How To: Destroy Iran’s Nuclear Program

In Wired's Danger-Room/ here

"The revelation that Iran has a clandestine nuclear facility has the pundits asking: How far will Israel go to prevent Iran from getting the bomb? Over the weekend, über-strategist Anthony Cordesman crunched the numbers in a provocative essay for the Wall Street Journal.

“One of the fundamental problems dogging Israel, especially concerning short-ranged fighters and fighter-bombers, is distance,” he wrote. “Iran’s potential targets are between 950 and 1,400 miles from Israel, the far margin of the ranges Israeli fighters can reach, even with aerial refueling. Israel would be hard-pressed to destroy all of Iran’s best-known targets.”

We’ve been down this path before: This spring, the Center for Strategic and International Studies prepared a detailed assessment of what would an Israeli strike on Tehran’s nuclear facilities might look like. It concluded that a strike by Israeli air force jets (along the lines of the 1981 bombing of the Osirak reactor in Iraq), or an Israelli ballistic missile attack against key Iranian facilities might at least set the Iranians back a few years. But the assessment also acknowledged the potential political fallout: The regional turmoil that might follow an Israeli attack, the study suggested, might further destabilize Iraq and Afghanistan.

Writing yesterday in the New York Post, Danger Room’s Sharon Weinberger notes another problem: Iran’s nuclear program is — quite deliberately — geographically dispersed. Sharon and I visited Iran in February 2007, and the politicians and scientists we spoke to were quite open about Iran’s deliberate plan to spread nuclear facilities around the map.

As Rahman Ghahremanpour, an analyst at a think-tank affiliated with Iran’s ex-president Hashemi Rafsanjani, told us: “You cannot be assured about the destruction of all Iranian nuclear technology. … The nuclear technology activities are distributed within Iran. If you want to destroy the nuclear technology totally, you should attack all the cities.”

It’s going to be an interesting week. Earlier today, Iran ratcheted up the tension with a test-firing of its Shahab-3 missile, which potentially puts Israel within range. The launch — which was preceded by the testing of shorter-range missiles — comes ahead of nuclear talks on Thursday in Geneva between an Iranian delegation and representatives of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany."