Uranium
UraniumUS government

The plot of the 1964 James Bond movie Goldfinger explains a lot of the current Iran-US nuclear stalemate, and could provide President Trump with a definitive unilateral discrete non-negotiated solution. In Goldfinger, Auric Goldfinger’s “Operation Grand Slam" was to reap a huge value windfall from Goldfinger’s vast holdings of gold by igniting a “dirty" nuclear bomb inside Fort Knox, “salted" with cobalt and iodine so as create a high radioactively/low explosive yield making Fort Knox’s gold unuseable for 57 years.

By analogy, Trump dropping a cobalt-salted nuke on Fordow, with a relatively small conventional-range “explosion," will only be making a likely already very radioactive site an unrecoverable radioactive site.

Why does James Bond’s Goldfinger explain where we are today? The reason is that unlike destroying an actual bomb or something structurally built, Fordow’s enriched gaseous uranium in hundreds of centrifuges simply contained the natural element uranium that can’t be “destroyed." Using Fort Knox and gold as an analogy, you could hit Fort Knox with 50 bunker busters, and you would never “destroy" Fort Knox’s gold. Instead, all you would have done was create a very small but incredibly rich gold mine where you’d simply quickly dig up the resulting “gold dust" and “refine" it.

Similarly, you can bomb Fordow all you want, and blow up every centrifuge, and you will not have “destroyed" the centrifuges’ enriched uranium. “Successfully" bombing Fordow or whatever building housed the centrifuges only blew up the centrifuges and released the gaseous enriched uranium which then solidified into the mix of dirt from the resulting explosion. Hence, just like blowing up Fort Knox, you’ve created an uranium mine of highly enriched uranium.

Hence, all the talk about “Uranium Dust." There is a question of whether the currently resulting highly-enriched “Uranium Dust" could be easily or safely dug out given the state of its radioactivity. But assuming the uranium resulting wreckage can be relatively easily extracted, that will only marginally slow Iran’s path to a bomb.

However, if one applies the thesis of Goldfinger’s Operation Grand Slam to Fordow, President Trump could drop a very low explosive/high irradiation cobalt-salted nuclear bomb on Fordow that will ensure the enriched uranium will be unusable for another 60 years. The site already may be relatively unusable. This will ensure it will be.