The reason for the timing of the strike, which has begun while negotiations were in progress is this: regime decapitation is more achievable  before the leadership has transferred to the most hardened facilities.

There is also a more general advantage in the reduced readiness posture of the adversary, and the disabling of launch sites before they can fire.

See Iran Protests; Is Revolution Nigh?

and What Are the Mullahs of Iran Thinking?

(CNN) A new problem throws four astronauts’ impending moon journey into uncertainty. Quoting,

Because hydrogen is the lightest element in the universe, it tends to leak out of anything intended to contain it. And after hydrogen seepage plagued the first wet dress rehearsal for Artemis II in early February, the space agency worked to replace two seals around the rocket’s propellant lines in an attempt to better confine the fuel.

This requires some context. All  particles in the universe are either fermions or bosons. Fermions have characteristics of ordinary matter familiar to us. One of these is that two particles of matter can’t be in the same place at the same time. On the other hand, bosons, like the photons that comprise light, have no problem.  Cross the beams of two flashlights, and the beams pass through each other  without colliding.

Hydrogen is the lightest element, but helium is the smallest. Hydrogen has a single electron, which has spin 1/2 or -1/2, which makes hydrogen behave as an obvious fermion. Fermions cannot occupy the same space, which results in an effective “size”. The two paired electrons of helium, have opposite spins, cancelling: 1/2 – 1/2 = 0. This makes helium atoms behave like quasi-bosons, which can be closer together than hydrogen can tolerate, until electrostatic repulsion takes over.

So helium is much “smaller” than hydrogen. Famously, it can pass through the glass of old-fashioned vacuum tubes, ruining them.

The inability to solve these leaks probably stems from multiple attempts to substitute for the extremely high costs of techniques used during the Apollo project almost 60 years ago. It is symptomatic of the thinking that also replaced a known-good heat shield technology with something extremely dangerous. See (CNN) NASA is about to send people to the moon — in a spacecraft not everyone thinks is safe to fly; the Stockton Rush Syndrome.

Since the engineers seem to have forgotten the basic Bayesian statistics that govern how many will live and how many will die, perhaps a rare appeal to the politicians is in order. This is going to look extremely bad for you.

They think they can win this fight. The distinctions  of strategic versus tactical victory allow this possibility. Famously, the U.S. won virtually every battle of the Vietnam War, yet lost. The early victories of Japan in World War II were stunning. The limit of the process, the clock, is defined by limits of material resources or political will. The mullahs know they have fewer of the former, but more of the latter.

With the penetrations of the GBU-57A/B MOP, the mullahs now understand the  difference between soft rock, the sedimentary strata of Fordow, and hard igneous rock elsewhere.

The mullahs judge they can handle domestic unrest with as much killing as required.

The mullahs do not fear invasion. One of the most quoted strategic shibboleths is “Air power cannot win a war.”  The accompanying explanation is that it takes boots on the ground to seize territory.  The recent near exception of Venezuela was a decapitation strike. This was facilitated by what, in retrospect, was a remarkable lack of redundancy in the Venezuelan government.

Can a decapitation strike in Iran achieve the goal of regime change? The answer depends on three calculations we may not know how to make:

• Success of the strike, measured against the survival of the target.
• Political implications. See Iran Protests; Is Revolution Nigh?
• Viability of an insurgency.

This last factor has small mention in open source, except for the widely despised Mojahedin-e-Khalq. An insurgency is vital to seize power; otherwise it will simply lapse to surviving elements of the current regime.

As a benchmark, insurgent forces in Iran are far weaker than those fostered in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation; see  Operation Cyclone. Broad access to sophisticated small arms is essential.

The  elevation  of Xi Jinping to effective dictatorship occurred in 2013, with his simultaneous occupation of three offices: general secretary (2012), president (2013), and chairman of the Central Military Commission (2012). In the following years, the relative opacity of China politics became even more completely opaque.

Beginning in 2025, open sources of uncertain provenance stated that Zhang Youxia had encircled Beijing with troops. It was suggested that Zhang had thus won a power struggle. His arrest by forces loyal to Xi Jinping illustrates the danger of apocryphal interpretations.

Nevertheless, since the troop concentrations, the weight of evidence has shifted further towards what some might call regime change, but is more accurately regime restoration. Like Putin, Xi is physically ill, with a slowly growing cerebral aneurysm, which may have been responsible for a mini-stroke, risking catastrophic rupture, as well as generalized cerebrovascular disease. This has resulted extremes of policy driven by Xi’s character, and sense of personal mortality:

• Unsound plans for military adventurism opposed by China’s military.
• Cult of personality.
• The attempt to replace consensus-based governance of the post-Mao years with concentrated personal power.

Favoring a coup:

• Those in the security forces who might place their bets with Xi are forced to appreciate that Xi may not have much life remaining as a high-functioning individual.
• Troops are arrayed with convenient lines of communication that cannot be disrupted.
• Xi has lost political support.
• Who strikes first, wins.

Conclusion. There is a decent probability that Xi will be deposed in the near term. This will occur with a minimum of disorder, as Xi is thought by many to have lost the mandate of heaven.

The Edicarian  Period was peaceful, with rare exception, as primitive, non-sentient organisms grazed on even more primitive organisms. The  Cambrian Period, 538.8 Mya – 486.85 Mya,  with an explosion of complexity, defined the hunter and the hunted. Jaws,  teeth, eyes, and brains inaugurated the arms race that continues to the present day.

All so we can metaphorically eat each other.

The Cambrian Past; Oil on Panel (click to enlarge))

See New Art Series; Traces of the Past; Painting the Ediacaran Period; Att: Larry Gagosian