It Will Take Time to Understand: Main Target of Israel's Attack on Iran Named

By attacking Iran, Israel makes no secret of its goal of destroying the core of the hostile power's nuclear program. It may take days or weeks to assess how much Israel has weakened Tehran's nuclear capabilities.

When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Thursday evening that Israel had struck “Iran’s main uranium enrichment facility at Natanz,” he demonstrated the scale of his country’s ambitions by delivering the biggest blow the Jewish state has ever dealt to Iran: Israel was seeking to destroy the beating heart of Iran’s nuclear program, The New York Times reports.

At the Natanz plant, Iran has produced the vast majority of its nuclear fuel and, over the past three years, most of its bomb-grade fuel, putting the country on the brink of nuclear weapons.

There are no reports yet on whether Iran's other major uranium enrichment facility, called Fordow, was attacked, The New York Times notes. It is a much more difficult target, located deep beneath a mountain and deliberately designed to be out of Israel's reach.

As a result, it could take days or weeks to answer one of the most important questions surrounding the attack on Iranian facilities: How far has Israel set back Iran’s nuclear program? If the program is delayed by just a year or two, it would seem that Israel has taken a huge risk for a relatively short delay, The New York Times comments. And among those risks is not just the possibility of a protracted war, but also that Iran will withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, close its program to public view, and begin a race for weapons—the very outcome Netanyahu sought to prevent.

History shows that such attacks have unpredictable results. Even the most sophisticated attack on Iran’s nuclear program 15 years ago — a cyberattack that planted malware that destroyed centrifuges — slowed Iran down for only a year or two. When the program came back, it was bigger than ever, The New York Times reminds us.

For nearly 20 years, Israel and the United States targeted the thousands of centrifuges spinning at the Natanz plant, hoping to deny Iranian scientists a key ingredient needed to build a nuclear arsenal. Together, the two countries developed the Stuxnet worm, a cyberweapon designed to render the centrifuges uncontrollable. Codenamed Operation Olympics, it began during the George W. Bush administration and flourished under Barack Obama until it was discovered.

Then Israel sabotaged the facilities that made critical centrifuge parts and began killing scientists who were key to the operation, The New York Times reports. But those were temporary setbacks. Iran quickly recovered. And the centrifuges at Natanz kept spinning until the 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran forced the country to give up 97 percent of its fuel and reduce enrichment rates at Natanz to a minimum. That agreement also limited enrichment to levels useful for generating nuclear power but not enough to build a bomb.

For three years, the threat from Natanz seemed to have been eliminated. Most U.S. officials believed that while the agreement did not end the program, it did constrain it. The Natanz plant was operating at a minimal capacity.

But then, in 2018, President Trump pulled the United States out of the deal, calling it a disaster. And within a few years, Iran began ramping up capacity at the plant and installing new, much more efficient centrifuges. That allowed it to boost enrichment levels to 60 percent, nearly the level needed for a nuclear bomb. Experts said it would take just weeks to reach the 90 percent level typically used in nuclear weapons.

Iran has also taken other steps that have given Natanz an even bigger target. International inspectors have concluded that Iran has accelerated its uranium enrichment in recent months. In Israel on Thursday night, Netanyahu used the recent progress to argue that Iran now has enough fuel for nine weapons and that the country can “convert” that fuel into weapons within a year. That’s consistent with what inspectors reported a week ago.

In his address to the Israeli people, Netanyahu argued that intelligence showed the risks to Israel of inaction were too high, a judgment that will be debated at length — along with the question of whether Trump’s diplomacy could have contained Iran’s capabilities, as the decade-old deal did, The New York Times notes.

But it is too early to tell how much damage Israel has done. Natanz is shallow, but the centrifuge rooms are 50 meters or more below the desert surface and covered with high-strength concrete. The question is whether the centrifuges have been destroyed.

Israeli attacks extended beyond these sites. Israel also sought to decapitate both the military and nuclear leadership, The New York Times reports.

Israel has carried out individual attacks on leading nuclear scientists for years. Some have been killed by sticky bombs attached to their car doors. The country's top nuclear scientist was killed by a robot. But some of the strikes Thursday night destroyed headquarters and living quarters in what appeared to be an attempt to mass-kill personnel.

One of the mysteries still surrounding the attack is whether Israel made any attempt to strike the deepest and most secure site in its vast nuclear complexes, a uranium enrichment center called Fordow. It is located at a Revolutionary Guard base deep in the mountains, nearly half a mile below the surface, according to Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who visited the site.

“If you don’t get to Fordow,” says Brett McGurk, who served as Middle East coordinator for several U.S. presidents of both parties, “you’re not going to stop them from making weapons-grade material.”

American officials have said Israel does not have bunker-busting bombs to reach the site, which houses Iran's most advanced centrifuges. And if Fordow survives the attacks, there's a good chance the country's key nuclear technology will survive with it, The New York Times concludes.