Mystery Iran uranium, vanishing Gaza ceasefire, Trump’s Venezuelan illusion

(Originally published Nov. 21 in “What in the World“) Hey, remember that Iranian uranium Trump said was destroyed?

Iran said Thursday it won’t let UN inspectors back in to verify that.

You may recall that, back in June, officials believed Iran had roughly 408kg of highly enriched uranium, produced since 2021, hidden away. One theory was that it was buried deep under a mountain at Iran’s Fordow Uranium Enrichment Plant. So, as Israel launched its own airstrikes, American B-2 bombers on June 21 lent a helping hand by dropping 12 GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs) “bunker buster” bombs on it. Afterwards, Trump claimed the attack completely obliterated the site and the enriched uranium stockpile along with it. “There are thousands of tons of rock in that room right now,” he boasted. “They [sic] whole place was just destroyed.”

But intelligence officials believe Iran moved its uranium just prior to the attacks and may now be more determined than ever to build an atomic bomb. The International Energy Agency has noticed new activity around some of Iran’s nuclear sites, though it doesn’t yet believe Tehran has resumed enriching uranium.

Since Israel’s 12-day war on Iran, Trump has brokered a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza, but that, too, is also hard to discern. Israel has launched attacks across Gaza against Hamas, killing at least 25 people. The attacks were supposedly retaliation for gunfire by militants in southern Gaza at Israeli troops. Occasional outbursts of renewed violence have raised fears that the cycle of reprisals has already upset the truce agreed to in mid-October between Israel and Hamas. Under the terms of that agreement, Hamas is supposed to disarm, but at least three of its soldiers have since been killed, resulting in retaliatory attacks that have killed more than 280 Palestinians.

Trump, meanwhile, has authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to conduct covert operations in Venezuela that could be a prelude to a U.S. military attack. The U.S. military, meanwhile, has drawn up plans for strikes against alleged drug facilities to strike, as well as Venezuelan military units loyal to the country’s President Nicolás Maduro. The White House has labeled much of Maduro’s government as a cartel dubbed “Cartel de los Soles,” which appears to be a mere figure of speech in Venezuela, and moved to officially label it a terrorist organization. Meanwhile, the U.S. has conducted the largest build-up of military forces in the Caribbean since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, with 15,000 U.S. military personnel in the region.