When President Trump warns that he may once again launch a military attack against Iran, he usually focuses on the threat of the country one day being able to build a nuclear bomb.
But for Israel, Iran’s bitter enemy, there is a far more urgent concern: an arsenal of ballistic missiles capable of striking anywhere inside of Israel.
These contrasting views about the threat posed by Iran will be near the top of the agenda when Mr. Trump meets with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel at the White House on Wednesday.
Mr. Netanyahu arrives in Washington as U.S. officials conduct talks with Iran over the future of its weapons program. Iran has insisted that the talks be confined to the nuclear program, and that its ballistic missile arsenal cannot be negotiated away.
The Israeli prime minister is trying to pressure Mr. Trump to get Iran to change its position by agreeing to limit its missile program. And if that does not work, he wants to convince Mr. Trump to approve another military campaign aimed at the missile sites, according to Israeli and U.S. officials.
For months, Mr. Netanyahu and other Israeli officials have told members of the Trump administration that the military conflict last June — when Israeli and U.S. airstrikes hit nuclear enrichment and ballistic missile facilities in Iran — left Iran damaged but still dangerous.
In particular, they have argued, Iran quickly rebuilt the missile sites damaged during the conflict.
During the 12-day conflict, Iran launched hundreds of missiles at Israel. Israeli military officials have said that Israel succeeded in intercepting and destroying more than 80 percent of the projectiles, and yet the Iranian barrage still inflicted significant damage to Israeli military and civilian targets.
During the conflict, the Israeli military had to conserve its interceptors, giving greater priority to the defense of densely populated areas and particularly important strategic installations.
Israeli intelligence assessments have concluded that if another conflict breaks out, Iran may decide that Israel is more vulnerable, without sufficient interceptors to defend its cities.
In addition to medium-range missiles capable of hitting Israel, Iran also has a large stockpile of shorter-range missiles that could hit U.S. military bases in Qatar, Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East.
For years, international attention has focused on Iran’s nuclear program, which the country insists is for peaceful, civilian purposes, and on the prospect that a nuclear bomb could give Iran the ultimate deterrent against efforts to overthrow the theocratic government in Tehran.
But analysts who study Iran’s government say that, at least in the near term, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, sees Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal as the only thing ensuring the survival of his government. Iran is even more reliant on its missiles as a deterrent, they argue, now that the militia groups it has long used as proxy forces, especially Hezbollah in Lebanon, are significantly diminished.
As a result, they say, the supreme leader would never agree to limit Iran’s ability to use the missiles to strike Israel or U.S. military bases in the region.
“From Iran’s perspective, the risk of military strike by the United States is less than the risk of giving up the only defense Iran has against it,” said Raz Zimmt, an Iran expert at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University.
“They believe that giving up the missiles would pave the way to regime change,” he said.
An analysis of satellite images by The New York Times this month appears to confirm that the missile program is Iran’s top strategic priority. The images show that Iran has moved quickly to repair several ballistic facilities damaged by Israeli strikes last year, but has done only minimal rebuilding of the major nuclear sites damaged or destroyed by the air campaign.
The satellite images analyzed by The Times show that Iran has carried out repair work in recent months in at least a dozen facilities involved in the production and launching of ballistic missiles. Iran appears to have prioritized rebuilding one of the sites, an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps missile testing and launch facility in Shahroud, in northern Iran, activity that could make the site operational again.
On Saturday, one day after U.S. and Iranian officials held indirect talks in Oman, Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, reiterated his country’s position on its arsenal, saying the “missile issue” was “in no way negotiable, neither now nor at any time in the future.”
At the beginning of the conflict last June, some Israeli officials estimated that Iran had more than 2,000 ballistic missiles. By the war’s end, there were estimates that the arsenal had dwindled by one-third to one-half, either because Iran had fired projectiles at Israel, or because Israel had struck the missile caches where they were being stored.
Now, after months of steady work, some experts believe Iran’s missile stocks are largely replenished.
“They are getting close to where they were before the 12-day war,” said Mr. Zimmt.
Ronen Bergman contributed reporting from Tel Aviv.
Mark Mazzetti is an investigative reporter based in Washington, D.C., focusing on national security, intelligence, and foreign affairs. He has written a book about the C.I.A.
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