Inside Israel’s nighttime attack on Iran’s nuclear program | About That – YouTube Dictation Transcript & Vocabulary

1.in the middle of the night Israel scrambled 200 fighter jets into the air They would fly towards Iran firing on multiple locations at once [Music] The first explosions were reported in Thran the capital around 3:30 in the morning local time The IDF has confirmed Israel has hit nuclear targets But the most dramatic phase of the attack would take place a little over 200 kilometers south where the strike value and the risk if things go wrong are both incredibly high This is where Iran enriches uranium which is either for producing nuclear power or a nuclear bomb We struck at the heart of Iran's nuclear enrichment program We struck at the heart of Iran's nuclear weaponization program Israel's attack went beyond this However it also included a series of targeted killings assassinations effectively of high-profile nuclear scientists as well as some of Iran's most senior military leaders Islamic Revolutionary Guards chief Hussein Salami the so-called head of the snake was killed in the attack Within hours Iran had already launched a counterattack which Israel has already responded to with a fresh attack of its own But let's start by understanding how Israel decided it would cross a line it has never crossed before We're talking about multiple sites being hit nuclear military facilities prominent Iranian military officials and some of the key nuclear scientists being assassinated The totality of that has never happened before This was not a surprise attack The world had already been warned In February the first in a series of intelligence reports predicting Israel was planning a strike Then in May just a few weeks ago new intelligence underscoring the potential target Iran's nuclear program something that even then might have felt like bad timing Trump was in the middle of trying to negotiate Iran down on its nuclear program What do you make of the Ayatollah saying that they they have to enrich They have to be able to enrich They won't be enriching If uh they enrich then we're going to have to do it the other way And I don't really want to do it the other way Trump left unsaid what he meant by the other way But Israel certainly found a way appearing to operate on its own schedule when it launched its attack in the early morning hours It would also launch a PR campaign on social media The Israeli Air Force posting pictures of its fighter jets about to deploy Americanmade armed to the teeth combat ready The US though would immediately put up its hands and say we had nothing to do with this From the desk of the Secretary of State this attack was Israel's unilateral action and we are not involved But the US knew this was about to happen They definitely knew because 2 days before the attack the US would start pulling American staffers out of the area Non-essential personnel invited to fly back to home soil paid for by the government Well they are being moved out because it could be a dangerous place and uh we'll see what happens Then a day later now one day before Israel's attack a bombshell from the UN's nuclear watchdog It passed a resolution accusing Iran of failing to comply with nuclear safeguards failing to cooperate with inspectors and failing to credibly account for uranium it wasn't supposed to have The IAEA resolution was kind of the diplomatic side of the same coin of Israel's military operations The IAEA said that for the first time in over 20 years Iran is not in compliance with its non-prololiferation agreement So this time Iran they said if you put more uh resolutions against Iran uh which they call politically motivated then what Iran will do is to simply just go ahead and expand its nuclear program even more Israel has long argued that Iran obtaining a nuclear bomb represents an existential threat So here we arrive at the point just hours before the attack Donald Trump telegraphing what he might have at that point finally seen as inevitable How imminent is an Israeli strike on Iran Well I don't want to say imminent but it looks like it's something that could very well happen We can think of Israel's strike as being made up of three distinct parts First an attack on Iran's military capability its capacity to attack and defend itself even its ability to sense incoming threats Israel would also target key military leaders the highest echelon of Iran's armed forces as well as perhaps the most volatile target of all what Israel would call the heart of Iran's nuclear program We'll start on the most conventional level an attempt to hobble Iran's fighting force itself Israel's air force would post this in the early hours after the initial strike Intended targets of an aerial attack on the western part of the country These are all surfaceto-air missile launchers destroyed in numbers we can't independently verify but which the IIAF claims numbers in the dozens if you include radar stations which were also destroyed To achieve this Israel says it relied on 200 fighter jets That's most of its aerial combat fleet Footage of which it was also quick to post online showcasing F-15s F-16s and F-35s That is a supersonic stealth fighter What the industry calls a force multiplier because of its ability not just to fight but also to gather intelligence even carry out electronic warfare 200 fighter jets for a country the size of Israel is quite significant It's going to be a large part of frankly their inventory and of their capabilities Not all of Israel's fighting force was dedicated to destroying infrastructure Though the mission also appears to have targeted very specific people Hussein Salami is the commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps That's a branch of Iran's military but it's more than just soldiers It has business interests political influence and controls Iran's missile program Golamali Rashid deputy commander-in-chief of the armed forces and commander of Iran's central headquarters tasked with planning and coordinating joint military operations Muhammad Beri the armed forces chief of staff the highest ranking military officer in the country overseeing all branches of Iran's military All three are now dead according to Israel A claim which again we can't independently verify and which I think I should point out I have seen conflicting reports about citing Iranian state media But this is the claim Israel's air force posted online Photos of all three men with the Hebrew word for eliminated written above their heads Those are three incredibly highle targets And so their elimination is going to make it really really challenging Think about it this way The the problem in terms of Iranian response was already going to be challenged because of how Israel went after the ballistic missiles but you've also eliminated the very people who were supposed to be in the room making the decision about how to respond The third prong of Israel's attack was something it has resisted targeting overtly with bombs and missiles until now That's Iran's nuclear program Israel and certainly this Prime Minister Netanyahu who has been wanting to do this for many many years And President Trump is the first US president to allow him to do these kinds of strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities The key target the Natan's nuclear facility south of Thran the primary facility where Iran enriches uranium in thousands of centrifuges which produce the core explosive material required to make a nuclear bomb This is what Israel and much of the western world have long insisted Iran is trying to do And if not stopped Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time It could be a year It could be within a few months less than a year This is a clear and present danger to Israel's very survival But I should also note Iran has long disputed this claim and continues to insist its nuclear development is strictly for things like energy and research All the same the UN has confirmed Natans was hit What's much less clear is how hard Israel claims it was able to damage the facility and attack its ability to function at all But Natans is also heavily fortified Its key infrastructure deep underground The problem with the underground facilities that Iran has associated with its nuclear program is that they're increasingly more fortified The weapon systems that the Israelis traditionally have been thought to have haven't always been able to reach that deep to actually destroy the concrete to actually collapse the walls to fundamentally be able to obliterate as Israel is trying to do the facilities But Israel also claims to have killed six nuclear scientists in addition to its strike on the Natans facility So how far this all sets back Iran's nuclear program as a whole is unknown especially when you consider Natans isn't Iran's only enrichment facility What you might actually end up doing uh is having the opposite of the intended effect which is that uh by attacking Iranian uh nuclear facilities you convince Iran that the only way to prevent further attacks on its territory is to actually move towards the ultimate deterrent which is the development of a nuclear weapon There have been new attacks since Israel's Operation Rising Line began Iran counterattacks Israel's military says Iran has fired around a 100 drones towards its territory Israel says explosions over its territory are both from interceptions and from impacts And there are now multiple reports of fresh Israeli attacks on other Iranian cities Iranian state media says Israel has launched new strikes on the country this morning What this amounts to is a dramatic escalation in what has for decades held more steadily as a proxy war between these two countries Israel not usually in an active state of direct war with Iran but rather locked in a constant struggle against Iran's allies Hezbollah in Lebanon Hamas in Gaza and Houthis in Yemen For a long time for years Iran and Israel were attacking one another through proxies That's been the story of the Iranian Israeli you know conflict the war in the shadows uh or what they call a war between wars But now the gloves are off The United States also faces a new problem Even before this attack unfolded Iran had threatened the US saying it would be seen as complicit in any Israeli attack Iran as you know um could and and has the ability anyway to target American military positions of which there are many in that region not to mention next door in Iraq uh and and even in Syria now And so how do we evaluate the state of play Has Iran been crippled Its military diminished Its nuclear capability stalled This has been a hard blow to Iran It is undermining the credibility at a very rapid pace of the regime Or has Iran been emboldened given new reason to think its survival is at stake unless it responds as severely as possible