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In just a few days of war, Israel has killed more than a dozen of Iran’s top nuclear scientists, taken out much of its top military hierarchy and attacked key parts of its nuclear programme.
It has been a powerful display of Israeli military and intelligence dominance, but has not critically damaged Iran’s widely dispersed and heavily protected nuclear programme, Israeli military commanders and international nuclear proliferation experts agree.
And far from curbing nuclear proliferation, Israel’s gamble on force could drive Iran to speed up its efforts to get a bomb if the current conflict ends without full destruction of the programme or a deal with iron-clad controls and broad inspection powers.
Israel’s initial attacks have delayed by a few months Iran’s ability to “break out”, or make a functioning nuclear weapon, an Israeli military official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
But US intelligence officials believe Tehran was up to three years away from being able to deliver a weapon and not actively pursuing a bomb, CNN reported on Tuesday – which would make that delay relatively inconsequential.
Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, claimed he launched the attacks because Iran was on the threshold of having a nuclear bomb. But even if that is true, strikes so far will not have bought much more time, and Israel may not be able to do more lasting damage without US help.
What the attacks have achieved is to stir up fear among the Iranian leadership and anger among Iran’s population. The hatred many Iranians harbour for their own government did not blunt the horror of a missile strike that killed dozens of children in their homes, and Israeli orders to evacuate entire neighbourhoods evoked the grim spectre of Gaza’s fate.
Israel developed its own nuclear arsenal as a deterrent, though it has never officially acknowledged what is an open secret. Many in Iran are convinced they need the same, and this war will probably have mitigated public resentment of the cost of those advances.
After the collapse over the past year of regional proxies that had served as the regime’s defensive shield, there was a greater focus inside Iran on the possibility of a nuclear programme, according to Sima Shine, Iran specialist and former head of research at Israel’s the Mossad intelligence agency.
“I have never seen so much talking about nuclear military capability as I saw in the last year and a half,” Shine said. Most focused on Iran’s decision not to build a bomb, rather than its capacity to do so, but the decision to hold back can easily be set aside.
“If the war ends without destroying the nuclear programme, allowing Iran to break out, they probably will do [it],” she said.
A western military official with experience in the region agreed that Israel’s attacks, although framed as pre-emptive strikes, are just as likely to be a spur to proliferation. “My own view is that if they have the capacity after this, they will go as fast as they can to get a nuclear weapon.”
The biggest obstacle to the military destruction of Iran’s nuclear project is the facility at Fordow near the holy city of Qom, buried so deep under a mountain that it is out of reach of even Israel’s most powerful munitions.
It houses centrifuges and much of the country’s highly enriched uranium, and the only bombs that might be able to destroy it are the US’s most powerful bunker-busting munitions.
Amid Israeli euphoria at the impact of the first strikes, national security adviser Tzachi Hanegbi warned the Israel Defense Forces cannot dismantle Iran’s nuclear programme alone.
“It cannot be done via kinetic means,” he told Israeli media. The military can instead create conditions for a long-term deal, brokered by the US that would totally block Iran’s nuclear programme, added.
Netanyahu has left little doubt that he would prefer US military cooperation to a diplomatic solution, and has been encouraging Trump to abandon the anti-war stance that helped bring him to power. “I understand America first, I don’t understand America dead,” he told ABC TV in an interview.
The Israeli leader dreams not only of destroying the nuclear programme but also of regime change in Tehran. But with each missile that lands in civilian areas, his appeals to the Iranian people sound more hollow on the ground.
“We underestimate the psychological impact of the Gaza war, including on Iranians who hate [the government],” said Vali Nasr, professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins University.
“Gaza also has a bad, vicious government that has been used as justification for action against it. Israel has shown a kind of willingness to kill at will, especially civilians.”
Fear of Israeli attacks has been amplified by western tolerance of mass killings, and extreme military tactics that former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert has described as war crimes.
“There was a belief that the international liberal order would keep Israel in check, that Europe and the US would not tolerate Israel using its military might with abandon,” Nasr said. Confidence in any capacity to restrain was blown apart in the rubble of Gaza.
If Trump ultimately decides to stay out of this war, and Iran is slow to accept a deal that would curb its programme, Israel may still have military options to inflict more lasting damage at Fordow.
“There has always been a fixation in Israel and in the world with bombing the nuclear sites. Even if it is impossible to destroy Fordow from the air, other methods exist,” said Alex Grinberg, an analyst and former Iran researcher in the IDF intelligence research division.
Israel’s capture of much of an extensive nuclear archive likely gave it access to plans for Fordow, which could make it easier to cripple support systems, block access or even send in special forces to destroy the plant in a ground operation.
There is precedent for these approaches in other Israeli raids. An attack this week on the electricity supply to another enrichment facility, at Natanz, destroyed centrifuges by causing them to spin out of control.
Last year Israel sent special forces commandos to destroy an underground Hezbollah missile factory deep inside Syria. Fordow is heavily defended, but as Israel now claims to dominate the airspace in western Iran, it could fly in elite teams in on a C-130 aircraft to attempt to storm the site.
Despite Netanyahu’s preference for a campaign of physical destruction, a deal to restrict Iran’s nuclear activities and through a strict inspection regime would probably offer a more lasting shutdown of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security.
“One of the problems with Israel’s strategy is that if they leave, if they stop bombing, then Iran can rebuild. And then they have to start bombing again.”
