‘Have to Drop a Nuke’: Guardian’s Lowell Details His Bombshell Report On U.S. Limits In Destroying Key Iranian Site

Hugo Lowell, the White House correspondent for The Guardian, joined Steve Bannon’s WarRoom podcast on Thursday to discuss his latest reporting on a potential U.S. strike on Iran and why the Defense Department assessed that only a tactical nuclear weapon may be able to destroy Iran’s key nuclear site.

Iran’s Fordow nuclear enrichment facility is buried deep inside a mountain, and many military experts believe that a U.S. “bunker-buster” missile would be needed to destroy or disable the facility, a capability Israel does not appear to have. Speculation as to whether or not President Donald Trump will enter the ongoing conflict between Israel and Iran focuses largely on Trump’s desire to help Israel disable the facility.

Bannon began the conversation by asking Lowell, “Walk me through what this was based on. I guess a report, a bomb damage assessment, or some report, talk to us first, what is the Pentagon report? Who is this group? DTRA, that carries so much weight, and why did this story have such a big impact around Washington today?”

“So DTRA is the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. It is the component inside the Defense Department that actually tested and developed the bunker bombs, the bunker buster bombs, the GBU-57s,’ Lowell replied.

Bannon added, “They developed them.”

Lowell continued, “They helped develop them. They helped test them. And when the new admin came in at the start of the year, they kind of gave their assessment of how effective these bombs actually are.”

“And the way DTRA does this is they look at a bunch of underground facilities around the world and they say, okay, it’s at this depth and at this depth, then how far can our regular conventional ordnance penetrate?” he continued, adding:

And the assessment that was basically shown to a number of senior Pentagon officials this January was, it doesn’t get to the bottom of the Fordow facility, the critical enrichment, the uranium enrichment facility that the Iranian regime is using. And so it’s really important if you think about why Donald Trump, you know, wants to, is still considering striking Iran’s facilities, because if you cannot take out this critical facility, then what’s the point? And that’s sort of the discussions that have been going on inside the White House that I know you’re aware of.

Bannon followed up, “These are, this bomb weighs 30,000 pounds, dropped at 30,000 feet, but the actual TNT explosives of it is not like a mother of all bombs as far as the explosive capacity. It’s really the ability to pierce through steel, to pierce through granite, stone, whatever, to a certain depth, correct?”

“Yeah, I think that’s a fair assessment. It’s, you know, it’s hard in casing and at the tip, it can kind of go through concrete, and then once it– and then it’s explosion and its shock waves will reach to a certain depth. And that’s the idea,” Lowell explained.

Bannon added, “And this means that, and what did the assessment say of how many? Because the headline said, hey, you could drop four or five of these, but you may still need to bring in a tactical nuke. Was that the conclusion of the report?”

Lowell replied, “Well, okay, so I think this is where it gets nuanced, right, is what does success entail? Is it you’re gonna set the program back, what, one, two, three years, because you wanna bury it with a bunch of these bombs and you know, you collapse some tunnels, that’s one thing.”

“If you wanna totally eliminate the facility all the way down at 300 feet, which is, well, even deeper, which is how deep the facility goes, according to Israeli intelligence, then the assessment of DTRA is you would have to drop a nuke down there,” Lowell added.

“You’d have to drop a nuke to take it all the way down,” repeated Bannon, adding, “The Iranians, the Persians were smart they build it at this depth this was built for a reason correct to be able to avoid the West being able to come in and stop it with a bomb with bombing runs.”

“Yeah, look, in the 1980s, Israel had a bunch of strikes on an Iraqi enrichment facility. And the Iranians looked at that and said, well, it is obvious that if we are going to do our own enrichment program, it needs to be underground to protect from the threat of aerial attack. And so this is the predicament we find ourselves in now,” Lowell concluded.

Watch the full clip above.

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