The Wire - June 26, 2025

//The Wire//2300Z June 26, 2025//
//ROUTINE//
//BLUF: MORE ARRESTS MADE FOLLOWING WEEKEND NEEDLE ATTACKS IN FRANCE. DEBATE CONTINUES REGARDING SUCCESS OF BOMBING RAID AT FORDOW.//

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-International Events-

France: More arrests have been made in conjunction with last weekend's mass needle-attacks at a nationwide series of music festivals around the nation. Over the past few days, a total of 12x suspects have been arrested after over 145x people were stabbed with syringes filled with various harmful substances at various events around the country. Most of the victims are women, who were intentionally targeted as posts on social media urged the syringe attacks before the events got underway. 13x police officers were also stabbed with needles during the festivities.

AC: Though the sheer scale of mass needle attacks is very concerning, this has happened many times before throughout France. In 2022, over 300x people were wounded in similar attacks. However, in traditional fashion, the names of the suspects who have been arrested have been withheld from the public.

Middle East: This afternoon a drone attack was carried out in Tehran, targeting a residential apartment building.

AC: So far details are sketchy at best, but there's been no response from any interested party, even though this is probably another ceasefire violation.

-HomeFront-

Washington D.C. - Much debate abounds concerning the recent strikes on Iranian nuclear sites. President Trump has condemned the initial intelligence leak that indicated that the strikes were not successful, and has blamed the leak on Democratic representatives in Congress (though few details have clarified this claim). Currently, all parties involved (to include every governmental resource and the mainstream media) all concur that the Iranian nuclear weapons program was set back considerably by the strikes, and that the American bombing operation was an overwhelming success. However, all sides have also stated that Iran possesses several hundred pounds of highly-enriched Uranium, which allegedly remains unaccounted for.

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Analyst Comments: A more forensic Battle Damage Assessment (BDA) of the strikes at Fordow will need to be conducted, but it's going to be almost impossible to confirm with any certainty whether or not America's finest bunker-buster munitions would pierce deep enough to catastrophically destroy the vast array of underground enrichment and processing facilities. The Iranians will seek to downplay losses (so they won't exactly be publishing photos of damage) and the Israelis/Americans will want to over-state the impact this targeting effort had. The truth will be challenging to discern via independent sources as everyone involved seeks to lie in one way or the other.

Nevertheless, the world will work with the information that is available, and micro-analyze every rock and pebble out of place at these facilities over the next few months, all with the goal of determining whether or not mission success was achieved. Speaking purely from a historical perspective, the debate of "can a GBU-57 actually pierce Fordow?" has been ongoing for decades. Of course, there are very few indicators that would actually provide proof of any internal damage to the facility (there will be no crater to speak of for an explosion that takes place hundreds of feet under a mountain). The only entities that for-sure, 100% know the damage that was caused by the strikes are the Americans/Israeli's (via spies) and the Iranians themselves. In short, the Iranians know how deep to dig their tunnels now, one way or the other.

In a larger sense, these details are important as exceptionally grave errors often result in a conflict where one belligerent makes the assessment that a certain target was destroyed, when in fact...it was not. In any case, from the outside looking in the American people don't have any solid way of knowing for sure if Iran's capability to create a nuclear weapon has been degraded. And if the Iranians were not sprinting to create a nuclear weapon before these strikes, they certainly are now. In the atomic age, it is not battleships nor aircraft carriers that were sought to be destroyed in a sneak-attack over the weekend...it is the capability to rapidly assemble a nuclear weapon. Anything short of the catastrophic and total destruction of these facilities guarantees that a proper attempt at achieving the status of a nuclear state will be undertaken.

Analyst: S2A1
Research: https://publish.obsidian.md/s2underground
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