Hey everyone, welcome back to My Weird Prompts. I am Corn, and I am joined as always by my brother, Herman Poppleberry.
Herman Poppleberry, at your service. And man, what a week to be diving into this specific topic.
Yeah, no kidding. Our housemate Daniel sent us this prompt a few days ago, asking about Iran's underground missile cities. And given the absolute chaos in the news over the last forty-eight hours, it feels like the most relevant thing we could possibly talk about.
It really is. I mean, we are sitting here in Jerusalem, and the sound of the world changing is literally right outside the door. But Daniel wanted us to look past the immediate headlines and really dig into the engineering and the scale of these subterranean complexes. What are they? How are they built? And why are they so incredibly difficult to deal with from a military perspective?
Right, because when people hear missile city, they probably think of a big bunker or maybe a few tunnels. But what we are actually looking at, based on everything from satellite imagery to the I-R-G-C's own propaganda videos, is something on a completely different industrial scale.
Exactly. And I think to understand where we are today, on March second, two thousand twenty-six, we have to look at how these things actually work under the hood. Or, I guess, under the mountain.
Well, let's start with the what. When the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps talks about a missile city, what are they actually describing? Because they have been releasing these highly produced videos for years now showing these endless concrete corridors.
It is basically a decentralized, subterranean ecosystem. We are talking about vast networks of tunnels, sometimes hundreds of meters deep, carved directly into the limestone and granite of the Zagros and Alborz mountain ranges. These aren't just storage lockers. They are fully integrated bases with their own power grids, water filtration, air scrubbing systems, and even living quarters for hundreds of soldiers. The I-R-G-C claims to have these facilities in almost every province and city across the country.
And the scale is what really gets me. In some of those videos, you see these tunnels that look like they go on forever. You see military leaders like General Hajizadeh or General Bagheri driving through them in trucks, and they are passing rack after rack of ballistic missiles like the Emad, the Qiam, and the newer Khyber Shekan.
Right, and that is a key detail. The height of these tunnels is often thirty to fifty feet. That is necessary because they are storing these missiles vertically or on massive transporter erector launchers, which we call T-E-Ls. If you look at the footage from the unveiling of sites like the facility near Kermanshah or the coastal bases along the Persian Gulf, you realize they aren't just tunnels. They are massive halls designed for heavy industrial throughput.
I remember we touched on the physics of tunneling back in episode eight hundred ninety-four when we were talking about why subways are so expensive. Does the same logic apply here? How is Iran actually digging these out without the whole world seeing the construction?
That is the clever part. Iran has spent decades building up their domestic civil engineering and mining sectors. They have a massive fleet of T-B-Ms, or Tunnel Boring Machines. These are the same machines you use to build the Tehran metro or long-distance water tunnels. They essentially took that civilian expertise and turned it toward the military. Organizations like Khatam al-Anbiya, the I-R-G-C's construction arm, are world leaders in this kind of deep-rock excavation.
So they can hide the activity as a public works project?
In many cases, yes. Or they just do it in remote mountainous areas where the only signature is a pile of tailings, the excavated rock. But even then, they have become very good at camouflaging those piles or using the rock for other construction. By the time a satellite picks up a new entrance, the heavy digging is often already done. And because they use hard-wired fiber-optic communications, there is no electronic signature for intelligence agencies to track during the build phase.
Okay, so you have these massive tunnels. But how do you actually launch a missile from inside a mountain? You can't exactly fire a rocket engine inside a confined space without cooking everyone inside, right?
You hit on the big engineering challenge there, Corn. There are two main ways they handle this. The first is the traditional way, which is what we see in the older missile cities. They have these heavy, reinforced blast doors at the end of a tunnel that leads to a hidden valley or a hillside. The launcher drives out, fires, and then ducks back inside before a drone can spot it.
Like a game of whack-a-mole, but with ballistic missiles.
Exactly. But the newer evolution, which is what defense analysts have been calling missile farms or Mazrae-ye Mooshaki, is much more sophisticated. Instead of driving out, they use these vertical launch capsules that are buried in the ground and covered with soil. No visible structure on the surface. When the launch order comes, the missile's engine ignites, the gas pressure pushes the soil aside, and it just erupts out of the earth. It is essentially a land-based version of a submarine's vertical launch system.
That is terrifying. Because if there is no visible entrance, you have no idea where the launch is going to come from until it is already happening.
And they have automated the whole process. We have seen videos of these rail-based magazine systems. Imagine a long tunnel with a rail track. You have a row of missiles on automated carriages. One moves into position under a launch hatch, fires, and then the next one immediately slides into its place. It turns a single launch point into a rapid-fire battery. This allows them to achieve a high volume of fire without exposing their entire inventory to the surface.
This really speaks to the industrial scale you mentioned. They aren't just building these for a few dozen missiles. They are building them to sustain a massive, prolonged exchange.
Right. And that brings us to the strategic side of this. Why go to all this trouble? Why not just keep them on mobile trucks like most other countries do?
Well, I assume it is about survivability. If you are facing an adversary with total air superiority, anything on the surface is a target.
That is exactly it. It is the porcupine strategy. You make yourself so difficult to swallow that the enemy thinks twice about attacking. If you have your entire arsenal five hundred meters underground, even the most sophisticated air campaign is going to struggle to neutralize it. It creates what we call strategic depth in a very literal, vertical sense.
Five hundred meters? Is that actually realistic? I know the I-R-G-C claims that, but from a geology perspective, that is a lot of rock to put over a hollow space.
The five hundred meter claim is almost certainly propaganda for most sites. However, we do know that facilities like the Fordow uranium enrichment plant are buried under about eighty to ninety meters of solid rock. That is still incredibly deep. For a ballistic missile city, you probably don't need five hundred meters to be safe from most conventional bombs. Even thirty or forty meters of reinforced concrete and rock is enough to shrug off almost anything in a standard inventory.
Almost anything. But we have seen the U-S and Israel using specialized bunker busters recently. We should probably talk about the G-B-U fifty-seven.
Oh, the M-O-P. The Massive Ordnance Penetrator. This is where the nerd in me really gets excited, even if the context is grim. The G-B-U fifty-seven is a thirty-thousand-pound bomb. It is twenty feet long, and the casing is made of a special high-performance steel alloy. It is designed to literally drill through the earth before it detonates. It can penetrate up to sixty meters of reinforced concrete or even deeper into standard earth and rock.
I saw a report recently saying the U-S Air Force just awarded a contract to Boeing to replenish their stockpile of these because they used so many of them during Operation Midnight Hammer last year.
They did. In June of two thousand twenty-five, B-two stealth bombers dropped fourteen of those things on Iranian nuclear sites. And the reporting from that operation showed that while they can penetrate hundreds of feet of rock, they aren't a magic wand. You have to hit the exact same spot multiple times to really burrow through to the deepest chambers. It is a process called tandem targeting, and it is incredibly difficult to pull off against a defended target.
So even with a thirty-thousand-pound bunker buster, you are still looking at a massive effort to take out just one of these cities.
Exactly. And that is why the strategy has shifted. If you can't destroy the whole mountain, you bottle it up.
Bottling up. Explain that.
It is much easier to collapse the entrances than it is to collapse the entire facility. If you use a smaller, precision-guided bomb to hit the tunnel portal, you trap everything inside. The missiles are still there, the soldiers are still there, but they can't get out to launch. You effectively neutralize the base without having to dig through a mountain.
But couldn't they just dig themselves out?
They can, and they do. That is what we have seen in the satellite imagery over the last few months. After the strikes in June two thousand twenty-five, and even after the strikes just two days ago on February twenty-eighth, we see these massive efforts to clear the entrances. Iran has these combat engineering units that are specifically trained to unseal tunnels under fire. They have heavy equipment pre-staged inside the tunnels for exactly this reason.
It sounds like a constant race. One side seals the door, the other side tries to pry it back open.
It is. And Iran has added layers of redundancy to make it even harder. They don't just have one entrance. These cities are labyrinths. They have multiple exits, often kilometers apart. You might think you have neutralized a base by hitting the main gate, but then a flight of missiles launches from a hidden fissure on the other side of the mountain. This redundancy is what makes the Iranian missile program so resilient.
This really reframes the challenge. It is not just about having a bigger bomb. It is about a persistent, twenty-four seven surveillance and strike cycle.
Right. You have to keep eyes on every single known entrance, every single suspicious pile of dirt, and be ready to strike the moment you see a bulldozer move. The logistics of that for an attacking force are staggering. You are talking about hundreds of drones and aircraft in the air at all times just to keep the cork in the bottle. It is an incredibly resource-intensive way to fight.
And meanwhile, Iran is building what experts are calling concrete sarcophagi over their most sensitive sites. We saw this at Parchin recently, right?
Yeah, the Taleghan two facility. Satellite images from earlier this year showed them building this massive concrete shield over a building that had been damaged in an earlier strike. Then they covered the whole thing in soil. From the air, it just looks like a hill. But underneath, you have this hardened shell that can deflect or absorb the energy of an initial strike. It is a form of passive defense that forces the attacker to use their most expensive munitions just to get back to square one.
It is amazing how much of this comes back to civil engineering. It is like they are playing a high-stakes game of hide and seek with millions of tons of concrete.
It really is. And you have to consider the industrial capacity required to maintain this. Iran has reportedly been producing hundreds of ballistic missiles every month. Even with the strikes on their fuel mixing facilities at places like Shahrud and Khojir, they have managed to keep the production lines moving by moving them into these underground cities. They have essentially created an underground defense industry.
So the factory itself is underground?
In some cases, yes. They bring in the raw materials, the chemicals for the solid fuel, the guidance systems, and they assemble the missiles right there in the tunnels. It eliminates the need to move large, conspicuous missiles on open roads. The first time a satellite sees the missile is the moment it leaves the launch tube. This makes the intelligence-gathering piece of this almost impossible. You can count the trucks going into a mountain, but you have no idea what is being built inside.
That is a huge advantage for them. It makes the strategic calculus for any adversary incredibly complicated.
Exactly. And the communications are all hardwired. They use deep-buried fiber optic cables. No radio signals, no electronic footprint for intelligence agencies to sniff out. It is complete radio silence until the launch command is sent through the wire. This is why these facilities are often described as black holes for intelligence.
So, looking at the current situation, we had these massive strikes on February twenty-eighth. We saw reports of explosions at the Jam missile city and the Bakhtaran base. Do we have any idea how effective those were?
Well, the early satellite imagery from yesterday, March first, shows significant cratering around the entrances. The I-D-F and the U-S Air Force clearly went after the portals. But we also saw Iran launch a retaliatory wave of missiles last night. Some of those were confirmed to have come from the very regions that were targeted. This suggests that the bottling-up strategy was only partially successful.
So they managed to keep some channels open.
Or they used those buried vertical launch capsules we talked about. The ones that don't have a visible entrance. That is the nightmare scenario for a military planner. You hit every known door, and the missiles still come flying out of the ground in the middle of a forest or a desert. It proves that the underground city is more than just a bunker; it is an active, offensive platform.
It really makes you realize why this is such a centerpiece of their defense strategy. It is the one thing they have that can't be easily taken away. They don't have a modern air force, their surface ships are vulnerable, but they have the mountains.
And they have used those mountains to create a level of strategic depth that very few countries on earth possess. It is a multi-decade project. They started this back in nineteen eighty-four with simple bunkers for Scud missiles they got from Libya and North Korea. Since then, it has evolved into this massive, nation-wide network that is now the backbone of their regional influence.
And Daniel’s prompt really gets to the heart of why this matters for the future. Even if you have a massive technological advantage, you are still fighting against geography. And geography is a very tough opponent.
It is. You can't bomb a mountain out of existence. You can only make it harder to use. And as we are seeing right now, Iran has become very, very good at using it. The sheer engineering required to maintain these sites—the ventilation, the humidity control for sensitive electronics, the fuel storage—it is a massive national undertaking.
So, what are the practical takeaways here? For someone listening to this and trying to make sense of the news, what should they be looking for?
I think the biggest thing is to look past the initial reports of strikes. When you hear that a missile base was hit, don't assume it was destroyed. These facilities are designed for what engineers call compartmentalization. If one tunnel collapses, the rest of the base stays functional. It is a cellular structure, much like a honeycomb.
Like a submarine. You seal off the flooded compartment and keep fighting.
Precisely. And the second thing is the scale of the inventory. Even if the U-S and Israel manage to destroy fifty percent of the mobile launchers, if there are thousands of missiles still sitting in those tunnels with automated rail systems, the threat hasn't gone away. It has just been delayed. The endurance of these facilities is their greatest strength.
It is a sobering thought. The sheer amount of resources, the billions of dollars and the decades of labor poured into these mountains. It is a testament to a very specific, very focused kind of military ambition.
It really is. And it shows that in modern warfare, the oldest trick in the book, hiding in a cave, is still one of the most effective strategies if you have the engineering to do it right. It is a fusion of ancient geography and twenty-first-century technology.
Well, Herman, I think we have given people a lot to chew on. This topic is obviously evolving as we speak, but understanding the physical reality of these sites helps make sense of why the conflict looks the way it does.
Definitely. It is a game of millimeters and megatons.
Before we wrap up, I want to give a quick shout out to everyone who has been following the show. We have been doing this for almost nine hundred episodes now, and the support from you all is what keeps us diving into these rabbit holes.
Yeah, it really does. And hey, if you are finding these deep dives helpful, especially with everything going on right now, please take a second to leave us a review on your podcast app or on Spotify. It genuinely helps other people find the show and join the conversation.
Absolutely. You can also find us at myweirdprompts dot com. There is a contact form there if you have your own weird prompts or questions you want us to tackle. We read everything that comes in.
And thanks again to Daniel for this one. It was a heavy one, but a necessary one.
For sure. Alright, everyone, stay safe out there. This has been My Weird Prompts.
Until next time, keep asking those weird questions.
We will see you in the next episode.
Bye for now.
