Iran’s Victory, America’s Defeat

Dmitry Orlov

The recent twelve-day rocket and drone duel between Israel and Iran with a cameo appearance by some American Tomahawk missiles and a heaping handful of bunker-busting bombs came to a sudden conclusion that is, if anything, inconclusive. “Who won this silly caucus race?” the animals asked. There followed some inconclusive muttering. “At last the Dodo said, ‘Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.’” And so Alice handed out some comfits, a box of which she had serendipitously discovered in her apron pocket.

Of course, it wasn’t all fun and games. All sides sustained damage.

• Israel sustained damage appraised at upwards of $10 billion (a casual estimate, which works out to around a thousand dollars per Israeli man, woman and child). Israel also demonstrated its inability to protect its tiny territory from Iranian missile and drone strikes even with help from US and British warships parked off the coast in the Mediterranean, which attempted to intercept whatever they could. As for the benefits accruing to Israel as a result of this attack — there weren’t any.

• Iran has sustained even more damage, especially in lives lost, among them some high-ranking officials of the Iranian government, military and nuclear science. There was also some damage done to three of Iran’s sites that are part of Iran’s nuclear program. But Iran also gained a great deal as a result of this attack. Perhaps most significantly, Iran has demonstrated the ability of its hypersonic missiles (which neither the US nor Israel know how to make) to penetrate US and Israeli missile shields.

• The US got yet another black eye from an Iranian attack on a US military base — its largest base in the region. Just as had happened with the previous Iranian attack on a US military base, the Americans did nothing in response. The previous Iranian strike was on a US military base in Iraq which followed the US assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, who was blown up using a drone while he was on a state visit to Iraq. The US also earned itself a major scandal back home because it is entirely unclear even if it did, whether it was anywhere close to developing a nuclear weapon; and if so, whether its putative nuclear weapons program was destroyed, damaged, delayed or in any way inconvenienced by the American bunker-buster and Tomahawk missile strikes, or whether it was instead accelerated, the Iranians having been given an opportunity to ascertain that the only thing worse than nuclear weapons is not having any.

Thus it is clear that all three parties suffered some amount of damage, none of it fatal, but still rather nasty. Kinetic military actions are inevitably like that. But did anyone win? To answer this question, we have to dig deeper — as deep as the Fordo nuclear facility, which is located approximately 90 meters underground beneath a mountain near the city of Qom, which the Americans unsuccessfully attempted to destroy using their bunker-busting bombs. These bombs can only penetrate 60 meters into the ground, and that only if the ground is made of something softer than the basalt of that mountain. Basalt rates around 6 on the MOHS hardness scale — twice as hard as the reinforced concrete of which bunkers are typically made, so the bunker-busters only penetrated 30 meters at best, leaving Fordo intact under 60 more meters of rock. Please don’t tell that to Trump or his head might explode.

All of this might lead an innocent bystander to believe that something or other nuclear is at the crux of this entire imbroglio. Iran indeed has a rather successful nuclear research program and either was or was not developing a nuclear weapon — depending on which set of liars you believe. There are the professional liars at the 18 US intelligence agencies (who lied about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, Syria’s chemical attacks, Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine, the Skripal father and daughter poisoned by Novichok in the UK and much else). There are also the IAEA officials, who, for three years running, haven’t been able to figure out who (the Ukrainians, as happens to be the case) is shelling the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, the largest in Europe, keeping in mind that Zaporozhye, the nuclear plant included, are now Russian territory. These liars said that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program. On the other hand, there is Donald Trump and his entourage, who, along with Israeli PM Bibi Netanyahu, were adamant that Iran does have a nuclear weapons program, and were then equally adamant that US air strikes had destroyed it.

Bibi’s brain pan is perpetually overheating over the idea that Iran will develop a nuclear weapon and immediately use it to destroy Israel. Bibi takes at face value the popular Iranian street chant “Death to America! Death to Israel!” But there are other factors to consider. First, there is a “fatwa” (a standing injunction) from Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei against developing nuclear weapons and no Iranian scientist or engineer would dare to violate it. Second, Iran certainly has nothing against Jews, having been home to Jews for thousands of years and even grants the Jewish community specific representation in its parliament.

What the Iranians are against are not Jews per se but Zionism (which UN Resolution 3379 declared to be a form of racism), be it Israeli or American. But it’s all the same to Bibi because he is a Zionist and can’t imagine a non-Zionist Israel living in peace alongside a non-jihadi Palestine. Truth be told, I can’t imagine that either, given that Israel is chock-full of Zionists and that the Palestinians have a bone to pick with them.

Be that as it may, the idea of Iran using a nuclear bomb (if it had one) to blow up Israel is ridiculous because Israel is tiny and there is no way to nuke any one piece of it without also nuking lots of Palestinians (who are fellow Muslims), not to mention the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, which is one of the holiest places in Islam.

No matter what the crowds in Tehran like to chant at rallies, “death to Israel” cannot come from an Iranian nuclear bomb. How about “death to America,” then? According to IAEA reports (yes, that IAEA, whose head thinks it possible that Russia is relentlessly attacking its own nuclear power plant), Iran has some 500kg of uranium enriched to 60% U235 (the isotope useful for making things that go “Bang!”).

Assuming 50kg of such enriched uranium per nuclear charge (enough to create a critical mass), Iran has enough of it to make an absolute maximum of 10 relatively crude nuclear bombs big enough to destroy a mid-sized city. Iran has enough uninhabited desert to test such a device in open air, as the US once used to do at a test range in Nevada or Russia near Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan, or Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic. Iran could also opt to test it underground, as North Korea chose to do when developing its nuclear arsenal.

Next comes the method of delivery. Russia is the only country big enough to test its ICBMs on its own territory; everyone else has to locate a test target somewhere in the ocean and sail to that location to see whether the missile hits it. Iran does have a converted oil tanker that could be used for that purpose. Theoretically, therefore, Iran could manage to put together 10 Hiroshima-sized nuclear bombs and build 10 ICBMs to carry them to the United States, but to what purpose? Quite recently, Iranian officials were in negotiations with the US to have sanctions lifted; would nuking the US, or even just threatening to nuke it, help lift sanctions?

This brings up a larger question: what are nuclear bombs good for anyway? The general idea is that if you have nuclear weapons, other nuclear powers will not attack you. Is that really so?

• North Korea’s Kim Jong Un did manage to position himself so that he can now return Donald Trump’s love letters unopened. He has nothing to fear from the US now that he can nuke California, but this was as much a result of clever diplomacy as nuclear strategy and the deciding factor may not have been North Korean nukes but massive North Korean artillery batteries aimed squarely at the South Korean capital Seoul, which is just across the border, along with the nearby US military base.

• Israel maintains a policy of nuclear ambiguity (many think it does have some nuclear weapons). Did this prevent Iran from attacking it with rockets? No, it did not, and so the deterrent value of Israeli nukes against Iran is zero.

• The US reports having 3,078 nuclear warheads, although many of these are quite old and if used may just make a nasty radioactive hole in the ground instead of going “Bang!” Be that as it may, did this prevent Iran from attacking US military bases in the Middle East? No, it did not, and so the deterrent value of US nukes against Iran is also zero.

• Elsewhere in the world, India and Pakistan both have nukes and nevertheless they recently had a limited military confrontation over a terrorist strike in Kashmir. The fact that both sides had nukes prevented them from escalating the conflict, and that is an excellent result.

• Russia has 4,380 nuclear warheads. Did this prevent the US from fighting a proxy war against it, with the Ukraine as the proxy (as openly admitted by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio), launching drones and missiles deep into Russian territory? No, it did not, and so the deterrent value of Russian nukes against US-instigated proxy wars is also zero.

We are therefore forced to conclude that nuclear weapons are rather hugely overhyped and aren’t particularly useful in deterring aggression except in certain specific cases.

[…]

Via https://boosty.to/cluborlov/posts/e3fdbd36-3674-41e6-885f-1da5c4987788