The evidence of the damage and destruction supposedly caused by Israel’s strike on Iran so far appears to be inconclusive. On Oct. 27, AP published satellite imagery from Planet Labs purporting to show damage done at two Iranian military bases, Parchin and Khojir, as a result of the Oct. 25, Friday night Israeli air strikes. The most telling damage, AP said, could be seen in images of Parchin, some 40 km southeast of downtown Tehran and near the Mamalu Dam. There, one structure appeared to be completely destroyed while others appeared to have been damaged in the attack, AP said. At Khojir, about 10 km north of Parchin, damage on at least two structures could be seen in satellite images.
Parchin is famous because of suspicions that the Iranians allegedly conducted explosive testing relating to nuclear triggers there. The AP story quotes David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security liberally to such effect. Albright claimed that one of the buildings destroyed there was the one that housed the explosive chamber that was supposedly used in that testing. Albright, however, has a long and notorious history as an “atomic bomb hunter” whose accusations against targeted countries are used to justify colonial military operations by British, Israeli, and NATO forces, EIR reported in 2010. “Albright has a track record of making half-baked analyses derived from questionable sources seem mainstream,” Scott Ritter wrote in 2008. “He breathes false legitimacy into these factually challenged stories by cloaking himself in a résumé which is disingenuous in the extreme.”
The AP report also cited Decker Eveleth at the Virginia-based think tank CNA as saying that other buildings destroyed at Khojir and Parchin likely included buildings where Iran used industrial mixers to create the solid fuel needed for its extensive ballistic missile arsenal. AP claims that destroying such sites could greatly disrupt Iran’s ability to manufacture new ballistic missiles to replenish its arsenal after the two attacks on Israel. That assumes, however, that the bulk of Iran’s fuel mixing capacity was located in those few buildings, which seems unlikely, given the huge scale of Iran’s ballistic missile programs.
The Iranians have not acknowledged damage specifically at Parchin or Khojir but have otherwise characterized damage from the Israel strike as trivial. Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council Ali Akbar Ahmadian claimed that the attack had not had the slightest effect on Iran’s military power. Defense Minister Brig. Gen. Aziz Nasirzadeh reportedly said in a speech that the damages had already been repaired.
