Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive October 12, 2026
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MainContent Politics as Persuasion

Back to episode — Episode 2872 CWSA 06/18/25

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move him. Because even if they didn't believe it, they'd still have to move him. And then maybe they could detect the movement. So it could be a trick. I'm just speculating. It could be that they didn't know where he was, but if they say they know where he is, maybe he'll act differently, but also maybe it'll create some action that they can track and then they can find him. So that might be comin…

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ody saw coming and it's more impressive than the pagers blowing up on Hezbollah? Well, maybe, maybe not. Maybe it's just to scare the Iranians.

And meanwhile the Iranians say, so what Mossad said is quote, "When the dust settles, you're going to see some surprises on Thursday night and Friday that will make the beeper operation almost seem simple." And then Iran says that Israel is going to have a quote great surprise that the world will remember for centuries. Really? Is there really going to be a great surprise that the world will remember for centuries? And will Mossad really have a new op that's even better than the pagers? I don't know. Sounds a little bit marketing-like.

Well the ongoing conversation about Tulsi Gabbard and Trump is continuing, that's what makes it ongoing. But Tulsi Gabbard had apparently said not too long ago that the intelligence community believed that Iran was not intending to build a nuclear weapon anytime soon. But Trump had been saying that their capability was that they could have it very soon. And so the news said, "Hey, you guys are disagreeing. It looks like we found some disagreements in the administration that we'll talk about." But I don't think they were exactly talking about the same thing.

So my take is that Tulsi Gabbard was talking about their decision that they had not decided to go nuclear and which might be true might not be true but it was about the decision whereas Trump's comment was about their ability. So I think Tulsi Gabbard would agree that they have the ability to build a nuclear weapon you know maybe within a year, months or something but that when they did their original analysis they didn't see the intention. Now, I'm not sure if you can measure intention. So it does make sense that you would worry a little bit more about their ability. You know, do they have the ability to do it? And so I think Trump is a little bit closer on what matters, you know, which is the ability because if you're depending on their intention, they could change their intention any minute.

And we also don't know what's happening inside that Fordow underground facility. How would we know what their intention was? And even if their intention was to not build a bomb, is it possible that their intention is to go right up to the line where they could build one any minute now? Because that would look a lot like intending to build it, but not tactically. So I think Trump's on more solid ground by just talking about whether they could or not.

Meanwhile, we're looking at the range of options that the US might be involved in. And at the top of the list is the use of these bunker buster bombs that they say only the US can deliver with their special bombers. And they're called MOPs or Massive Ordnance Penetrators. Now, I've never heard of any weapon that sounded more sexual than that. Hey baby, you want to see my massive ordnance penetrator? So but that's neither here nor there.

But I saw today some experts saying that it might take half a dozen of those MOPs, those Massive Ordnance Penetrators, for each of the facilities. Now, allegedly the US has about 20 of them and then there's one expert and who knows how many, you know, who knows if the experts really know. But what if it took half a dozen for each of the underground facilities? I think there are two that they're worrying about especially, might be more. You know what I hear when somebody says it might take me six of these bombs? What do you hear? What I hear is it might not work. Is that what you hear? Because if it takes six for each of those facilities, that's a whole lot like they don't know if it'll work. They don't know if it'll take 20. They don't know if it'll take 100. They don't know if it'll take one. Six.

If they'd said it might take two, then I would think, oh, they know what they're talking about. That one will almost certainly get it done, but you might need that second one. But when they say it might take six for each of those underground facilities, what I hear is we don't know if this will work. So is it possible that the worst case scenario is that you destroy the front door of the underground facility, but you don't destroy anything that's under there and then when you're done Iran just digs out the front door and then they go right back to work. How would we know exactly if we had collapsed the underground facility? Would we know? We could tell what the bomb damage was on the top of the ground, but how would you really know if it got the stuff

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underground, especially after dropping six of those mother of all bombs on it? I don't know. So suddenly my confidence that all you need is the US to say yes and those facilities will go away, I'm not so sure. I feel like the US involvement would be maybe we could destroy them, maybe we couldn't. So it might be worse if we try and fail. Because that would also tell them exactly how deep they have…

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