Last chance to stop a nuclear Iran

Last chance to stop a nuclear Iran

Henry Kopel

Under clear pressure from the United States, Israel refrained from targeting Iran’s nuclear development sites in last week’s retaliatory strikes against Iran’s military assets. But that merely delays Israel’s dilemma of what to do about this existential danger.

By all Western intelligence estimates, Iran is at most months and possibly just weeks away from having deployable nuclear weapons. Hence, both the United States and Israel face an inescapable choice: Either massively bomb Iran’s nuclear development sites now to stop and disable its drive to nuclear weapons capacity or forgo such a strike, thereby subjecting the world to the terrifying specter of a nuclear-armed Iranian regime.

For Israel, the necessary response is obvious. Ever since the 1979 revolution that installed the Islamist theocracy, Iran’s ruling mullahs have declared ad nauseam their intent to destroy the “Israeli cancer” that afflicts the Muslim world. In the past half-century, the country has massively invested in that goal by financing and arming a ring of terror armies that surround Israel. All those Iranian proxies seek to perpetrate a modern-day Holocaust in the Middle East: Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad in Israel’s south; Hezbollah to the north; Syria, along with related Syrian-based militias, in the northeast; and the Houthi terror gangs in the far southeast.

Iran effectively declared open war on Israel in October 2023, both by green-lighting thousands of Hamas terrorists to storm the border on Oct. 7 to slaughter, rape and maim thousands of innocent Israelis and by launching a year-long barrage starting on Oct. 8, with tens of thousands of Hezbollah missile and drone strikes launched towards communities in Israel’s north. This has forced more than 100,000 people from both the south and the north to become refugees within their own country, many of whom are today still languishing in hotel rooms far from their homes and workplaces. Proportionate to population size, this would be like 3.7 million Americans forced to abandon their homes along the southern and northern borders.

So far, Israel has waged an extraordinary defense against those genocidal proxy armies. But once Iran has nuclear weapons, such efforts will be rendered nearly irrelevant. As then-Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani declared in 2001, “The use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything.”

This imminent need to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran is not just an existential problem for Israel. 

Since 1979, Iran’s leaders have declared that their annihilationist targets include “the Great Satan” (America) and the “Little Satan” (Israel). Iran’s national assembly routinely prefaces its business with chants of “Death to America!” Iran’s growing ballistic-missile arsenal—now the largest in the Middle East—can strike targets across the region and in parts of Europe.

A nuclear-capable Iran would radically diminish both America’s and its allies’ capacity for action and influence in the Mideast. This reality is illustrated by NATO countries’ self-imposed limits and frequent expressions of apprehension in supporting Ukraine against nuclear-armed Russia. Iran’s nuclear blackmail would likely preclude the anticipated entry of Saudi Arabia into the 2020 Abraham Accords and could lead to the collapse of that unprecedented Arab-Israeli peace architecture.

The existential threats of a nuclear Iran do not end there. Possibly the greatest risk lies with the question: What will Iran’s neighbors do? Would they place their hopes in diplomacy and American security guarantees? They all know that Ukraine did exactly that in 1994 when it surrendered its nuclear-weapons arsenal in exchange for a U.S. security guarantee, and they all know how that worked out. This is why many expect that if Iran reaches nuclear-weapons capacity, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt will all follow suit.

Here is the real endgame of the decision not to take out Iran’s nuclear capacity: The end of nuclear nonproliferation and the launch of a Middle East nuclear arms race. After that, it’s down the proliferation rabbit hole with a plethora of unstable Islamist regimes bristling with nuclear weapons.

Unfortunately, this is precisely the endgame that inexorably follows from the Biden-Harris administration’s highly public pressure campaign against an Israeli airstrike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. In effect, the administration is protecting Iran’s march to nuclear-weapons capacity, despite Iran’s clearly stated genocidal goals, despite its half-century shadow war on the free world, and despite the irreversible risks to the free world from a nuclear Iran.

We have one last chance to prevent such a catastrophe, but the window is about to close. The time to strike is now.