IRANIAN NUCLEAR PROGRAM

 So let’s break this down. Did those six massive US bunker-busting bombs, the GBU-57s, all hit their targets in the mountain at Fordo? Yes.

Were they the culmination of years of painstaking study by the Pentagon on how best to attack Iran's deeply buried uranium enrichment programme? Yes. Did they choose the best line of attack - the ventilation shafts - then detonate at the right depth to achieve maximum effect? Yes.

But that's not the whole story.

We simply don't know, beyond conjecture, what state those centrifuges are in, down there in that subterranean hall, because neither US nor UN inspectors have been down there. Crucially, we don't know where the missing 408kg of highly enriched uranium (HEU) has gone to.

And we don't know - because this was a Pentagon briefing, not an intelligence assessment - how much of a nuclear knowledge base Iran retains that could soon, potentially be applied to restarting its programme in secret.

So in short, from a purely tactical point of view, the B2 pilots who flew that extraordinary 37 hour mission to drop those 13-tonne bunker-busting bombs fulfilled their mission to the letter.

But when it comes to the question of whether Iran's suspected nuclear programme has actually been destroyed (as the US claims), or merely set back, the jury is still very much still out.

From the BBC