The air assault that Israel began last night on Iran’s government, military, and nuclear facilities was not a surprise.
Its scope was.
This attack wasn’t a warning, a symbolic bombing to show Iran that Israel could defeat its air defenses. Israel was not trying to push Iran to negotiate concessions or temporarily delay its nuclear weapons program.
No, nothing was symbolic about the attacks that started yesterday. They are all-out war. Israel is aiming to end the nuclear program and decimate Iran’s top generals. It has already succeeded in the latter. Iran has confirmed the deaths of its two top military officials, Mohammad Bagheri and Hossein Salami.
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So it’s easy to understand why Israel believed it could not let Iran join the club of nuclear-armed nations.
Iran was very close. Enriching the uranium is the hard part of making a nuclear weapon. Actually building a bomb is trivial.3 And a report four days ago from a respected independent group suggested Iran was three weeks away from producing enough bomb-grade uranium to make nine good-sized atomic weapons.4
After last night, that timeline has no doubt… slipped considerably.
But how considerably? And what comes next?
The destruction Israel has wrought will no doubt only fortify Iran’s current leadership in its quest for a bomb. After all, without one, it — and they — will remain vulnerable.
The key words there, though, are current leadership. The bet Israel is making is that it can damage Iran’s leadership badly enough either to force regime change or set the nuclear program back decades. Not years, decades.
Israel isn’t just trying to destroy Iran’s facilities. It is aiming killing so many scientists that Iran cannot rebuild enrichment plants and restart the program until it trains an entirely new generation of engineers from scratch — a new generation that may be in no hurry to join up. No one has to become a nuclear scientist, and national pride only goes so far in the face of certain death. Iran has gone to great lengths to protect its facilities, including tunnelling under a mountain to build an enrichment plant called Fordow.
But Israel now has complete air superiority over all of Iran, and it intends to keep attacking until Tehran surrenders or it has destroyed what is left of the program. Presumably, it will either destroy the Fordow plant entirely or entomb it by blocking the entrances and leaving everyone inside to asphyxiate.
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Can the Iranian regime, which is highly religious and faced sharp protests from more secular urban Iranians in 2019, survive this catastrophic attack?
Why have Iran’s military and intelligence services failed so badly yet again, and does that failure signal that some high-level Iranian officials are working with Israel to destroy the regime?
And — if the regime does hold — can Israel do enough damage to Iran’s nuclear program to ensure that even if Iran wants to rebuild, it cannot do so for the foreseeable future?
The answers to those questions will not be known for weeks, perhaps months or longer. (Though the third certainly seems likely.)
Until they are, it will be too early to call this attack a success. Yes, Israel has helped itself considerably since last night — at remarkably low cost so far. It has reason to be optimistic.
Don’t forget Hamas felt exactly the same after Oct. 7.
Starting wars is easy. Winning them is harder.
Bagheri ran the entire armed forces and reported directly to Ali Khamenei, Iran’s ayatollah. Salami commanded Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, which is separate from and smaller than but more powerful than the official Iranian army.
Recently there have been a couple of minor exceptions, like Ukraine’s effort to seize territory in Russia and the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. But those are more properly described as incursions.
Building one small enough to be delivered on a missile is more complicated. But for blackmail or a doomsday weapon, a missile isn’t required. A shipborne weapon will do just fine. Once Iran started building bombs, it would soon be able to claim it had smuggled them into Israel, and Israel would have no real way to know whether it had.
Making a bomb requires uranium that’s 90 percent or more U-235, the atom’s fissile isotope. Natural uranium is about 99 percent U-238, a much more stable isotope that cannot be used in nuclear weapons.
U-238 is just slightly heavier than U-235, and the most common way to enrich uranium is to gasify it and build centrifuges that spin very fast and throw the U-238 portion of the gas toward the outside of the cylinder. Repeat over and over until the gas contains mostly U-235. This is not a trivial engineering process, but it has been around for more than 80 years. Iran would surely have bomb-grade uranium by now if Israel weren’t constantly trying to destroy its weapons program.
