Even Setting Back Iran’s Nuclear Program ‘Only Temporarily’ Would Be Well Worth It

Even Setting Back Iran’s Nuclear Program ‘Only Temporarily’ Would Be Well Worth It

 HUGH FITZGERALD

Israel is considering striking Iran’s nuclear facilities on its own. Their considerations are discussed here: “Israel Still Eyeing a Limited Attack on Iran’s Nuclear Facilities,” Algemeiner, April 19, 2025:

“We have intelligence from reliable sources that Israel is planning a major attack on Iran’s nuclear sites. This stems from dissatisfaction with ongoing diplomatic efforts regarding Iran’s nuclear program, and also from Netanyahu’s need for conflict as a means of political survival,” the official told Reuters.

The Iranian official’s claim that Netanyahu wants a war with Iran as a way to delay his own rendezvous with Israeli courts is preposterous, but the anti-Netanyahu brigade wants you to believe he would actually go to war just to keep himself in office for a while longer. It’s all part of the systematic attempt to demonize Netanyahu, whose tenacity over the last 18 months of fighting a seven-front war has been remarkable.

Tehran has, according to both Marco Grossi, Director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and to David Albright, President of the Institute for International Security, been going full-steam ahead with its enrichment program. It makes no sense to enrich uranium up to 20% or 60% if all you are interested in is nuclear energy, which is what the Iranians continue to claim. The level of enrichment needed for that is between 3% and 5%. Yet the Iranians claim, with straight faces, that they are only interested in the peaceful uses of atomic energy. How do they explain, then, why they’ve enriching uranium to a much higher level? They can’t. They don’t.

Any attack would carry risks. Military and nuclear experts say that even with massive firepower, a strike would probably only temporarily set back a program the West says aims to eventually produce a nuclear bomb, although Iran denies it.

But setting back Iran’s nuclear program “only temporarily” is well worth it, if it delays by many months the program’s development. In that time, what is to prevent the Israelis from launching another attack as Iran tries to rebuild? Or, even better, wouldn’t the Israelis use that time to convince the Trump administration to join with the Jewish state in a double-whammy against Iran, with Israeli jets bombing all of the above-ground sites, while the Americans would use their 30,000-pound bunker busters (MOPs, or Massive Ordnance Penetrators) to hit the underground enrichment facilities at Natanz and the inside-the-mountain enrichment facilities at Fordow?

Here’s what I think will happen: The Iranians will keep dragging out the negotiations in Oman, feigning a sincere desire to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion, but will keep refusing even to consider — they’ve called it their a “red line” — turning over to the US or some other party their stockpile of enriched uranium. 

At some point — it should be before Iran has a chance to repair its air defenses that Israel destroyed on October 26 — Trump, an impatient man, will snap, realize that he is being played by Tehran, pull Steve Witkoff back to Washington, and tell the Israelis he now agrees to collaborate with them, as they had long been hoping, with a joint strike to destroy, not merely damage, the nuclear program on which the mad mullahs have spent tens of billions of dollars. And that humiliating loss may lead, in dominos-falling fashion, to mass demonstrations by Iranians against the regime that has wasted all that money, and caused one-third of Iran’s population — more than 25 million people — to now live below the poverty line