Unthinkable (30 page)

Then there are Iran's passive defenses. The Iranian nuclear program consists of dozens of different facilities, but the Israelis would almost certainly concentrate on just a few of the most important ones: the Fordow uranium enrichment plant, the Natanz uranium enrichment plant, the Esfahan uranium conversion plant, the Arak heavy-water reactor, the Bushehr reactor, and the Parchin weapons testing facility. In truth, neither Bushehr nor Parchin is likely to be high on Israel's list, as it is no longer clear that these facilities are crucial to Iran's nuclear-weapons-related activities. On the other hand, if Israel can locate wherever Iran is working on weaponization, they might add those sites to their list.

Some of these targets are aboveground and vulnerable to attack, such as Esfahan, meaning that it would not take many bombs to destroy them. Other Iranian facilities are large, bunkered, and underground—such as Natanz and Fordow—and they will be a much bigger problem. Iran's main uranium enrichment plant at Natanz is a large facility—roughly 325,000 square feet with two 80–100,000-square-feet centrifuge halls. It is also well protected. Its chambers are located twenty-five feet belowground, covered by a seventy-two-foot mound of dirt, and further defended by two concrete walls, one of which is eight feet thick.
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Iran's newer (but smaller) Fordow enrichment facility is even more formidable. It was built inside a mountain near Iran's holy city of Qom, beneath nearly three hundred feet of rock.
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Since Natanz and Fordow are Iran's primary known enrichment venues, it is essential for Israel to destroy them in any attack. Israel has 2,000-pound GBU-27 and 5,000-pound GBU-28 “bunker busting” bombs, designed to penetrate earth and reinforced concrete. These bombs could waste the Natanz facility if several dozen of them struck it accurately.
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However, neither bomb is big enough to give Israel a high probability of destroying the Fordow site. Israel would have to drop scores of them on the same point on the mountain to have even a remote chance of damaging the Fordow facility. By one estimate, if Israel used all 25 of its F-15Is
(which are the only Israeli planes that can carry the GBU-28) to attack Fordow with 25 GBU-28s and 50 GBU-27s, and all 75 of those bombs hit precisely the same point in the mountain, there would be some probability that
one
of those bombs would damage the Fordow plant itself. Even then, the extent of the damage would be impossible to predict and might well be negligible.
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Although both bombs are precision-guided, they still can miss, making the likelihood of this long shot closer to a miracle.

Worse still, even trying such an attack would leave no F-15Is, and therefore none of the heavy GBU-28s, left to hit Natanz. That would force Israel to devote scores of F-16Is with the smaller GBU-27s to attack Natanz, leaving few aircraft to strike other Iranian targets let alone provide air defense and electronic warfare escorts. The Israelis might also try to seal Fordow by destroying its entrances, but this effort might have little to no impact on the centrifuge halls (or the centrifuges themselves) and the entrances could probably be reopened in weeks, if not days.

Moreover, this analysis assumes that Iran has no hidden nuclear facilities. The Iranians have a penchant for building covert nuclear facilities that they have been able to hide from the world for some period of time, usually several years. There are some caveats to that point. The facilities that we know about were all discovered before they became operational, and Israel, the United States, the IAEA, and several European countries are all investing enormous resources into discovering hidden Iranian nuclear facilities. But neither we nor the Israelis can rule out the possibility that Iran may have concealed one or more large, important nuclear facilities. The Iraqis did before 1991. Ahmadinejad warned in 2009 that Iran would build ten more secret mountain enrichment plants like Fordow.

Some have speculated that Israel might employ special forces (SF) troops as part of an attack on Iran.
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The Israelis are a remarkable bunch. In 1976, they flew a hundred commandos (famously led by Prime Minister Netanyahu's older brother, Yonatan) more than 2,500 miles to rescue one hundred Israeli and Jewish hostages captured by Palestinian terrorists and held at the Entebbe airport in Uganda. They pulled it off with only one fatality, Yoni Netanyahu. That should make us wary of claiming
that they won't or can't do something just as remarkable. However, against Iran it would be even harder.

Because of Iran's distance, Israeli troops would have to be flown by large, slow, and vulnerable transport aircraft that would be far more vulnerable than IAF fighter jets to being detected and intercepted by Iranian air defenses. Even if Israel tried to fly the commandos to a location nearby and then use helicopters to fly them to the assault location, the fiasco of Desert One in 1980—in which American SF troops attempted just such an operation to rescue the American hostages in Iran, and failed disastrously—is an important warning of how difficult such a raid would be. In April 2013, Israel agreed to purchase U.S.-made V-22 Osprey tactical transport aircraft, which would be ideal for a commando assault on Fordow or other nuclear facilities, but these planes would also have to be refueled several times for a mission to Iran, and they are not expected to be delivered and operational until 2014 at the earliest, by which point Iran may well have further bolstered its defenses at these sites.
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Even if Israeli troops made it to one of the Iranian sites, they would have to fight their way in and carry enough explosives to destroy these large complexes. Israel would have to accept the risk of having some, perhaps many, of these troops killed or, worse still, captured by the Iranians. Israel may be the most casualty-sensitive country in the world, routinely releasing hundreds, even thousands of enemy prisoners in return for just one Israeli captive, or the remains of an Israeli soldier. Given that most Israelis are ambivalent about a strike on Iran (see below), it would be even harder for an Israeli prime minister to risk captured Israeli soldiers. On top of all this, a daring commando raid might add little to the damage that the IAF could inflict on its own.

Israeli skill, creativity, and technical competence are high enough that we should not assume that they can't pull it off. If anyone can, it is the IDF. But neither should we assume that it would be easy. It sure won't be. Getting the planes there, getting through Iran's air defenses, destroying the targets, and getting back home are all significant challenges, much more difficult than those Israel faced for the Entebbe, Osirak, Tunis, or
al-Kibar operations. It would be the most daring mission the IDF ever attempted. Anthony Cordesman, one of the finest military analysts in the United States, and Abdullah Toukan, the former science advisor to the king of Jordan, ultimately reached a similar assessment: for an Israeli strike, “the number of aircraft required, refueling along the way and getting to the targets without being detected or intercepted would be complex and high risk and would lack any assurances that the overall mission will have a high success rate.”
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It isn't that Israel can't do it, just that it would be very hard to succeed and very easy to fail.

Given the number of variables involved in an Israeli attack on the Iranian nuclear program, solving the equation to determine how much damage such a strike would do is difficult. How many Israeli warplanes will be launched and how many will make it to Iran? Of those, how many will be dedicated to fighter escort or SEAD (suppression of enemy air defenses) roles, and how many will be left to drop bombs? If the IAF maximizes the number of strike aircraft and takes the risk of leaving Iranian air and air defense forces unengaged, how much will those Iranian defenders be able to disrupt the strikes? Will the Israelis try to take out Fordow or leave it alone and concentrate on other key targets? If they do attack Fordow, will they do any damage to it—and what other targets will they have the planes left to strike? How accurate will the strikes be? Will they employ their Jerichos or Popeye Turbos in an opening attack or save them for restrikes and responses to the inevitable Iranian retaliation?

These questions overwhelm any calculus. They require critical assumptions and their interdependence creates highly imprecise estimates. It makes predicting the damage that the Israelis might cause to the Iranian program effectively impossible. That's why the many estimates of the extent to which an Israeli strike on Iran would set back Tehran's nuclear program range from a few months, to a year or two, to as many as three to five years.

Not surprisingly, the U.S. government (which opposes an Israeli strike)
and dovish Israelis tend to believe that an Israeli strike would set Iran back by one to two years at most, whereas hawkish Americans and Israelis both contend that it could set the program back by three to five years.
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Who is right? Who knows?

One way to approach these questions is to ask who is making the predictions. I have a lot of confidence in Tony Cordesman and Abdullah Toukan. Both are known for their ability and integrity. They lay out their analysis in considerable detail in their published reports on this subject so that you can see how they came to their conclusions, and Cordesman in particular has proven to be scrupulously objective in his analysis over the years, acknowledging when he does not know the answer to a question or cannot make a judgment. So I find it noteworthy that their 2012 study concluded that “Israel does not have the capability to carry out preventive strikes that could do more than delay Iran's efforts for a year or two.”
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A number of highly respected former senior Israeli intelligence officers have echoed these comments, with Efraim Halevy concluding that an Israeli strike would only set Iran back a year, and Rafi Eitan insisting that the Iranians would be set back “not even three months.”
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Another way to approach this question is to ask nuclear physicists and technical experts how much damage an Israeli strike might accomplish. Here the estimates from various nuclear specialists—American, Israeli, European, and others—seem far more consistent, and they cluster around the one-to-two-year end of the spectrum.
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A senior Israeli official told veteran journalist Karl Vick in 2012 that the experts on Israel's Atomic Energy Commission had concluded that an Israeli strike could only expect to delay the Iranian program by a year at most, and more likely just a few months.
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Likewise, Dr. Ali Vaez, the director of the Iran Project at the Federation of American Scientists, said in 2012 that an Israeli strike on the Iranian nuclear program “will delay the program for a couple of years, but would galvanize Iran to dash toward the ultimate deterrent.”
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The technical expertise, meticulous work, and objectivity of David Albright, Jacqueline Shire, and Paul Brannan of the highly regarded Institute for Science and International Security is always important to heed.
Their 2008 assessment argued that “an attack on Iran's nuclear program is unlikely to significantly degrade Iran's ability to reconstitute its gas centrifuge program.”
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(And that judgment was rendered even before we knew that Fordow existed.) Albright, Brannan, and Shire noted that Iran has dispersed the plants at which it builds centrifuges, has stockpiled critical equipment and raw materials, and may well have additional centrifuges in reserve, all of which would make reconstitution relatively quick.
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Moreover, the Iranians have now gone through the entire process once, so they understand how to do it and know how to avoid mistakes. Repeating the process would doubtless be faster.

Official American statements also seem to accord with this time frame, suggesting that this is also the conclusion of the U.S. intelligence community's own nuclear scientists and technical experts. A
New York Times
story cites one of the WikiLeaks cables that provided a readout from a meeting between the French defense minister and then–secretary of defense Robert Gates in February 2010. According to the
Times
, the cable reports that Gates told his French counterpart that an Israeli strike “would only delay Iranian plans by one to three years, while unifying the Iranian people to be forever embittered against the attacker.”
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At my own center's annual Saban Forum in December 2011, then–secretary of defense Leon Panetta was asked about an Israeli strike on Iran. He answered, “At best it might postpone it maybe one, possibly two years.”
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The chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, explained in a CNN interview with Fareed Zakaria in 2012 that “I think that Israel has the capability to strike Iran and to delay the production or the capability of Iran to achieve a nuclear weapons status, probably for a couple of years. But some of the targets are probably beyond their reach and, of course, that's what—that's what concerns them.”
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General Dempsey's remark about targets beyond Israel's reach raises another important factor in assessing the impact of an Israeli strike: Fordow. Israel just may not be able to destroy the Fordow enrichment plant, and if it cannot, that will greatly—perhaps even fatally—compromise the effect of the operation regardless of any other damage
the Israelis might do. Fordow has nearly 3,000 centrifuges and has already enriched uranium to 3.5 and 19.75 percent purities. Even if the Israelis destroy Natanz (with its roughly 14,000 centrifuges), if Israel cannot do the same to Fordow, Iranian uranium enrichment would be slowed but not halted. What's more, the Iranians recently installed more advanced IR-2 centrifuges there. Once they can get these machines operational at Fordow, the diminution in Iran's overall production of enriched uranium from the loss of Natanz alone might not be significant at all.