Smoke is still billowing from sites across Iran, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel just made a speech, in English, warning that Israel would keep attacking for “as many days as it takes” to eliminate the Iranian nuclear program. So far the catalog of damage is mostly rumor—tantalizing rumor, for Iran’s enemies, but rumor nonetheless. Netanyahu says Israel targeted facilities for making nuclear fuel, facilities for assembling fuel into bombs, and facilities for building rockets to deliver those bombs and other conventional payloads. He also said something Israel has so far not admitted publicly: that it assassinated key nuclear and military personnel inside Iran. Some of the smoke is billowing from high-rises in Tehran, where one is unlikely to find enrichment centrifuges but might find a scientist or general in his pajamas. Iran has announced the death of the head of its Revolutionary Guards Corps, its most loyal and elite military unit, and of prominent nuclear scientists. Israel has additionally claimed the death of the chief of staff of the entire Iranian military.
Israel has been contemplating an attack like this for two decades. Why was last night different from every other night? Israel claims that Iran was in a late-stage rush to assemble a nuclear weapon (“nine atomic bombs,” Netanyahu said). That claim is nearly unverifiable, but it’s worth noting general trends that might have made Iran’s decision to go imminently nuclear more likely. For at least two decades, the decision to go nuclear has been political rather than technical. Iran had the know-how. Its leaders just needed to decide that a nuclear bomb was worth the risk. And recently that calculation around that decision has shifted.
Membership in the nuclear club—the nine countries known to have nuclear weapons—comes with one incredible perk: near-immunity from direct attack, even with conventional weapons, by other nuclear powers. India and Pakistan have bent this rule, but overall it has held, because the danger of nuclear escalation is just too high to risk it. The peculiar thing about Iran—what made it unique among aspiring inductees into that club—was that until recently it enjoyed this perk even while its membership application remained under review. When countries attack Americans and American interests overseas, the United States is generally uninhibited in striking back. (Libya, Iraq, Sudan, and Afghanistan are recent examples.) Iran attacks American interests all the time—and yet it has been treated gently in return by every U.S. president since Jimmy Carter, as if it were not a nuclear aspirant but a club member already.
It achieved this deterrence by infiltrating much of the Middle East, and rigging it to blow. The first detonator was installed in Lebanon, in the form of Hezbollah, which succeeded so spectacularly there that it became the template for deterrence and punishment of Iran’s enemies across the region. The militias and states that arose on this template were the Axis of Resistance, and their ability to unleash havoc on the region (combined with Iran’s own conventional forces) was enough to make Israel and the United States repeatedly decline to touch Iran within its own borders, even when American soldiers were being killed in large numbers by Iranian proxies.
Why, then, did Iran not make a mad rush for a nuclear weapon? Because it already had the immunity that a nuclear weapon would confer—and because as long as it didn’t have a nuclear weapon, it could use its threat of getting a bomb to extract concessions from America and its allies. Instead of getting a bomb and joining the club, it could advance half the remaining distance to the nuclear threshold whenever it wished—always getting closer, but like Zeno, never getting to the end. Each step closer to the threshold served as an impetus to negotiation, a new reason to demand less support for dissent inside Iran, or more money, lest the next step closer to the bomb be taken.
Circumstances have changed, and the country that changed them is Israel. It did so by piercing that immunity repeatedly, by attacking Iranian soldiers abroad, by humiliating and killing Iran’s proxies, and most of all by attacking it openly on its own hitherto sacrosanct territory. The Axis of Resistance wobbled, and by failing to do anything to steady it, Iran largely lost its deterrent power. In Syria, its main state ally, Bashar al-Assad fell. Hezbollah is wounded and hors de combat. Iranian-linked Iraqi militias are flourishing and making money off the peace in Iraq, and are disinclined to leap to their wounded patron’s defense. Only the Houthis remain defiant and unbowed.
An Iran without a vigorous Axis simply does not have much to bargain, or threaten, with. And a reduced Iran is just another country, a Sudan or Libya with better weather. The only way to recover the lost deference would be to close the distance to the threshold and achieve real nuclear statehood, rather than just the provisional and revocable version. Iran has in the past reached low-points in its power, and it has taken in some cases years to recover its position and find a strategy. Perhaps its strategy was a rush for a bomb. Perhaps it was not, but Israel saw no point in waiting around to find out what it would do instead. The attacks carry obvious risks (perhaps even guarantees) that Iran will retaliate against Israel and the United States. But these risks are less, if Iran is at its weakest.
In 2009, I visited Iran’s northeastern city of Mashhad. Many pilgrims go there to venerate the tomb of Reza, the eighth of Iranian Shiism’s 12 imams. Far fewer visit the adjoining museum, on the Shrine’s premises. To my surprise, one of the temporary exhibits there was not religious in a conventional sense at all. In what appeared to be bronze-resin, a sculpture depicted two hands, emerging from a map of Iran, and triumphantly clutching a glass ampule filled with highly enriched uranium. Below it, to illustrate, were small labeled samples from the nuclear fuel cycle, from yellowcake to uranium hexafluoride—all the way to nuclear fuel for civilian applications, or with a bit more enrichment, for a bomb that could annihilate much of Tel Aviv in a fraction of a second.
It was an odd exhibit at a religious site, with those hands reaching up in what I took to be heroic defiance. I wonder where that statue is now, and whether the model for those defiant arms has much defiance left in him.
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