In the headlines

Donald Trump has approved plans for a US attack on Iran but is yet to give the final order. Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei says any US military intervention would cause "irreparable damage" and that Iran "will not surrender". A new wave of missiles from Tehran struck a hospital in south Israel this morning, injuring at least 80 people. A SpaceX Starship has exploded during preparations for a test flight at the company's base in Texas. Ship 36 (pictured below) was being fuelled with around 1,200 tonnes of liquid oxygen and liquid methane when it erupted, causing no injuries but setting fire to part of the Starbase complex. Coffee could be the key to staying strong while ageing. A seven-year study, which analysed more than 1,000 over-55s, found that regularly drinking four to six cups of coffee a day led to a reduced risk of frailty.

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A B-2 plane dropping a "bunker-buster" bomb. US Air Force

Can the US really destroy Iran's nuclear programme?

The world is understandably worried about the risks of America joining Israel's bombardment of Iran, says Holman W Jenkins Jr in The Wall Street Journal. But what about the risks of not acting? Veterans of the Clinton and George W Bush administrations still "kick themselves" for failing to prevent North Korea from developing nuclear weapons. Today, the US has a golden opportunity to ensure that Tehran doesn't do the same. Iran has no air defences, no ability to strike back with equivalent force, and no backup from its previously well-armed proxies. Most of its top brass were "targeted and eliminated in the first minutes of the war", and there are even reports of top Iranian officials fleeing to Russia. The world is a complicated place, but the old maxim still holds: "Take victory when it's on offer."

Everyone seems convinced the US can easily obliterate Iran's nuclear programme, says Robert A Pape in Foreign Affairs. Not so. There's no guarantee that America's "bunker-busting" bombs would be able to penetrate the crucial underground facility buried under a mountain at Fordow. The US and Israel would also have to destroy most of Iran's centrifuges, not to mention its centrifuge manufacturing facilities, "the locations of which have never been disclosed". Then there's the Bushehr nuclear power plant, which the Iranians could in theory modify to generate plutonium for nuclear weapons. The only way to eliminate that risk would be to destroy the reactor, potentially releasing a "Chernobyl-like radiological plume" across the Persian Gulf. And even if the US and Israel did all that, they still wouldn't know for sure that the entire programme was dead and buried. Is that really a

💣🤷‍♀️ US intelligence agencies don't share Israel's belief that the Iranians were about to make a bomb, say Katie Bo Lillis and Zachary Cohen in CNN. On the contrary, their assessment is that not only was Tehran "not actively pursuing a nuclear weapon", but that even if they did set out to do so it would take them as long as three years to produce anything effective.

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Netanyahu and Trump earlier this year. Kevin Dietsch/Getty

One of our aims at The Knowledge is to provide readers with a wide range of strong, thoughtful views on the important subjects. So far this week we've had a full-throated argument in favour of Israel's attack on Iran, the surprisingly non-partisan view from the Arab world, both sides of the argument on US intervention and, today, the question of whether that intervention would even work.

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