I have a number of questions about the overhead photos of the bombing at Fordo. I haven’t done a detailed photo analysis like this in a long time – probably back to the photos of what turned out to be a Syrian reactor under construction in 2007. And I’m not up to date on how the MOP bombs work, so these may be dumb questions. But I haven’t seen them asked or answered.

At the very least, perhaps this analysis will help people to understand how it’s done.

A number of news outlets report that the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) has assessed that the damage at Fordo was not extensive, not the obliteration that Donald Trump claims. Trump has been at odds with the intelligence agencies on a number of issues around the attack he ordered on Iran’s nuclear sites. I choose to believe the intelligence agencies over Trump’s vibes. But it is an early assessment and can change.

An overhead photo shows bomb damage at an entry point to the Fordo enrichment facility (lower holes) and at a ventilation shaft (upper holes). MOPs were dropped on Fordo, and these holes are probably their result. It’s reported that two MOPs were dropped for each hole, one after the other, to increase the destruction.

The DIA has more information than I do to interpret these photos, and probably additional photos. But one thing that can be noticed immediately is that there is no subsidence. Subsidence would indicate that the centrifuge halls had been collapsed. It is possible, however, that subsidence would not have reached the surface. We do not have positive evidence of subsidence, so it is not possible to say that the halls have been collapsed, but that result is not ruled out.

I had expected the MOPs to create a larger crater. Explosions generally extend their force in all directions, hence a crater. But these holes are very neat. They blew out some detritus – you can see fallout plumes to the right of the holes. Surprisingly little for such large bombs. The neatness of those holes suggest that they have some of the characteristics of shaped charges – to focus their force downward. That would be consistent with their bunker-busting purpose.

Geoff Brumfiel does some of the math to figure out the effects of the MOPs. The numbers indicate that Fordo is a tough target, and “It depends enormously on the kind of rock,” said Raymond Jeanloz, an expert in the field. My understanding is that we don’t know the geology of the site well, and Brumfiel’s calculations do not indicate an easy win, even for these big bombs.

Jeanloz observed that the bomb itself could be diverted by geologic layers, and that shockwaves are dissipated by rock. I’m also wondering if they could be redirected by horizontal layers above the centrifuge halls, just as, in a favorite Los Alamos story, an explosion at Two Mile Mesa one cloudy day blew the papers off Harold Agnew’s desk on the fourth floor of the Administration Building, maybe a mile away. The clouds channeled the shock wave. Could layers of rock do the same and protect the centrifuge halls?

I suspect that the DIA also has infrared satellite photography and perhaps radar scans that can give some idea of what lies below the surface, although the Fordo tunnels are deep enough that those techniques may not be useful.

These are actually questions rather than a comment. I am looking for answers from people who know how things work, not what someone saw in a video game or watched on YouTube.

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner

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This is the grave of Emmett Roe.

You have likely never heard of Emmett Roe. But he was a murderous horrible person, one who made America worse for his existing. In fact, I don’t know all that much about much of his life. He was born in 1927 and grew up in the capitol region of New York. He went into food processing as a young man, based mostly in Troy, New York. He worked for Empire Foods and in 1960, left Troy to become a manager at a chicken plant in Moosic, Pennsylvania. Early in his career, he seems to have believed that labor and management should work together, common in the era of union power. That did not last long. But employees who remembered him in Moosic recalled him working on the lines with them when it got busy and caring when they got hurt. He was certainly known for his temper, but he would also hold big clambakes every summer and he doesn’t seem to have been worse than many other employers.

In 1970, Roe left Empire to run some fried chicken restaurants. They went belly up in 1973. He went back to Moosic, mortgaged his home, and bought the Empire factory. He renamed it Imperial. But he did not see Pennsylvania as his future. See, labor was cheaper elsewhere. In those years, the workers had unionized with the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Retail Clerks. Roe hated unions. He was so angry that anyone would dare tell him how to run his factory that he decided to close it and move to antiunion locations in the South.

Among other states, Roe chose North Carolina. A state in bed with the agricultural industry if there ever was one, North Carolina regulators never inspected the factory because the budget for inspections was minuscule. In 11 years of operation, it received no fire inspections. The factory did undergo repeated inspections from the company’s poultry inspector. Workers complained about the terrible smell and quality of meat, with at least one telling an inspector that the meat processed into chicken nuggets was particularly awful. According to one survivor of the fire, the plant managers locked the door to stop workers from stealing chicken. This was the same excuse sweatshop managers gave to locking the doors at Triangle when that disaster killed 146 workers in 1911. Roe loathed his own workers. He saw them as dumb blacks, animals basically. He used to rant about how they would steal everything, even though there wasn’t any evidence for this. I suppose it did happen some, but it’s not as if was crushing his profit margins or anything. He just saw workers as the enemy. Roe, now working with his son Brad, also produced nasty meat, forcing workers to package chicken that had fallen on the floor.

So on September 3, 1991, thanks to Roe being a cheap bastard who didn’t care about the lives of workers, his chicken factory in Hamlet, North Carolina burned. He killed 25 workers that day.

The fire began when the deep fryer caught fire after a hydraulic line to a cooking vat failed, with obvious problems with it not found because of the company’s indifferent safety culture. It spread very quickly thanks to a combination of burning cooking oil, insulation, and exploding gas lines hanging from the ceiling. It didn’t help that all of the phones inside the building were nonfunctional. The workers at the front of the plant all managed to get out. But at the back of the plant the company did not place any fire alarms. Moreover, Imperial managers not only locked all the exits but sealed the windows as well. Those workers had nowhere to go. As an old plant, it was a maze of paths inside. The smoke meant they couldn’t find their way to the front. They were doomed. Like at Triangle, some workers did get out the back by breaking open a locked loading bay, but many died. On one door, near charred bodies, blackened footprints could still be seen, signs of the desperate attempt to escape. Eighteen of the dead were women. Most of the dead were African-American.

Roe basically didn’t care. He was angry that his investments in other plants around the South and in the beef industry in Colorado had not worked out. Dead workers were the least of his concerns and he showed little to no regret through the entire process after the fire.

There was both a state and a federal investigation of the fire. The state passed the buck. The state labor commissioner said that his department did not have enough money (true, thanks to the notoriously anti-labor North Carolina legislature. Even today, NC has the lowest union density rate in the nation. He also blamed the federal government for not enforcing safety standards (OK, but that is indeed passing the buck). As it turned out, Roe had not even filed basic paperwork with the state. He was notorious for ignoring both state and federal law, such as closing an Alabama factory without giving workers the legally required notice. He hadn’t filed for a business license in North Carolina! But this “pro-business” state just ignored all that stuff until they had federal investigations coming.

Three men faced charges for the fire. Roe, his son, and the plant manager all took plea bargains. Since Roe had personally directed the locking of the doors, he received a prison sentence of nearly 20 years, less than a year for each of the murders he committed. He served four years in prison. Imperial Foods also received an $800,000 fine. The factory was never reopened. 215 people lost their jobs. The federal government ordered North Carolina to improve its worker safety legislation or the government would do it for them. This did lead to the passage of 14 new laws, including a whistleblower law, as well as a near doubling of state workplace safety inspectors. The enforcement of all of this was still pretty not great.

Roe served four years. Given the impunity CEOs almost always have in this country, it’s kind of amazing. It was amazing enough that Don Blankenship, murderer of coal miners at Upper Big Branch in West Virginia, served a year in prison, during which he refashioned himself as a political prisoner and started what he hoped would be far-right campaigns for political office. Four years, that’s almost impossible to imagine for a murderous CEO today.

Roe spent the last years of life in Roswell, Georgia. He died in 2018, at the age of 91.

Emmett Roe is buried in St. Patrick Cemetery, Colonie, New York.

If you’d like this series to visit other murderers of workers, all of whom I hope are burning in Hell, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Oddly, both of the owners of the Triangle Fire largely disappeared from the record after the fire, though we know that they were later fined for opening another factory and locking the doors once again, as we know that employers who kill once will kill again. Thomas Drummond, the judge who ordered the military to crush the Great Railroad Strike in 1877, is in Chicago. Karl Linderfelt, the Colorado National Guard officer who murdered Louis Tikas to begin the Ludlow Massacre, is in Los Angeles. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.

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Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
If someone does this and does, the liability lies with Canada.

hahaha ok then.

Thanks to Crystal for sending from over the weekend.

This is obvious in theory, and this is evident wherever it’s been tried. The chaos is the point [free link]:

Many of the Republicans pushing for Medicaid work requirements — permanent program cuts that will strip up to 14 million people of their health care coverage — likely have no idea what it takes to comply with them. We do. As legal aid lawyers, we were on the front lines helping low-income people in Arkansas keep their health care coverage when the state rolled out work requirements in 2018. The policy caused chaos for everyone involved: people receiving Medicaid, hospitals and health clinics, pharmacies, social services organizations and state agency caseworkers. No officials serious about governing should willingly create such problems for their own state.

Over 18,160 people in Arkansas lost coverage in only five months before courts halted the policy. Many were our clients. Adrian McGonigal had chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, for which he received treatment. At the time he held a job working 30 to 40 hours a week at a poultry plant, which paid more than any other job he’d had before and should have satisfied the requirement. But the state’s system for automatically identifying working people was faulty, and Mr. McGonigal struggled to navigate the complex monthly reporting system on his own. Unable to report his work, he lost Medicaid, couldn’t afford his C.O.P.D. medications, wound up in the hospital emergency room several times, lost his job and never fully recovered. For the next several years he struggled in various minimum-wage jobs, earning much less than he had at the poultry plant. Sadly, he died in November.

We saw many working people face similar challenges. Our clients ran the gamut of low-wage work: fast food workers, restaurant dishwashers and servers, construction workers, janitors, landscapers, motel cleaners, gas station clerks and nursing assistants. Many had disabilities, and their ability to continue working depended on getting treatment to manage chronic pain, asthma, injuries, cancer and mental health conditions. Some lost coverage simply because they couldn’t navigate the policy’s complicated requirements and labyrinthine reporting process. Others lost insurance because of the instability of low-wage work: Bosses cut their hours or laid them off without warning, limited public transit narrowed their options or they lived in struggling rural areas where jobs were hard to come by. When the state cut them off, their health worsened and many lost jobs, as well as the ability to work new ones.

Nobody on Medicaid was free from the tumult. Despite outreach from the state, there was widespread panic, as people didn’t know if they had the type of Medicaid that the new requirements applied to. People received confusing 10-page letters from the state Medicaid office, which often contradicted other coverage letters people received around the same time. The website to report compliance shut down every night at 9 p.m., and when it was running, it was so complex that we put together video tutorials to help people navigate it successfully. (Many still couldn’t.) People spent hours on the phone or at agency offices trying to figure out their status or fix errors, often needing a lawyer’s help. In some cases, they had to pester their employers for extra proof of wages or statements that met the state’s requirements. All told, 18,164 people were terminated because of noncompliance with the work requirements, and thousands more people lost coverage because of related paperwork burdens.

Sowing anxiety and panic, depriving vulnerable people of their access to healthcare — it’s not just the outcome of the policy, it’s the reason. The dark cynicism here is to make people think that it’s their fault that they’re losing their insurance, and this is how Republicans will sell it — this isn’t really a “cut,” it’s just taking healthcare away from poor people who aren’t “deserving.” I don’t think this lie will work on the public if the policy is enacted, but it’s as much about convincing themselves (and perhaps some gullible reporters) as anything.

It also can’t be said enough that the red line for front line House Republicans isn’t mitigating these cuts, it’s securing another upper-class tax cut.

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