[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] A powerful solar flare erupted from the sun on Tuesday, prompting warnings from NASA about potential blackouts and communication disruptions.
The solar flare, classified as an X1.2 flare, one of the most severe types, exploded from the sun's Earth-facing side at around 6pm ET.
'X-class denotes the most intense flares, while the number provides more information about their strength,' NASA shared in a release.
The eruption unleashed a burst of ionizing radiation, magnetic energy and heat capable of interfering with technology on Earth.
Dr Tamitha Skov, an independent space weather physicist, said the flare's impact was strongest in the western hemisphere, affecting areas including the US West Coast, Alaska, eastern Russia, the Asia-Pacific region and potentially New Zealand.
Almost immediately, the flare triggered a shortwave radio blackout over the Pacific Ocean, with ham radio operators in Hawaii reporting sudden signal loss.
NASA and other space weather agencies are now closely monitoring sunspot region 4114, the source of the flare. Sunspots are cooler than other parts of the surface.
Sunsport 4114 is expected to remain active in the coming days, and scientists warn that another major flare could erupt as soon as today.
'Another flare may be in the offing today. Sunspot 4114 is large and unstable, with a 'delta-class' magnetic field that harbors energy for strong explosions,' the team at SpaceWeather.com shared.
A delta-class magnetic field is like a pressure cooker of magnetic energy on the sun, and it is often a warning sign that a big solar flare is to come.
Officials said in a Wednesday update that the solar flare likely came with a huge burst of charged solar particles, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), which will take about 15 to 72 hours to reach Earth.
A G1 geomagnetic storm watch has been issued for Friday, which is the least powerful on the scale of five.
However, it has the potential to cause minor fluctuations in power grids, slight impacts on satellite operations and make the aurora borealis visible at high latitudes.
In May, experts revealed they conducted an extreme space weather scenario and found Earth may not survive.
They conducted a 'solar storm emergency drill', simulating what would happen if a major geomagnetic storm hit our planet.
Results showed power grids failed, blackouts were triggered and communication broke down across the US.
#2
^
Skidmark - thank-you for the posted warnings.
Given the collected data, is pointing to another 14 V/km event. Like what took out Canada's power grid back in March 1989 will happen again soon. Plus, we are likely to see another 23+V/km event within the next 10 years.
So, I've been looking for a Family/Homeowner level preparedness manual. But most of what I am finding is Business and Government level manuals. eg. https://securethegrid.com/plan-prepare/
Which point to numerous tidbits of needed info.
Question: Can you point us to a User level focused preparedness manual link?
The vast majority of NOAA Geomagnetic Scale 5 level storms (G5) will not cause catastrophic damage to the electric grid. On average, the Earth is impacted by such storms about four times during every 11-year solar cycle, so many large storms have impacted the planet since the Carrington Storm with much less signification impact.
[IsraelTimes] The more we learn, the clearer it becomes that Israel struck in the nick of time: Iran was very close to the bomb. Its ballistic missiles were becoming a dire threat. And then there’s that derided ‘Destruction of Israel Plan’
A version of this Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.
How close was Iran ...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for spontaneously taking over other countries' embassies, maintaining whorehouses run by clergymen, involvement in international drug trafficking, and financing sock puppet militias to extend the regime's influence. The word Iran is a cognate form of Aryan. The abbreviation IRGC is the same idea as Stürmabteilung (or SA). The term Supreme Guide is a the modern version form of either Duce or Führer or maybe both. They hate JewsZionists Jews. Their economy is based on the production of oil and vitriol... to the bomb, and how far has Israel now pushed it off?
Rafael Grossi, the head of the UN’s nuclear weapons watchdog, the ineffective International Atomic Energy Agency, warned a few weeks ago that "they’re not far off," and also cautioned that Tehran’s obstruction of his agency’s inspectors has meant that the IAEA has not been able to keep track of recent progress by the regime on the various aspects of its program.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was still more dramatic, characterizing Israel’s resort to force on Friday as preemptive action against an imminent "existential" threat. In a video address at the start of the campaign, Netanyahu said Iran had stockpiled enough uranium to build nine bombs, had taken unprecedented steps in recent months to weaponize that enriched uranium, and could get to the bomb "in a very short time — it could be a year, or it could be a few months." (The IDF at the launch of the attacks said Iran could enrich enough uranium to weapons-grade level for 15 bombs "within days," and did not specify how long it would take the regime to complete its nuclear weapons project.)
By contrast, CNN ...formerly the Cable News Network, now who know what it might stand for... on Tuesday cited a host of American sources assessing that Iran was "up to three years away" from being able to build, deliver and detonate a bomb and asserting that it was not even "actively pursuing" one — an implausible claim, not least in light of the regime’s documented production of increased quantities of near-weapons-grade uranium with no civilian application.
As far as I have been able to determine from interactions with several sources familiar with the matter, Israel’s intelligence assessments are that Iran was very close indeed to attaining nuclear weapons — as in, building and delivering a working bomb. Closer, that is, even than Netanyahu’s public estimate.
The Iranians have the enriched uranium, produced at their now largely destroyed main enrichment facility at Natanz. It has likely been stockpiled at the Isfahan site, also targeted by the IAF. In 2023, the IAEA reported evidence of uranium enriched further, to 83.7 percent purity, just short of weapons-grade, by the advanced centrifuges at the relatively invulnerable Fordo facility.
Critically, too, they have developed the highly complex nuclear detonator — the engineering device that causes the nuclear explosion of the bomb’s uranium core. And they have long had the missile capacity to deliver such a device.
Putting all the required components together, should Iran have chosen to do so, I was given to understand, was a matter of no more than two months, and possibly as little as a week.
Or, rather, it would have been — before Israel launched its attacks.
Why is that no longer the case, given that the 60%-enriched uranium would be headed to the thus-far impregnable Fordo, and given that Iran has the knowledge — which cannot be destroyed in aerial attacks — to complete its program?
Well, for one thing, Israel believes that its raids are relentlessly destroying the knowledge.
At a presser on Monday evening, Netanyahu said Israel had killed 10 of Iran’s senior nuclear scientists and would soon reach several more. (Indeed, that number is now understood to have risen to 14.) These scientists, I was told, are the elite of the nuclear weapons program, the small group of experts with the knowledge and experience to bring Iran’s nuclear weapons drive to fruition. They can be replaced, of course, but their successors are less adept.
Additionally, having raided Iran’s nuclear weapons program archive in Tehran in 2018, in one of the most daring operations in Mosssd ...sees all, knows all, gets 'em all in the end... history, and brought home vast quantities of material in a convoy of trucks, Israel in a barely reported air assault this week blew up all manner of documentation and other materials relating to the project, including the archive’s computer backups.
What Israel believes it is managing to do, in other words, is set back the program by eliminating its key personnel, and depriving their successors of the institutional memory to efficiently and rapidly revive the program.
Physically tackling the centerpiece Fordo facility would plainly be more straightforward were President Donald Trump ...Never got invited to a P.Diddy party... to bring the United States into the conflict and order B-2 bombers to drop a series of the ultimate bunker-busting "Massive Ordnance Penetrators," the GBU-57," consecutively through a hole into the site, built into a mountain, until it was destroyed — a potential scenario sketched out by the New York Times
...which still proudly claims Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize... on Tuesday.
Trump "will decide on what is good for America," said Netanyahu on Monday. "We will accept any assistance."
But Israel does not believe Fordo is impenetrable. "We are continuing to destroy nuclear targets systematically," said Netanyahu. Others in the know suggest cryptically that there is more than one way to breach even the most inaccessible and fortified targets.
A central characteristic of Israel’s attacks on Iran since Friday is the intelligence material that has enabled them. Israel achieved air control through western Iran to Tehran, took out all air defenses en route, destroyed vast numbers of missile factories and launchers, is battering nuclear sites, and has eliminated those nuclear scientists and the regime’s key military chiefs, and their deputies and their successors, in pinpoint strikes.
I wrote on Friday that "The assessment in the security establishment is that this was the right and necessary moment to strike — before Iran has rebuilt defenses destroyed in Israel’s far less dramatic attack last October, and at a time when intel on the Iranian [nuclear] program is regarded as particularly strong."
The concern in the security establishment is that its intelligence on the regime’s nuclear program would not have been "particularly strong" for very much longer — another indication that the ayatollahs’ push for the bomb was entering its final phase.
All the signs are that Israel is responding just in time, and moving to separate an ideologically and territorially rapacious regime from the weaponry with which it intended to pursue the destruction of Israel and hegemony in this region and beyond.
REGIME CHANGE: ’WE’LL BE VERY HAPPY’
Regime change is not a formal Israeli government goal of the war itself, but there can be no doubt that it is a desired result.
From the start of the attacks, Netanyahu has declared to the Iranian people that their "liberation from tyranny is closer than ever," and IAF strikes on symbols of the regime, notably including its state media facilities, are overtly intended to weaken its hold on the public. In an interview on Tuesday with his favorite Hebrew TV outlet, Channel 14, Netanyahu asserted that 80 percent of Iranians "hate" their rulers.
As is frequently the case, National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi has been among the most revelatory government officials on this issue.
Bringing down the regime is "certainly not a defined goal of the operation," he said in a Channel 12 interview on Tuesday night, "because we know that the only people who can bring down the Iranian regime are the Iranians."
"But we’ll be very happy if, as the very important, consequential result" of Israel’s attacks on this "extremist leadership," it suffers the same fate as other such regimes, Hanegbi went on, referring in particular to the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria.
"Not only would we not be sorry, it would be the best thing that could happen for the world, for the region and certainly for Israel," he said. "Do we have the means to carry this out ourselves? Absolutely not. Will what we are doing today lead to this kind of result? There are those who believe so."
ASYMMETRY
A wise man pointed this out to me, and I am happy to share it: "In the coverage of the conflict between Israel and Iran, we need to really emphasize the asymmetry between the interests of the two states: Iran would like to destroy Israel and Israel... would like not to be destroyed by Iran. This is not a situation where evenhandedness is appropriate."
HOW MANY ARROWS?
The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday morning that the IDF is "running low" on Arrow missile interceptors. The IDF responded to the report with a bland statement that it was "ready to handle any scenario" but does not comment on "matters related to munitions."
It seems highly improbable that the IDF, having directly planned this operation for many months and worked on it more broadly for years, would have gone to war with insufficient supplies of its prime missile defense interceptors.
The IDF had anticipated that Iran would fire 600 ballistic missiles in its initial response to Israel’s strikes early on Friday. In fact, Iran fired none at all in those opening hours. To date, it has fired some 400, and is believed to have some 1,800 left.
’THE DESTRUCTION OF ISRAEL PLAN’
The stunning early success of Israel’s assault on Iran’s nuclear and military capacities and personnel has refocused Israeli anguish on the failures of October 7, 2023. As was the case when Israel detonated thousands of explosive-laced pagers on their Hezbollah owners in September, we agonize anew at the unfathomable, willful blindness of the political, military and intelligence echelons that left Israel wide open to the monstrous mass-murdering Hamas ..the braying voice of Islamic Resistance®,... and that still sees 53 hostages held in Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about oppression and disproportionate response... , 20 of them believed to be alive.
By the same token, however, it is worth pausing to internalize what might have become of Israel had Hamas fully coordinated its invasion with its then-far more potent fellow proxy Hezbollah, and with their Iranian sponsor.
A scenario in which not only was Hamas leading thousands of snuffies through the useless border fence under cover of heavy rocket fire, but Hezbollah was also attacking full force in the north, and Iran was firing hundreds of ballistic missiles all across Israel, is too terrible for words.
The likelihood of any such coordinated attack taking Israel by complete surprise would have receded the more widely it was discussed and planned, with Israeli intel presumably far more likely to have realized what was about to unfold and the political and military leadership able to prepare in time.
But it is important to highlight that the four designated goals of this attack on Iran, as approved by the security cabinet and revealed by Hanegbi on Friday, include attacking Iran’s capacity to destroy Israel via a multifront ground invasion.
Hanegbi stressed that while some may deride this ambition, the Iranian leadership continues to believe it is absolutely feasible.
Similarly, the IDF on Friday issued a statement specifying that its Intelligence Directorate "has collected and analyzed vast quantities of intelligence materials that reveal the regime has a concrete plan to destroy the State of Israel, which they call ’The Destruction of Israel Plan.’"
And it put out video material to underline the point.
"In parallel to the efforts of the Iranian regime to obtain nuclear weapons, the regime has focused on manufacturing tens of thousands of missiles and UAVs, and is advancing plans for a combined ground offensive against Israel on multiple fronts simultaneously," the IDF said, in a bombshell statement that was barely reported in the fast-moving early hours of the Israeli operation.
"Materials collected during the war show the coordination between the Iranian regime and the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, including after the October 7th Massacre, which demonstrates how the regime plans to re-arm the terrorist organizations," it added.
Military sources have elaborated that Iran’s ground invasion plan involves undermining the regimes in Egypt and Jordan, to enable a coordinated attack across every frontier. In recent days, again barely noticed, the IDF has announced that it is bolstering deployments on the Jordan border and in the north.
Via its nuclear program, with its ballistic missile development, and with an intended multifront ground offensive, Iran’s ayatollahs were confident they were on the way to wiping Israel out. In initiating a preemptive campaign to stop them, the IDF Spokesman said on Friday, "the State of Israel was left with no choice."
Continued on Page 47
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Alexander Shchegolev
[REGNUM] The official reason for Israel's attack on Iran was the Iranian nuclear program: supposedly, in this way, Tel Aviv was trying to prevent Iran from creating nuclear weapons. But was there (and is there still) a risk that Iran would actually acquire a nuclear bomb?
Iran, like many other countries outside the "nuclear club," has a nuclear power plant, the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant. Until now, it has been running on Russian nuclear fuel.
But Iran wanted, at least in words, to produce fuel on its own, so as not to depend on external suppliers, and to recycle nuclear waste on its own. That is why it launched a uranium enrichment program for energy purposes.
There is nothing criminal or unique about this. Some of the non-nuclear countries that have nuclear power plants independently enrich uranium. Germany, the Netherlands, Japan, Brazil and even South Korea have the corresponding technologies and sometimes even full-fledged production facilities.
And this does not cause any heartburn in the world community in general, nor in Israel and the Americans in particular. Why? Because the mere presence of uranium enrichment plants does not mean that a country can create a nuclear bomb.
PHYSICS OF THE PROCESS
A nuclear reactor and a nuclear bomb require slightly different uranium. Natural uranium, which can be extracted from ore, contains only 0.7% of the uranium-235 needed for a fission chain reaction, the remaining 99.3% is inert uranium-238.
To use uranium as nuclear fuel, the uranium-235 content must be increased to at least 2–3, and preferably to 5 percent. This long and complex process of increasing the concentration of "fuel" uranium-235 is called enrichment.
But enrichment to 5% is not enough for a bomb; it needs to reach at least 90%. Iran, according to official IAEA data, is not yet capable of this. The maximum enrichment level it has managed to achieve so far is 60%.
Why does Iran need fuel enriched to 60%? Officially, it is for the TRR research reactor in Tehran (built, by the way, in cooperation with the US back in 1967), which needs highly enriched uranium.
In any case, 60% is not enough for a bomb.
Could Iran theoretically achieve 90% enrichment?
Of course, the technologies are generally known, but this will be far from the easiest task. And to solve it in such a way that the preparations are not noticed by the specialists from the IAEA monitoring mission will be almost impossible.
When Iran is ready to start producing uranium enriched to 90%, we can say with certainty that it is preparing to build a bomb. Until that happens, there is nothing to talk about.
THE PLUTONIUM PATH
True, there is an alternative way: to make a bomb not from uranium, but from plutonium, or more precisely, plutonium-239. It is obtained from uranium, or more precisely, passive uranium-238 in a nuclear reactor, where powerful neutron flows are simply present during its natural operation.
Uranium-238 absorbs one of these neutrons, turns into uranium-239, and then, through a chain of nuclear decays, into plutonium-239, which can then be isolated from spent nuclear fuel and used as a “nuclear explosive.”
But this is in theory.
In practice, this path is not available to Iran. Iranian power reactors are essentially Russian WWER-1000 reactors, which are not suitable for producing weapons-grade plutonium.
The fuel in them is replaced once a year or even less often, which means that the already produced plutonium-239 remains in the reactor's active zone for a long time in powerful neutron flows. And now it can absorb neutrons, turning into plutonium-240, which is not suitable for the production of nuclear weapons.
More precisely, in usable weapons-grade plutonium there can be no more than 7% plutonium-240, while in spent fuel of WWER-type reactors there is more than 20%. Such “dirty” plutonium, by the way, can be used as nuclear fuel, but it is not suitable for creating a nuclear bomb.
To produce weapons-grade plutonium, a different type of reactor is needed, with less powerful neutron fluxes, and also allowing partial replacement of fuel, when some fuel rods are removed from the reactor and others are put in their place without stopping the reactor. In addition, the neutron fluxes in the reactor must be weaker - and in VVER-type reactors they are quite high.
IR-40 REACTOR AND DONALD TRUMP
In principle, Iran was trying to build a reactor that would meet all the requirements for producing weapons-grade plutonium - the IR-40 heavy water reactor in Arak. Its construction began in 2004, and that's when serious and well-founded concerns emerged that preparations were indeed underway to make nuclear weapons.
Under pressure from the international community, construction of the reactor was stopped in 2015, and the site where the active zone was to be located was filled with concrete. Later, as part of an international agreement between Iran, the United States, Russia, China, Great Britain, France and Germany, a new reactor design was approved, which was no longer suitable for plutonium production.
Iran even began reconstructing the IR-40 in accordance with the new design, and international inspectors, including US representatives, confirmed that the requirements were being met.
But in 2018, the US withdrew from the agreement, reimposing sanctions on Iran.
By the way, the initiator of the withdrawal from the agreement was Donald Trump : he demanded that the deal be expanded to include restrictions on Iran's missile program, as well as demands to provide American inspectors with access to all military facilities in the country, including those that are not directly related to the nuclear program.
Iran refused, and when the US imposed new sanctions, it threatened to resume the IR-40 project in its previous form. However, things did not go beyond threats, and at present the IR-40 remains in its previous state.
That is, the “plutonium path” is also closed for Iran, and there are no signs of attempts to revive it at the moment.
***
US National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard recently stated directly that Iran is not developing nuclear weapons, and that all such developments are directly prohibited by the country's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.
So at the time the Israeli missile strikes on Iran began, there was no indication that Tehran was actually trying to develop nuclear weapons.
But what will happen after the war is hard to say. Escalation has taught Iran that no concessions on the nuclear program will guarantee its security, unlike the nuclear bomb itself, if it were to be created.
#4
So lets chat regime change. The media is spinning on it, seems no one really wants it. I think we need to define what regime change looks like. I think we can all agree that defeating Iran and installing a democracy has a high chance of failure. We dont do very well at installing democracies around the world. So what I believe we should do is erase Iran from the map. We should divide the nation up amongst their neighbors, thus removing the last remnants of the Persian empire from the face of the earth. Give the northern area to Turkey, they are fairly western. Give central area to Saudi, they can make it the model for the new western agenda, the southern area, oil fields and ports can go to the UAE, another very western state. It would buffer the arab states from Pakistan and the rest of the stans and enrich the US friendly and somewhat western friendly arab states.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
06/19/2025 10:29 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
...sees all, knows all, gets 'em all in the end...
