Podcast: Victoria Coates on the Confusion in Natanz

On Saturday, December 4, 2021, an explosion occurred near Iran’s nuclear facility outside the city of Natanz. Afterward, two nearby villages were evacuated. Was the explosion the result of a weapons test? An accident? Sabotage? No one yet knows what took place in the mountains of northern Iran that day. And whereas civilians and observers can afford to wait for more information, national-security professionals are forced to act and react to events like this in real-time without a lot of information. If there’s an explosion near the nuclear compound of an adversarial nation, what do you do?