On Friday June 13, White House envoy Steve Witkoff was meeting with Iran’s foreign minister in Rome in the hope of persuading the Iranians to abandon their program to build a nuclear bomb.
The Iranians had made it clear over and over again that they would never end uranium enrichment, the key to nuclear bomb making. The Iranians also claimed that they had no intention of creating a nuclear weapon.
But according to the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency, the Iranians had enriched 9.2 tons of uranium to 60% purity, something that’s useless for any civilian program but is enough to make nine nuclear bombs.
So a few hours after Witkoff’s meeting, Israel pulled off a surprise attack with 200 fighter jets targeting 100 missile bases, military command centers, and nuclear sites.
The result was the Iran-Israel war, a war that’s only six days old, but is unlike any other conflict this earth has ever seen.
- First off, the Iran-Israel War is the first war ever to break out over a nation’s nuclear capabilities.
- Second, it’s a war of rockets, drones, fighter jets, cyber-attacks, and a multi-layered anti-missile defense system, something we haven’t even seen in the Ukraine. So far, Israel has used 250 fighter jets to carry out 500 bombing sorties. And Iran has responded by firing over 400 rockets at Israel, including the first highly maneuverable hypersonic missiles ever seen in the middle east.
- Third, this is a war in which one side is trying to kill as many civilians as possible and the other side is targeting key military and nuclear experts with an astonishing precision and is trying not to hit civilians. The side trying to inflict the maximum number of civilian deaths is Iran. The side inflicting death on war commanders and nuclear bomb makers is Israel, which warns civilian neighborhoods to evacuate before it bombs military centers disguised as banquet halls, recreation centers, and a sports complex.
But beware. This war is not what the media has been leading you to think.
First off, it is a war of an ant against an elephant. Most of us are likely to think that Israel is the elephant and that Iran is the poor little ant. But the truth is the opposite. Iran has 75 times the territory of Israel. Yes, it would take 75 Israels to make up the territory of one Iran. What’s more, Iran has nine times the population of Israel.
On top of that Iran has oil wealth. Israel does not. Though Israel is developing natural gas fields off its coasts.
Israel’s goals are simple: to eliminate Iran’s nuclear capabilities and to weaken the leadership of the Ayatollahs, the leadership of the religious fanatics who stole the revolution of 1979 from secular Iranians.
To people like you and me, it looks as if Israel is winning. It has crippled Iran’s air force, has eradicated Iran’s anti-aircraft systems, and now has total control of Iran’s skies. Every day of this war, Israel takes down more of the leaders that Iran’s Ayatollah relies on to run the country, to keep the people in line, and to “destroy” Israel.
But Iranians see this very differently than we do. Iran calls Israel’s Iron Dome a myth. It claims that “Iran now holds complete dominance over the skies” of the Jewish state and that the Israelis “remain utterly defenseless against the Islamic Republic’s precision strikes.”
And one Iranian major general says far bloodier surprises are yet to come. He declares that the attacks on Israel this war has seen so far are a mere “deterrent warning, and the actual punitive operations will be executed soon.”
In addition, Iran says that its hypersonic missile, the Fatah, a kind of weapon the United States does not possess, is a “precision-guided two-stage solid-fueled rocket with a range of 1,400 km and a terminal speed of Mach 13 to 15.” That’s a speed 13 to 15 times the speed of sound. And the hypersonic Fatah has a range of 870 miles.
Iran claims that this hypersonic missile’s “movable nozzles” allow it to maneuver “both in and out of the Earth’s atmosphere” making it “immune to interception by all existing anti-missile systems.” And Iran threatens to unleash a second generation Fatah missile with a gliding warhead.
On top of all that, Iran claims that the Israelis have used up all their Iron Dome missiles and are basically defeated. And it’s true that Israel is running out of one of its key defensive missiles, the Arrow-3.
But the decider in this most unique of all wars may be Donald Trump.
One of Iran’s many nuclear plants, Fordow, is located in the heart of a mountain, protected by nearly 300 feet of sedimentary rock. Israel’s tiny 2,000-pound bunker busters are not powerful enough to tunnel through that rock and reach the vital uranium centrifuges inside.
But the United States has 30,000-pound bunker busters, bunker busters too big to be carried by a fighter jet. The American Air Force has planes that can carry this explosive cargo—our B-2 bombers. So the question is whether president Donald Trump will involve these bombers in the Iran-Israel war.
Four days in a row, from June 17 to June 20, President Trump was in meetings with his national security team going over a range of “attack plans.” But he prefers to keep the world guessing about what he will do next.
References:
https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2025/06/18/749984/explainer-what-makes-fattah-missile-used-op-true-promise-lethal [Press-TV is owned and operated by the Iranian government.]
https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/israel-iran-conflict-06-18-25-intl-hnk
https://www.yahoo.com/news/irans-supreme-leader-vows-destroy-191134502.html
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About the author: Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. Bloom has appeared on Iranian and Saudi TV over forty times. The Sheikh who made Dubai what it is today named a race horse after one of Bloom’s works. Howard Bloom’s new book is The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature is Wrong. Says Harvard’s Ellen Langer of The Case of the Sexual Cosmos, Bloom “argues that we are not savaging the earth as some would have it, but instead are growing the cosmos. A fascinating read.” One of Bloom’s eight previous books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. Bloom’s work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. Not to mention in scientific journals like Biosystems, New Ideas in Psychology, and PhysicaPlus. Says Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of Evolution’s End and The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, “I have finished Howard Bloom’s [first two] books, The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain, in that order, and am seriously awed, near overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he has done. I never expected to see, in any form, from any sector, such an accomplishment. I doubt there is a stronger intellect than Bloom’s on the planet.” For more, see http://howardbloom.net or http://howardbloom.institute