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Its Proxies Pummeled, Iran is Suddenly More Vulnerable Than Ever. Will It Go Nuclear?

Times of Israel - Sunday, December 22, 2024 by Lazar Berman and |

Iran’s position has slipped dramatically in recent weeks.

Israel hammered its most powerful proxy, Hezbollah, into stopping its rocket attacks in November after the Lebanese terror group lost its leadership and thousands of fighters.

Days later, Sunni rebels took advantage of Israel’s successes and swept southward from Idlib, ending the Assad family’s half-century of rule in Syria and breaking the land bridge between Iran and Hezbollah.

Tehran’s vaunted missile arsenal has proven underwhelming as well. Its two massive attacks on Israel this year succeeded in killing one Palestinian man and wounding a 7-year-old Bedouin girl. In response, Israel showed it can carry out airstrikes on sensitive Iranian sites. Israeli Air Force planes also destroyed the Islamic Republic’s state-of-the-art air defense batteries, opening the path to future strikes on sensitive infrastructure.

Though the focus for months has been on the dramatic developments across Israel’s northern frontier, it is now returning to the issue that dominated Israeli and Western security discussions before October 7 — Iran’s nuclear program.

And one question is on everyone’s mind: Will Iran’s newfound weakness cause it to avoid sparking a confrontation with its more powerful adversaries, or will it prove to the Islamic Republic that its survival depends on attaining a nuclear weapon?

Iran advances

The Western countries leading the effort to prevent Iran from moving ahead with its nuclear program are sounding the alarm.

On Tuesday, Britain, France and Germany accused Iran of growing its stockpile of highly enriched uranium to “unprecedented levels” without “any credible civilian justification.”

“Iran’s stockpile of High Enriched Uranium has also reached unprecedented levels, again without any credible civilian justification. It gives Iran the capability to rapidly produce sufficient fissile material for multiple nuclear weapons,” the trio said in the statement.

In a report in early December, the Office of the United States Director of National Intelligence warned that “Iran now has enough fissile material to make more than a dozen nuclear weapons,” but said the regime had not yet decided to break out to a bomb.

Despite the advances, the program stands more or less where it was before October 7. Iran hasn’t enriched uranium past the 60 percent mark, and its estimated breakout time has not shrunk.

“The bottom line has not changed,” said Raz Zimmt, an Iran scholar at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.

Iranian rhetoric has become noticeably sharper over the past year, however.

“The threats of the Zionist regime against Iran’s nuclear facilities make it possible to revise our nuclear doctrine and deviate from our previous considerations,” said Ahmad Haghtalab, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander in charge of nuclear security, in April, as Tehran awaited Israel’s response to its first ballistic missile attack.

“We have no decision to build a nuclear bomb but should Iran’s existence be threatened,” echoed an adviser to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in May, “there will be no choice but to change our military doctrine.”

In October, dozens of lawmakers signed a letter to Iran’s Supreme National Security Council asking it to change its doctrine to allow the production of nuclear weapons.

But that rhetoric doesn’t mean Iran is about to break out to a nuclear weapon.

With key provisions of the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal expiring in 2025, and incoming US President Donald Trump seemingly open to discussing a new agreement, Iran’s threatening language is meant to pressure the three European states in the JCPOA to keep Washington from adopting an overly aggressive stance against Iran, said Alex Vatanka, founding Director of the Iran Program at the Middle East Institute.

“I haven’t seen anything to suggest that this has been anything other than a fresh pressure strategy to shape the calculations of the Western camp,” he explained.

Iran also agreed last week to tougher monitoring by the UN nuclear watchdog at its Fordow site.

Jonathan Ruhe, director of foreign policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, is not entirely of the same opinion.

Ruhe concurred that Iran’s expansion of high-enriched uranium stockpiles is useful leverage for anticipated talks with the West, but argues that it also “compensates for Iran’s losses on other fronts by positioning it for a major breakout.”

With its string of losses and a long-stagnant economy, Iran may at some point decide that the last card it has to play is indeed moving toward a nuclear weapon.

Watching weaponization

A key component of that process, not under the IAEA monitoring regime, is weaponization.

According to Axios, US and Israeli intelligence began to detect new activity at the “Taleghan 2” earlier this year, including computer modeling, metallurgy and research on explosives, that would be relevant to creating a nuclear device.

“They conducted scientific activity that could lay the ground for the production of a weapon. It was a top-secret thing. A small part of the Iranian government knew about this, but most of the Iranian government didn’t,” a US official told Axios.

Israeli airstrikes on Iran in October targeted the site, said the report, destroying sophisticated equipment used to design the explosives that could surround uranium in a nuclear device.

The attack indicates that Israeli intelligence has penetrated Iran’s weaponization project, and would know if Tehran resumes its push toward creating the specialized device.

But “the final leap to a bomb could still be hard to detect,” cautioned Ruhe. “The IAEA still lacks clarity on Iran’s bomb-building program, and historically it’s been incredibly difficult to detect the decisions that propel countries to take that last step.”

Still, other factors are making it less likely for Iran to make that move.

A decision to weaponize was always a dangerous move for a regime in Tehran that was worried about provoking a direct attack from the US and its allies. With its proxies battered and air defenses reduced, that decision would be even more dangerous.

Israel’s options

With Iran’s deterrence against Israel dissipating, voices calling for an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear program are growing louder.

IDF officials briefed reporters last week that the IAF is continuing its preparations for potential strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Due to the dramatic changes in the Middle East, especially the fall of Bashar al-Assad, which allowed the IAF to take out the vast majority of Syria’s air defenses, the Israeli military believes there is now an opportunity to strike Iran’s nuclear sites, the officials said.

What would Israel be able to accomplish, if it chose to strike in the final weeks of a lame-duck Joe Biden presidency?

Israeli strikes in Iran in October and in Yemen this week should leave little doubt about the IAF’s ability to carry out major long-range precision air raids.

But it would certainly not be able to wipe out the nuclear program, only delay it.

The challenge would be “to attack the Iranian nuclear program in the multiple sites where you have to carry out an attack, in a way where you feel confident that you’ve done the sort of damage that will be hard to undo for years,” said Vatanka.

Iran has been working hard to make that kind of success much harder to achieve.

“Iran has spent years making its infrastructure as resilient as possible by dispersing enrichment-related activities, moving them deeper underground, and blocking inspectors,” said Ruhe. “Expedited transfers of US-made KC-46 tankers and bunker busters would certainly help here.”

Israel might prefer to wait until the Trump administration takes office, with the hope that he is more likely to give Israel the munitions it needs for an attack, or even eventually order a strike himself.

“We are in a waiting period,” said Zimmt.

The Iranians are likely waiting for Trump to indicate what his policy will be before deciding on their next steps, and Israel could well be in a similar posture.

“The most likely possibility is that Iran will try to conduct some sort of dialogue with the new administration,” Zimmt predicted. “Both sides are ready for negotiations.”

“The problem is I don’t see how these negotiations reach an agreement.”

If they don’t, then in October 2025, the possibility of invoking “snapback” UN Security Council sanctions on Iran will expire — a major landmark that adds urgency for the West to come to some sort of plan of action well before that date.

Originally published in Times of Israel.