So, what’s going on with all the explosions in Iran?

Seth Frantzman put together a great map of all  the mysterious explosions and fires in Iran in recent weeks:

 

It sure doesn’t look like coincidence!

But some of the “experts” being quoted about these are as clueless as everyone else. Business Insider has a perfect example of building a thesis around literally nothing:

Israel is involved in an extended campaign to pressure or damage Iran before President Donald Trump can be voted out of office in the November election, a former Israeli defense official and a current European Union intelligence official told Insider.

The attacks appear to be part of a campaign of "maximum pressure, minimal strategy," said the EU intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they cannot be named discussing active intelligence matters. Their identity is known to Insider.

The [EU] source said Iran could be considering a rash response after exhibiting relative patience in the wake of the January assassination of top commander Qassem Soleimani in a US drone strike.

"It's one thing to ask hard-liners to take the long view on an incident like Soleimani in light of the worldwide COVID crisis and a host of other factors," the official told Insider, referring to the shift in global attention to the coronavirus pandemic. "It's another thing to conduct a rapid series of operations without a strategy, and I fear the Israeli plan here is to provoke an Iranian response that can turn into a military escalation while Trump remains in office."

With a broad belief among America's allies that Trump is unlikely to win reelection, Israel's apparent shift in tactics toward high-pressure "kinetic" operations seem to reflect a belief that under a Biden administration, there would be a move to save the 2015 nuclear deal that had been scuttled by Trump.

"There would be a lot less appetite for adventures and secret missions to blow up nuclear facilities under a Biden administration," said the EU official.

it doesn’t take much parsing to see that this EU official knows absolutely nothing. He is guessing that Israel is behind most of these, he is guessing that Israel has no strategy, he is guessing that the US elections are the catalyst for these events, he “fears” that Israel wants to provoke a response.  This is simply anti-Israel bias pretending to be analysis.

Like this EU official, I have no idea how many of these (if any!) are the work of Israel. Iran does have other enemies and plenty of Iranians would happily sabotage their government installations with minimal help from outsiders.

Assuming that Israel is responsible for some of these, the real question is: How is this being done?

Cyber-warfare can do some kinetic damage as we saw from Stuxnet. But to cause things to explode is a whole different ballgame, one that requires computer control over hardware that can be exploited to cause intense heat. Most computer-controlled manufacturing would have safeguards in place, even if the machines could physically be made to overheat to such an extent.

This points to sabotage. Which means that insiders are doing some of this. The psychological impact on Iran must be huge, because it means they cannot trust their own workers – especially around their nuclear research.

Some of the fires are probably accidental, but they add to Iran’s paranoia.

I would like to believe the Israel’s latest spy satellite, launched July 5, has some sort of directed energy weapon that can be used from space with pinpoint precision. As far as I can tell, this is still science fiction:  while these are successful directed energy weapons they require an enormous amount of energy to run and the solar energy used on the satellite seems unlikely to be able to generate that.

But who knows?  Israel isn’t talking and the “experts” aren’t experts.