, particularly since Israel assassinated a cadre of high-level Iranian nuclear scientists who shared decades of expertise.
“The whole knowledge question is the key issue, so Israel has addressed this by assassinating nuclear scientists, and that’s important,” American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Michael Rubin said.
Rubin told the Free Beacon he also favors an air campaign that aims to obliterate Fordow, saying that Iran could enlist any number of international partners—including Russia or China‚ if the strike leaves any portions intact.
“You don’t want to keep kicking the can down the road,” he said. “There’s an assumption that it remains an indigenous Iranian program. But if the Pakistanis, if the Russians, if the Chinese, if the Turks decide that they want to help Iran reconstitute this quicker, they can. It’s important to eliminate all vestiges of the program so that there’s no baseline from which to rebuild it.”
Should Iran’s nuclear infrastructure collapse, the country’s hardline regime may not be far behind. The United States has an opportunity to recruit Iran’s remaining nuclear scientists—just as it and other Western powers did with Nazi Germany when it lost World War II.
“We can entice nuclear scientists out, bring them out, so that we can interrogate them, so that we can control them,” Rubin said. “They should have a choice: Either they show up at the closest American embassy, or they realize that the next drone could be coming for them.”
While American military support would vastly quicken Israel’s campaign to annihilate Tehran’s nuclear program, the Jewish state “wouldn’t have started this fight if it couldn’t win it by themselves,” according to former State Department Iran adviser Gabriel Noronha. “Almost just as important as destroying the [uranium] stockpile is the facility—it would take Iran years to rebuild something as fortified and strategic as Fordow.”
The United States or Israel would need to dispatch teams the ground in Iran to collect and dispose of any uranium scattered during an attack, Noronha said.
Without American military support, Israel still has options to target Fordow and other key nuclear sites like the Isfahan nuclear plant. But all of these plans come with sizable risk, according to Andrea Stricker, a nonproliferation expert with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Israel has the option to orchestrate “successive bombing runs” on Fordow, dropping lighter bunker-busting bombs that could leave the facility mostly intact but operationally hamstrung. Other options could include “covert sabotage actions like explosions from within, cyber-attacks, and disabling the facility’s support functions, such as electrical power,” Stricker said.
A riskier—but potentially feasible—scenario includes Israeli commando units venturing underground at Fordow to destroy it from within.
American support, however, could be on the horizon.
“We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran,” Trump wrote Tuesday afternoon on Truth Social, just ahead of a Situation Room meeting with his National Security Council. “Iran had good sky trackers and other defensive equipment, and plenty of it, but it doesn’t compare to American made, conceived, and manufactured ‘stuff.’ Nobody does it better than the good ol’ USA.”
