Israel’s military strikes on Iran have struck at the heart of the country’s military leadership and nuclear program, creating a possible vacuum at the top of the regime that could hinder its ability to recover from the onslaught, experts say.
But — assuming that it still can — there is a scenario in which the strikes could lead Tehran to abandon negotiations over its nuclear program and instead rush toward building a bomb, according to analysts and former U.S. officials.
The killing of top Iranian military officers as well as several nuclear scientists will likely have sparked fears in Tehran that Israeli intelligence had deeply penetrated the regime and that other senior figures could also be in danger.
Israel has previously pulled off brazen assassinations inside Iran, targeting senior government scientists involved in the country’s nuclear program and the political leader of the Iranian-backed Palestinian group Hamas when he was visiting Tehran.
“You have to assume the system is shell-shocked,” said Alex Vatanka of the Middle East Institute think tank. “They don’t know… how badly they’re infiltrated” by Israel.
Iranian media and the Israeli military said Israel’s strikes on Thursday killed Iran’s top military officer, Mohammad Hossein Bagheri, as well as the commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Hossein Salami, and a major general in the Revolutionary Guards, Gholam Ali Rashid.
The senior military officers targeted had deep ties to Iran’s regime and were known personally by the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, particularly Bagheri, according to Vatanka. Khamenei promoted Bagheri to his post as chief of the armed forces in 2016.
“There’s a personal element here, which might be a factor in terms of what Khamenei decides to do,” he said.
Shahid Beheshti University said five professors were killed in Thursday’s attack as well as “some” family members.
Nuclear program’s future
The first wave of Israeli military strikes launched Thursday likely inflicted serious damage on Iran’s nuclear program, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that air raids will continue for “as many days as it takes” to ensure Iran does not develop a nuclear arsenal.
But Iran still has buried nuclear facilities at Fordow and elsewhere that it could potentially use if it chose to pull out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and rescind its commitment not to pursue nuclear weapons. In that case, Iran would need to enrich uranium to weapon-grade levels, a short technical step with its current stockpile, and then build a nuclear warhead. That effort could take roughly a year or more, most experts estimate.
The CIA declined to comment as to whether there were any indications that Iran was moving to pull out of the NPT and pursue nuclear weapons.
U.S. President Donald Trump appears to be trying to use the Israeli military attack as leverage over Iran, pushing it to make concessions or else face even harsher military strikes. But Iran may calculate that the time for negotiations is over and opt to build nuclear weapons, according to Ali Vaez of the International Crisis Group think tank.
“One of the strategic risks in targeting Iran’s nuclear infrastructure is the potential for backlash,” Vaez said. The strikes “could incentivize Tehran to reconstitute its program with renewed urgency, driven by a heightened resolve to achieve a credible nuclear deterrent,” he said.
Iran has invested decades of effort and trillions of dollars in building its nuclear program, and Iranian political leaders portray it as a point of national pride, a symbol of the country’s independence and technological progress.
Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank, said Iran’s leadership will likely choose to develop nuclear weapons rather than give up the program it sees as a patriotic endeavor.
“It has become a symbol of national prestige and honor,” Miller said on MSNBC.
“When all is said and done, and this regime stays in power, which I suspect it will, the Iranians will probably make a decision to go all out in an effort to weaponize,” Miller said. “And the Americans and the Israelis are going to have to figure out, over time, how to deal with it.“
Jonathan Panikoff, a former deputy national intelligence officer for the Near East at the U.S. National Intelligence Council, said that Iran may conclude that pursuing nuclear weapons is the only way to safeguard the regime.
Iran “may determine that the Israeli strikes mean time is up for the regime to decide whether to obtain a bomb, if it hasn’t done so already,” Panikoff, now at the Atlantic Council think tank, wrote in an analysis. “The conclusion could be that it can no longer sit on the proverbial nuclear fence, and that it has to rush for a bomb or risk never having one.”
To many Iranian political leaders, securing a nuclear weapon — or nuclear weapons capability — is vital for the survival of the regime itself, he added.
But it was unclear if Israel’s military strikes could deliver a knock-out blow that would make it impossible for Iran to build nuclear weapons, some experts said.
Alex Plitsas, a former senior Pentagon official and a fellow at the Atlantic Council, said it was likely that the Israeli assault, which included sabotage operations, had caused too much damage to Iran’s nuclear sites and equipment to enable Iran to rush toward building a bomb.
Iran was caught flat-footed by the Israeli attack, even though Israel had sent clear warnings for years and in recent months that it would not tolerate an advancing Iranian nuclear program, Plitsas said.
“The Iranians have misread the signals from Israel again and again,” he said.
Even a successful series of strikes against Iran’s nuclear sites might only delay Tehran’s ability to develop the bomb by up to two years, according to past comments by U.S. officials and estimates by experts.
In 2012, Robert Gates, shortly after he stepped down as defense secretary, said military strikes against Iran’s nuclear program would likely fail in the end to prevent Tehran from developing the bomb.
“Such an attack would make a nuclear-armed Iran inevitable,” Gates said at the time. “They would just bury the program deeper and make it more covert.”
Iran maintains its nuclear program is designed for purely civilian purposes to generate energy and research, but Western powers have long accused Tehran of laying the ground for a nuclear weapons project, citing enrichment activity far beyond what’s required for peaceful uses. U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Iran had a nuclear weapons program but halted the project in 2003.
A report in May from the International Atomic Energy Agency concluded Iran was not fully cooperating with U.N. inspectors and that the agency could not provide assurance that Iran’s nuclear program was “exclusively peaceful.”
On Thursday, the IAEA censured Iran for failing to comply with nonproliferation obligations designed to prevent Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon. It was the first such censure in 20 years.
Democratic lawmakers have criticized Trump for pulling, during his first term, the U.S. out of a 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran that imposed limits on its nuclear activities, saying that decision opened the way to the current crisis.
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