Attack on Iran’s N-sites would cross ‘regional red line’

While the region awaits with trepidation over Tel Aviv's retaliation for Iran's October 1st mass ballistic missile launch at Israeli military bases, US officials believe Iran's military and energy infrastructure will be targeted rather than its highly sensitive oil and nuclear facilities. For a change, US President Joe Biden has expressed his strong opposition to any potential Israeli attacks on Iranian oil or nuclear facilities but during the past year of its war on Gaza and now Lebanon, Israel has not listened to Biden. While Israeli strikes on Iran's oil sector could drive up global petrol and fuel prices and risk Iranian attacks on US military installations in the region, targeting Iran's nuclear programme would be counterproductive for several reasons.

Writing in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Darya Dolzikova and Matthew Savill said, "Israel has historically targeted Iran’s nuclear programme through relatively limited sabotage in the form of cyber-attacks, assassinations of scientists, and bombs placed at Iranian nuclear facilities. The Iranian nuclear complex is too dispersed, key facilities too hardened, and nuclear expertise too consolidated to be eliminated through limited military strikes."

Consequently, Israeli strikes without direct US military support are unlikely to take out Iran's nuclear plants. Washington has long resisted Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's efforts to draw the US into a war with Iran, a country with 80 million people.

While considering Iran its main antagonist in the region, the US is well aware that overthrowing the government could involve occupying the country. Recent US invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq have been expensive in US lives and treasure and disastrous militarily and politically.

In an interview with the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Carnegie Endowment nuclear expert James Actor said that the Iranian programme "is based around centrifuges, which are very small and can be manufactured quickly and placed almost anywhere. So even if an Israeli attack destroys Iran’s current centrifuge plants at Fordow and Natanz — and it’s not obvious to me that (Israel) has the capability to destroy Fordow, which is buried inside a mountain — but even if Israel can destroy Iran’s existing centrifuge plants, Iran is almost certainly going to reconstruct centrifuge facilities. In fact, it may already have clandestine centrifuge facilities. We don’t know."

Israeli and/or US strikes on Iran's nuclear infrastructure could prompt Iran to weaponise existing enriched material. This decision has not, so far, been taken. Brigadier General Rasoul Sanai-Rad, an adviser to Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, warned "Striking Iran's nuclear sites could certainly have an impact on calculations during and after the war," Fars news agency reported. "Moreover, such actions would cross regional and global red lines."

Two decades ago, Khamenei ruled in a fatwa that nuclear bombs are un-Islamic as they kill and main innocent people whose lives are meant to be sacrosanct even during war. Nevertheless, 39 Iranian lawmakers have called on the National Security Council to review this policy on the ground that circumstances have changed. However, policy change could not happen without Khamenei's authorisation.

There is no proof that Iran has decided to build a nuclear weapon. If Iran began work on weapons, the US would be able to detect such activity. US Central Intelligence Agency director Willian Burns said a week ago, "We do not see evidence today that the supreme leader reversed the decision that he took at the end of 2003 to suspend the weaponisation programme.” Iran has built up its arsenal of ballistic missiles as the “means of delivery” for a potential nuclear weapon, he said.

He pointed out that since ex-President Donald Trump withdrew the US from the 2015 agreement limiting Iran's nuclear programme in exchange for lifting sanctions, Iran has reached "a much closer position to produce a bomb’s worth of... enriched material for a single weapon,” The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said Burns underestimated the amount of uranium Iran has enriched to 60 per cent of purity since the US torpedoed the agreement in May 2018. The IAEA said Iran can in a matter of weeks enrich enough of this material to 90 per cent, the level of purity needed for multiple bombs.

Some experts argue Iran would need several months to produce nuclear weapons during which Iran's nuclear sites could come under attack. While others are more explicit. US physicist and weapons expert David Albright said in a recent interview that it could take Iran six months to make a crude nuclear bomb.

But his would not be a bomb capable of being delivered by a missile. However, Iran's rulers might think a crude device would be a deterrent against attack by Israel or the US. The first and only regional power with an arsenal of nuclear weapons is Israel which has 90 or more devices and enough plutonium to make hundreds of bombs and warheads.

Bombing nuclear reactors and enrichment sites could release fine particles of radioactive material into the air, water, and land near the site, polluting the immediate environment. Surrounding areas could be contaminated, and residents injured. Radioactive dust could be carried by winds throughout the region and beyond.

Since assuming Iran's presidency reformist Masoud Pezeshkian has urged the return to the 2015 agreement as sanctions are crippling the country's economy. During his address to the UN General Assembly he criticised Trump's withdrawal from the deal to which Iran responded — after a year — by enriching uranium to a higher level than allowed, amassing a large stockpile, and introducing banned advanced centrifuges for purifying uranium.

Pezeshkian’s appeal amounted to a shift in the rejectionist policy adopted by his predecessor Ebrahim Raisi and signified a change in the approach by ultimate authority Khamenei. Subsequently, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said last month that the 2015 deal could serve as a basis for a new agreement. The Biden administration did not take up the Iranian suggestion although a breakthrough on this issue would have given Biden a foreign policy success during a year he has become "genocide Joe" due to his supine support for Israel's massacre in Gaza and devastating onslaught on Lebanon.