Former Head of Israel’s National Security Council: Iran’s Nuclear Program Set Back Over a Decade

Maj. Gen. (Res.) Yaakov Amidror, former head of Israel’s National Security Council and JINSA Distinguished Fellow, explained his theory on the developments in the campaign against Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Amidror referred to the IDF’s achievements and the attack on the Iranian regime and prepared for the decisive phase of the campaign: “I don’t know if we will be sitting in battalion headquarters on Passover, but it is worth planning for it. This is a long process in which we and the Americans are working together to damage deep infrastructures that have been built in Iran for almost 50 years.”

Amidror added, “Even if the regime remains in place, the regime that will be in Iran will lack many tools that have been built over years in the entire field of the industrial base, production capabilities for everything related to the industrial world of heavy industry, missile production, drone production, all kinds of things needed around the nuclear program, production of weapons in general. Iran is a country with very large military capabilities. Let’s remember, for example, that the Russians bought the first versions of UAVs from the Iranians; the Iranians had capabilities that the Russians did not have in this field.”

According to Amidror, “This process is not a one-off. At the same time, serious attacks are also being made on the Basij, the Revolutionary Guards. An American general told me that it’s like a ladder, you start on the upper floors with those who have the highest priority and slowly you go down and you start to hit those with lower priority but people who still have a part in the process.”

“The Americans also hit the Iranian navy, which practically ceased to exist, it only had capabilities in areas that are difficult to detect, such as mines and Iranian ships. In principle, they don’t have a navy and their air force was not significant,” Amidror said, adding that the arms of the Iranian army were mostly eliminated.

Regarding the day after the campaign in Iran, Amidror clarified: “We pushed them back. At the end of the 12 days, they lost some of their capabilities in the missile and nuclear fields, but it wasn’t profound. Not the entire industry. In the end, they will also be able to build it in the future, but instead of it taking them a year, it will take them ten years. One of the complicated things to know today is what level of supervision we and the Americans will have over the Iranians after the war is over. That is, how will we jointly monitor what is happening there, will there be an agreement based on an agreement or divisions on the ground, that every time they try to do something that we think is a deviation from what is right for them to have, we go back there and destroy it.”

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