As you may recall, recently Comrade Donald Trump, as Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces, made this claim on national television:

“Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.”

Yeah, no. Didn’t happen. Just another in the endless series of Trump’s self-aggrandizing lies. The Defense Intelligence Agency conducted a preliminary Bomb Damage Assessment of the US attack (that’s right, the DIA did a BDA) and assessed that the damage at the primary Fordo site was “not extensive.” Certainly, the site was not obliterated like Trump claimed. But that’s not the real problem.

This morning the Unlikeliest Secretary of Defense Ever, Pete Hegseth, complained about the news coverage of Comrade Trump’s pointless attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Hegseth claimed that reports detailing the limited damage done by the bombing was, in effect, an attack on the integrity and honor of the pilots and air crew who flew the mission. Which, obv. is total bullshit. Which, again, is in keeping with almost everything Hegseth says. But that’s not the real problem.

It’s been reliably reported that at the primary uraniam enrichment site at Fordo, two of the so-called ‘bunker buster’ bombs (okay, technically they’re called ‘Massive Ordnance Penetrators’ or MOPs) were dropped on the entry point to the facility and on a ventilation shaft, one after the other, to increase the level of destruction. The destruction that, you’ll recall, the DIA described as “not extensive.” Which means the MOPs didn’t do what they were intended to do. But that’s not the real problem.

Here’s the real problem: for a couple of decades, the threat of the ‘bunker buster’ gave the US leverage. Hostile nations, fearful of the power of that specific bomb, were reluctant to test the US resolve. If a nation started to build a highly secure underground facility against the wishes of the US, the US would dangle the ‘bunker buster’ and that was generally enough to dissuade them. The threat of the ‘bunker busters’ was enough to cow most of our adversaries.

They were incredibly effective as a deterrent…as long as we didn’t actually USE them.

Not anymore. Now everybody knows the most fearsome conventional high explosive bomb in the US arsenal can’t do what it was designed to do. You know North Korea is digging deep today.

Trump has once again made the US weaker. Nothing he can say or do—nothing Hegseth or any of Trump’s other sock puppets can say or do—can change the reality. Oh, the ‘bunker buster’ is still a formidable conventional weapon. But now the world knows it’s just another really big bomb, and if you dig deep enough it won’t hurt you.