Israel still has work to do if it is to destroy or significantly hamper Iran’s ability to acquire nuclear weapons, and risks emboldening Tehran into pursuing its programme to create an atom bomb at any cost, experts have warned.
The onslaught by Israeli forces against multiple Iranian targets – dubbed Operation Rising Lion – had at its core an attempt to degrade once and for all Tehran’s decades-long pursuit of a nuclear weapon , by striking both infrastructure and the scientists judged by Tel Aviv to be vital to the Islamic Republic’s atomic project.
But despite hitting the Natanz nuclear site – described by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as Iran’s “main enrichment facility” for near-weapons grade uranium, and assassinating six senior scientists, it was not immediately clear how much of Tehran’s stockpile of nuclear materials had been eliminated alongside its technical ability to build a bomb.
Leading experts, including a former UN weapons inspector and a former senior Israeli intelligence officer, told The i Paper that a number of other key Iranian installations – including Fordow, south of Tehran – needed to feature on Israel’s target list if it is to permanently hobble Iran’s nuclear project.
Such a move, which Tehran has previously threatened to make, would take Iran beyond the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN body which for now at least has a role in monitoring its nuclear activities and alerting the outside world – as it did on the eve of the Israeli strikes – when it is no longer compliant with its undertakings.
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Dolzikova said: “Should Iran decide to [withdraw from the NPT], its nuclear programme will become a much more challenging nuclear proliferation threat to deal with than it is now.”
The result is a moment of rare and potent peril for the Middle East and indeed the wider world.
As a former senior Nato official put it: “We have feared this moment for a long time. And the reason we feared it is precisely because the potential outcomes are so varied and so close to the sort of uncontrolled escalation that can lead to a regional war, or worse.”
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