Unthinkable (31 page)

Thus, to significantly set back Iran's nuclear program, Israel has to destroy both Natanz
and
Fordow. However, if the Israelis made an effort against Fordow as part of an air raid, even committing all of their F-15Is against it, they would still have very little chance of destroying it and, in trying, would so diminish the damage that they could inflict on other Iranian targets as to make the raid undesirable. Thus the most likely outcome of an Israeli attack would be that Natanz, Arak, Esfahan, and perhaps one or two other sites would be destroyed or badly damaged, but Fordow and the rest of the program would be left intact. And practically speaking, the existence of an operational centrifuge plant at Fordow negates the utility of an Israeli air strike.

One way around the Fordow problem would be to eliminate Iran's ability to supply the centrifuges there with uranium hexafluoride, the feedstock that the centrifuges use to make enriched uranium. The Iranian plant at Esfahan that produces uranium hexafluoride has the great advantage of being aboveground and relatively unprotected, making it easier to destroy by air strike. But it would be hard to know how much uranium hexafluoride the Iranians would have stockpiled at the time of the attack and harder still to eliminate those stockpiles. In the words of Albright, Brannan, and Shire:

Iran's uranium conversion facility at Esfahan, which produces the natural uranium gas that is introduced into centrifuges for enrichment, has already produced many years worth of uranium hexafluoride that is under safeguards. Destroying the facility would not eliminate this stockpile, now
over 300 tonnes of uranium hexafluoride, or enough to produce weapon-grade uranium for over 30 nuclear weapons, if it were moved prior to a strike. In any case, an attacker would be hard pressed to destroy all of the uranium hexafluoride at Esfahan, since it is stored in many, relatively small, thick metal canisters designed to withstand sabotage and severe transportation accidents. The bombs or missiles would likely need to hit close to the canisters to ensure their destruction. Yet, the attackers might not know their precise location within Esfahan.
²⁷

Unless the Israelis somehow destroyed those stockpiles, too, the loss of Esfahan might not have much impact.

Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak once argued that when Fordow became operational Iran would enter a “Zone of Immunity” from attack by Israel.
²⁸
Unfortunately, Fordow became operational in the fall of 2012, meaning that Iran has already entered Barak's “Zone of Immunity.” Israel could still strike, but if it can't destroy Fordow, the impact on Iran's nuclear program will be
much
less than it otherwise might.
²⁹

On June 7, 1981, eight Israeli F-16s escorted by six F-15s operating at the extreme edge of their range obliterated Iraq's Osirak (or more properly, “Tammuz”) reactor, located at Tuwaitha, in the desert outside Baghdad. The strike has been celebrated ever since. At the time, and until well after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, it was believed that the Israeli strike crippled Iraq's nuclear program, setting it back so much that Baghdad was unable to develop a nuclear weapon prior to Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. In that version of history, the Osirak strike was crucial to preventing Saddam from acquiring a nuclear weapon—an event that would have made Operation Desert Storm impossible.

Information that has come to light in the years following Saddam's fall has forced us to revise that story. This evidence indicates that the Osirak strike had a much more mixed impact on Iraq's nuclear program, and
ultimately did more to accelerate Saddam's drive for the bomb than it did to impede it. The emerging consensus among scholars who have studied this evidence is that had the Persian Gulf War not put an end to Saddam's nuclear weapons program with massive, repeated air strikes followed by comprehensive inspections, Iraq would have acquired a nuclear weapon by the early to mid-1990s.
³⁰
Iraq's program in the 1980s was desultory and poorly funded. The Israeli attack infuriated and humiliated Saddam, prompting him to invest far more heavily in a new program that pursued several feasible paths to a weapon and put Iraq on the way to acquiring a bomb by the time of Operation Desert Storm.
³¹
In the words of the most comprehensive and evenhanded assessment of Osirak: “The Israeli attack intensified the Iraqi elite's determination to acquire nuclear weapons and secure sufficient resources to establish and expand the nuclear weapons program over time.”
³²
This same study found that “[t]he attack on Osirak triggered a well-funded covert program to produce nuclear weapons, which increased the proliferation risk posed by Iraq in the long term,” and that ultimately, “the Israeli attack was ineffective.”
³³

The critical lesson of Osirak is therefore not that an Israeli air strike could eliminate the Iranian nuclear program. The real lesson is that even a successful air strike, like the Osirak raid—which would be far harder for Israel to replicate against Iran—is unlikely to convince the targeted state to give up on nuclear weapons altogether. It could in fact cause them to redouble their efforts. Moreover, even a successful air campaign requires comprehensive inspections and the threat of sanctions to force compliance with those inspections. In the case of Iraq after 1981, there were neither inspections nor sanctions and so Baghdad rebuilt its program bigger and better. In contrast, after 1991, Iraq was bound by both invasive inspections and crippling sanctions. Those measures ultimately succeeded in preventing Saddam from rebuilding, although it still required a long and painful struggle.

THE FIRST PARADOX.
In the ideal scenario, an Israeli strike on the Iranian nuclear program would prove so devastating that Iran would give
up on its nuclear dreams. Is that scenario possible? Sure. After all, Iranian politics are complicated and unpredictable. Unfortunately, it is hard to make the case that this is the likely outcome of an Israeli attack. The opposite seems far more likely.

Some have argued that Iran might give up the nuclear ship because a successful Israeli strike would humiliate the regime and might incite popular unrest. If either of these were to prove true, it could trigger a change in the Iranian regime, bringing to power a different group of leaders who would put repairing the economy and ending Iran's isolation high on their list of priorities and rebuilding a nuclear infrastructure low on their list, if it were to appear at all.
³⁴

It is always important to acknowledge these as possible outcomes because of how hard it is to predict Iranian behavior. However, all run contrary to the history of air campaigns and Iran's history since the 1979 revolution. For instance, it is unlikely that the regime would even admit that an Israeli strike (or an American one, for that matter) had been successful. Because it would be difficult to see the damage to Iran's underground facilities, it would be hard to disprove their claims. Consequently, it is not clear whether anyone would even try to move against the regime in the belief that it had been damaged or humiliated. Even then, the protesters would still face the regime's proven willingness and ability to crush internal unrest, a capability that almost certainly would not be affected by an Israeli strike. Indeed, historically, being bombed does not bring about regime change, and only rarely brings about significant changes in regime behavior—and even then typically requires a range of other factors.
³⁵
Saddam never gave up his nuclear ambitions after the successful Osirak raid, the ineffective Iranian attacks during the Iran-Iraq War, or even the massive bombing campaigns of Operation Desert Storm. Only the combination of comprehensive inspections tied to crippling sanctions did that, and even then it was a temporary, tactical retreat.
³⁶

It seems more likely that, like Saddam before them, the Iranians would respond to an Israeli strike by rebuilding their nuclear program as fast as possible. The U.S. government understands this problem implicitly.
As General Michael Hayden, George W. Bush's brilliant director of the CIA, put it, “The view among Mr. Bush's top advisers was that a strike (by Israel) would drive them (the Iranians) to do what we were trying to prevent.”
³⁷
It is also, by the way, the widespread Israeli expectation. Ephraim Kam, a former Israeli intelligence officer and the deputy director of the Institute for National Security Studies, notes, “The common assumption is that an attack on its facilities would not stop the program, but would at most postpone its completion by several years. This is a realistic assumption. It is likely that the Iranian regime would feel committed to rebuild its nuclear facilities as fast as possible and continue to advance the program while assimilating lessons from the strike, including improving fortifications and dispersing sites.”
³⁸

THE SECOND PARADOX.
If an Israeli strike fails to convince Iran not to rebuild its nuclear program, the next best option is for the international community to prevent it from doing so by wielding the same kind of intrusive inspections and harsh sanctions that worked in Iraq. When you speak to Israeli policymakers, military officers, and intelligence analysts, this outcome is their real goal because few believe that there is any likelihood that Iran won't try to rebuild.
³⁹
In the words of Major General Amos Yadlin, “After the Osirak attack and the destruction of the Syrian reactor in 2007, the Iraqi and Syrian nuclear programs were never fully resumed. This could be the outcome in Iran, too, if military action is followed by tough sanctions, stricter international inspections and an embargo on the sale of nuclear components to Tehran.”
⁴⁰
Yadlin may well be right, but the “if” in that statement is a big one.

The good news in the case of Iran is that we already have an intrusive inspections regime coupled with crippling sanctions. The bad news is that an Israeli strike would jeopardize both.

There is a high probability that after an Israeli strike, Iran would withdraw from the NPT.
⁴¹
Iranian officials have argued about whether to adhere to the treaty for decades because of the complications it creates for Tehran's nuclear program.
⁴²
In recent years, Tehran has claimed that the
IAEA is furnishing information on the Iranian nuclear program to Israel, Britain, and the United States to help them to attack it.
⁴³
Senior Majles member Javad Jahangirzadeh railed against the NPT and the IAEA in late 2012, claiming that “[IAEA director Yukiya] Amano's repeated trips to Tel Aviv and asking the Israeli officials' views about Iran's nuclear activities indicates that Iran's nuclear information has been disclosed to the Zionist regime (Israel) and other enemies of the Islamic Republic. . . . If the agency's actions lead to Iran cutting cooperation with this international body, all responsibility will be with the IAEA director general.”
⁴⁴
In September 2012, the commander of the Revolutionary Guard, Mohammad Ali Jafari, warned that Iran would withdraw from the NPT if its nuclear program were attacked.
⁴⁵
Iran's envoy to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, even warned the agency's thirty-five-nation board in November 2012 that if Iran were attacked it might withdraw from the NPT and evict the inspectors.
⁴⁶
Doing so might not be cost-free for Iran because some countries have argued that states like Iran that violate their obligations should not be allowed to withdraw. However, Tehran would count on international opprobrium against Israel to shield it from any such measures, and may not care at that point, especially having endured so many sanctions already.
⁴⁷

If Iran withdraws from the NPT, it means the end of the inspections and potentially of the sanctions, too.
⁴⁸
The IAEA inspection regime in Iran is entirely derived from Iran's adherence to the NPT. If Iran withdraws from the treaty, the inspections go with it. Likewise, the legal foundation for all of the UN Security Council resolutions against Iran (upon which rest nearly all of the multilateral sanctions on Iran) is its failure to adhere to its obligations under the NPT. If Iran withdraws from the NPT, this decision could compromise the legal basis of the sanctions. Iran and its advocates have challenged the legality of the sanctions, and its withdrawal from the NPT would exacerbate those claims. In practical terms, the West would argue that the sanctions resolutions have standing beyond Iran's violation of its NPT obligations and therefore should be unaffected. The reality is that the Chinese, Russians, and potentially others
are likely to be furious at Israel for launching a strike. That anger would be played out both in the UN Security Council and in the court of world opinion. At the very least, it would become much harder for the West to secure new sanctions. Even if the existing sanctions remained on the books, there is a high risk that various states would simply start ignoring them, as happened when international opinion turned against the sanctions on Iraq in the late 1990s.

Iran might go even further, dropping their claimed abstention from nuclear weapons and announcing their determination to pursue an arsenal to ensure that Israel (or anyone else) never attacks it again. Tehran could argue that the Israeli strike demonstrated that Iran's conventional deterrent was inadequate to protect itself, and it had to acquire a nuclear arsenal instead. A great many people would not only sympathize with this sentiment; they would blame Israel for having brought it about. Although many Arab governments would like to see Iran's nuclear program eradicated—even by the Israelis—their people detest any Israeli use of force, especially against fellow Muslims. Thus, much of the Muslim world might follow, as could many other developing countries who see Israel as arrogant, aggressive, and unwilling to make peace with the Palestinians.