Ehud Barak: Iran Can Transform Itself into a Nuclear Power—And It’s Too Late to Stop It By Surgical Attack
Time-July 25th ,2022
It’s time to face reality.
It was for good reason that, nine months ago, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that if an agreement is not achieved within weeks it might not be worth signing. That’s even more true today. Iran kept enriching uranium and has turned from a country that Russia was assigned to monitor into a country supplying Russia with armed drones. At this point, a new agreement would be useful mainly for appearances, providing both sides a ‘denial umbrella’ for domestic needs — for the U.S., avoiding tougher realities and choices, and, for the Iranians, keeping sanctions at the lightest level possible.
This summer, Iran will turn into a de-facto threshold nuclear state. Yes, it will still take them from 18 to 24 months to polish their skills treating metal uranium and packing it into a missile warhead. But these steps can be executed in a small lab or workshop and cannot be easily followed, never mind stopped. It may well be that, even if and when Iran becomes a nuclear threshold country, the mullahs will opt to pretend otherwise, remaining in the Non-Proliferation
Treaty (NPT) regime in order to avoid even heavier sanctions. But that will not change the reality. After more than 20 years of trying, Iran is about to cross the point of no return in becoming a member of the “nuclear club.”
This has been the mullahs’ ambition all along.
They have successfully followed in the footsteps of North Korea and Pakistan, who defied the whole world and turned nuclear. They also avoided the coerced end of the Libyan and South African nuclear programs, and the fate of the Iraqi and Syrian programs, destroyed by Israeli surgical air raids in 1981 and 2007 respectively.
But in 1981 and 2007, those programs weren’t as advanced as the Iran’s program had been allowed to become.
For unexplainable reasons, after the US pulled out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2018 neither the US nor Israel prepared an available military ‘plan B,’ a kinetic attack capable of delaying the Iranian program by at least several years.
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