> A dirty bomb remains viable with partially enriched materials.

A dirty bomb is basically Hollywood nonsense, and wouldn't use uranium to begin with because it isn't very radioactive.

The premise is that you put radioactive materials into a conventional explosive to spread it around. But spreading a kilogram of something over a small area is boring because you can fully vaporize a small area using conventional explosives, spreading a kilogram of something over a large area is useless because you'd be diluting it so much it wouldn't matter, and spreading several tons of something over a large area is back to "you could do more damage by just using several tons of far cheaper conventional explosives".

Uranium, especially highly enriched uranium, is not very radioactive. That's one of the reasons its useful for weapons. UF6 is chemically really nasty, but it's heavy and also you have criticality issues that limit how much you can pack into a confined space before it explosively disassembles. That is to say, it would make an extremely poor dirty bomb that would do very little. It'd scare people of course but there are far easier things they could use to achieve that.

Far more concerning is the possibility that they give it away to someone else. Enrichment is nonlinear, going from 60% to the 90% needed for weapons is a fairly trivial amount of work.

Remember that Israel had more nuclear bombs than China and never signed any international as tmy treaty.

> earthquake bomb

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_bomb for others who haven't heard the term

Iran is prone to earthquakes, would an earthquake bomb do more damage than that?

Even if it just damages the centrifuges, as far as I see it, it would just delay their enrichment process, severely less than total destruction of their underground base.

> As I understand it enrichment is by gas centrifuge or thermal diffusion.

Centrifuges. They got them via the A. Q. Khan network. We learned about if circa 2005 from Qaddaffi who gave up his to secure peace and his safety (and it didn't turn out well for him because Obama did not respect the gentleman's deal Qaddaffi had with Bush).

MOP is a conventional weapon, 30,000 lbs. Only the B-2 is rated to carry it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GBU-57A/B_MOP

The GBU-57 was most likely used, which is non nuclear

> almost certainly be nuclear

Source:

This is nonsense.

those of you hating on this comment, the conventional weapons could not possibly work, the facility is too deep