What do tunnel entrances reveal about a major Iranian nuclear site?

What you see here are buried tunnel entrances to a nuclear facility in Iran. It is one of the most important sites in the country for the American and Israeli armies. UN inspectors believe about half of Iran’s highly enriched uranium is buried here. And these three entrances are the only known ways to reach it. If you think about nuclear sites in Iran, three main sites come to mind. They are very famous: Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan. Natanz and Ford, where they were hit extensively by US strikes last year. So I’m focusing on Isfahan. Uranium is still relatively accessible here. It is really a huge campus. This area here was very important for uranium processing, but last June it was attacked heavily by America and Israel. If you go a little further north, it’s underground and requires tunnels to get into it. In the terrain view, it becomes quite interesting. There are three roads that lead to these tunnel entrances, and these tunnel entrances have become very important, not just in the last year, but even now. They lead to an underground facility where UN inspectors say uranium is stored and a new enrichment site may be located. If it falls into the wrong hands it will cause problems in the long run. Here’s a great example of how recent satellite imagery gives us new insights. It’s the end of January this year, and what you see here is a line of trucks. And they’re filled with mud, and they’re lining up to go into some of these tunnel entrances. If you look a little closer here, you’ll see another one of these trucks that is unloading some soil and some earthmoving equipment. Iran is preparing for any possible attack at that time. They try to keep the facility a little more secure. So this is January 29th. And if you look a few days later, we go to February 2nd. This is the entrance to a completely buried tunnel, which is completely covered with soil to protect it from any attack. And it still looks that way in mid-March. Here the US and Israel basically have two options: The first is to heavily bomb the entrances to this underground complex which will block any access at least for the near future. He has not done this yet. So it’s very, very interesting – a little surprising. And it could point to another option: That would be to go in with ground forces and extract the uranium. But this would require really large numbers of troops to secure the vast area, bring earthmoving equipment to clear the tunnels, and take a lot of time into enemy territory.