One person is responsible for Israel’s attack on Iran: Rafael Mariano Grossi, the Argentine director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA, since December 2019.
His predecessors, and especially Mohamed El Baradei, in charge 1997-2009 when it first became clear that Iran’s nuclear efforts were aimed at weapons and not energy, were extremely polite international diplomats, who presented the IAEA’s reports on Iran in very restrained language — as if they were describing purely academic research.
Grossi’s reports were entirely different. He was a diplomat until he arrived at IAEA, but from the start of his career in the Argentine foreign service, he had immersed himself in technological questions, acquiring a great deal of engineering expertise over the years.
From the start, Grossi’s investigations in Iran focused on the country’s vast effort to “enrich” uranium, to increase the proportion of radioactive U-235. Some energy reactors can operate with zero enrichment by using heavy water moderators, while others work very well with 3-4% enrichment, or a maximum of 5% of U-235.
Because the infrastructure needed to enrich uranium is extremely expensive, only a handful of the 31 countries that operate nuclear reactors have ever tried it themselves. Most simply buy it from the cheapest source, often Russia as well France, the UK and Kazakhstan.
But Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. The IAEA has inspectors who dutifully investigate nuclear installations — or rather those voluntarily shown to them. But they can only ask to visit nuclear installations that show up in freely available satellite photography. There was one in Iran that Grossi wanted to visit starting very early in his tenure: Parchin, some 15 miles south-east of Tehran. But his requests were persistently refused. Previous IAEA chiefs would have moved on to other things, but for Grossi it was the turning point: he had found the place where Iran was preparing to shape uranium and assemble its nuclear weapons.
From then on, his reports made it increasingly clear that Iran’s enormous expenditures, on some of the largest nuclear installations in the world, meant that it was after nuclear weapons as soon as possible. The main Natanz building has an area of 2.7 square kilometres, enough for no less than 50,000 centrifuges. It is clearly meant for the mass production of nuclear weapons, in parallel with the production of hundreds of ballistic missiles. Neither India, nor Pakistan or Israel, all of which have nuclear weapons, have ever attempted anything remotely on that scale.
What happened next was that Grossi started warning everyone that Iran would soon become a nuclear power, one ruled by religious fanatics pursuing the Shi’a vendetta against the world’s Sunnis for killing the last descendant of Muhammad at Karbala back in 680 AD, and for whom the destruction of Israel is key to supremacy over the entire Middle East.
When the Israelis realised that European leaders — but also Russia and China, and indeed the Biden administration — ignored Grossi’s increasingly alarmed warnings that a nuclear Iran was only months away, they waited for Trump to intervene. In this, they were immediately reassured when the US sent B2 bombers to its Diego Garcia base, each capable of destroying even Natanz.
But then Trump met resistance from the isolationists in his own administration, while he himself evidently did not want to begin his tenure with a war. Instead, he appointed a New York lawyer with no Iran or nuclear expertise to negotiate with the Islamic Republic. Unfortunately, Steve Witkoff was so poorly informed that he immediately accepted the enrichment level that Obama had negotiated, and which Trump had vehemently attacked as much too dangerous.
“Steve Witkoff was so poorly informed that he immediately accepted the enrichment level that Obama had negotiated”
That is when the Israeli government — not just Netanyahu, but the entire defence ministry leadership alongside Mossad — understood that their country would very soon be faced with a nuclear Iran. It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.
Operationally, the seemingly impossible challenge was to bomb large nuclear installations a long way from Israel without a single strategic bomber. Aside from the immense Natanz installation, other essential targets included large buildings in the Parchin base not far from Tehran, where the bomb would have been assembled. There were other vital targets too, including the uranium hexafluoride plant near Isfahan. On top of all that, the Israelis would also have to attack the hundreds of Iranian long-range missiles aimed at Israel.
To reach all these targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day — with 60 Mirage fighters and little else. Copying Formula One racing crews, to quickly refuel and re-arm the same few aircraft to attack again and again, Israel’s highly trained ground crews multiplied its air power, while its pilots made the most of their few bombs with extreme precision.
This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible — but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.
And, of course, there are also Israelis on the ground, including the ones who killed Iran’s two top military leaders. Yesterday, Al Arabiya had two successive reports on Hossein Salami, commander of the Revolutionary Guards. The first was Salami’s warning that Iran’s retaliation for any attack would be “unprecedented”. The second, a few hours later, relayed Iranian state TV’s confirmation that Salami had been killed. He, too, was surprised, as well as all the experts who explained that Israel could never do it alone, without US heavy bombers.
