Israel's Nuclear Option Against Iran
Photo by Johannes Plenio from Pexels
BY BENNETT RAMBERG
The longer that US nuclear negotiations with Iran remain stalled, the more Iranian centrifuges will continue to spin, adding to the pressure on Israel to take matters into its own hands. Lacking good options, its only viable strategy may be to play the card that it has had up its sleeve for decades.
LOS ANGELES – “George, I am asking you to bomb the plant.” Fourteen years have passed since Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called upon US President George W. Bush to attack Al Kibar, a suspected nuclear reactor for military purposes that Israeli intelligence had discovered in the remote Deir al-Zour region of northeast Syria.
In his memoir, Bush reports that on July 13, 2007, after extensive consultation with his national security staff, he conveyed his answer to Olmert. “I told him I decided on a diplomatic option backed by the threat of force.” Olmert’s response was direct: “I must be honest and sincere with you. Your strategy is very disturbing to me.” Two months later, Israeli aircraft struck and destroyed the reactor.
What at first blush seems to be a historical footnote takes on new meaning in the shadow of the August 2021 White House meeting between today’s US and Israeli leaders. Iran’s nuclear program was at the top of the agenda as President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett took questions from reporters. In their banter, Biden and Bennett occupied positions eerily similar to those of Bush and Olmert. Biden wanted to put “diplomacy first and see where that takes us,” adding that “if diplomacy fails, we’re ready to turn to other options.” Bennett made clear that Israel’s goal “is to permanently keep Iran from ever being able to break out to a nuclear weapon.…We will never outsource our security.”
A few weeks after that meeting, Israel took an even more alarming tone when the head of its armed forces, Aviv Kohavi, announced that the country’s military plans against Iran’s nuclear program had “greatly accelerated.” Soon thereafter, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz commented that “military action” would remain on the table in the event that US diplomatic efforts to put Iran’s nuclear program “back in a box” failed. And in his address to the United Nations General Assembly in late September, Bennett said that “Iran’s nuclear program has hit a watershed moment. And so has our tolerance. Words do not stop centrifuges from spinning.” Is a much larger-scale version of the Al Kibar operation in the cards?
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Bennett Ramberg, a former foreign affairs officer in the US State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, is the author of Nuclear Power Plants as Weapons for the Enemy.
This article was originally published by Project Syndicate.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Pacific Council.
