We don’t have the luxury of time to wait for a successful popular uprising to remove the Ayatollahs from power
There is a growing consensus that with or without a normalization agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, the latter will do whatever it takes to match an Iranian nuclear bomb with one of its own. Having watched both Israel and the United States essentially do nothing while the Iranians reached nuclear weapons threshold status, Riyadh is under no illusion that it is alone and must do whatever it can to acquire the ability to build its own nuclear deterrent.
Clearly, they can do this with or without American uranium reprocessing technology. And the idea of an Israeli nuclear umbrella shielding the Kingdom from an Iranian nuclear threat is totally unrealistic given Israel’s political unreliability- not to mention our military’s preference for “managing” problems rather than decisively eliminating them. But is there something Israel could do to preclude Saudi Arabia’s need for nuclear weapons?
Yes, there is. But first we have to appreciate the nature of the problem posed by Iran’s possession of nuclear weapons.
It’s an unfortunate fact that there is no level of conventional bombardment carried out by either Israel or the US that could totally eliminate Iran’s nuclear weapons establishment. This is due to Iran’s dispersal, hardening and redundancy of its nuclear weapons program.
Moreover, given that Iran has acquired the knowledge needed to rebuild whatever would be destroyed by a conventional enemy strike, it would only be a matter of time before Tehran once again reached threshold status- except this time with a very real incentive to proceed to actual nuclear weapons testing, which would essentially protect them from any further attack.
As well, the expected Iranian retaliation against countries like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the UAE- not to mention Israel, would be so devastating that the overall damage done to Middle East stability would be incalculable. What this means is that unless Iran is literally wiped off the map, it will not be possible to deter the Mullahs from continuing to sow terror and violence throughout our region under the protective cover of its burgeoning nuclear weapons arsenal.
Claims that Iran’s revolutionary drive for regional dominance could somehow be contained by economic embargoes or diplomatic isolation have already proven to be totally unsuccessful. And with America’s geostrategic concerns increasingly focused on the Indo-Pacific, it’s highly unlikely that any US administration- Republican or Democrat, will be predisposed to militarily confront the Iranians in any meaningful way.
That leaves Israel to shoulder the burden of taking out both the Iranian nuclear threat and the clerical regime in Tehran once and for all. This would require our use of nuclear weapons on a scale that would necessarily spell the end of Iran as a country. The only remaining questions involve whether Israel has the ability and the resolve to do so.
On the question of arms, suffice it to say that we apparently have the weapons needed to accomplish this mission. While it’s true that our nuclear arsenal was originally intended as a deterrent, that policy has clearly failed, leaving us with the imperative to employ them before they’re only useful as a retaliatory weapon after Israel has been nuked.
Granted, questions have been raised concerning our inadequate number of aerial refueling tankers. Without going into the fact that we could have converted enough passenger aircraft to serve as refuelers by this time if we’d have leaders who were willing to resist US pressure not to do so, the bottom line is that we have enough tankers for a reduced strike package employing air launched nuclear weapons.
We also have sufficient nuclear armed F-35s to neutralize Iranian air defenses on the approach routes to Iran’s major cities and the majority of their nuclear facilities. Most of these targets, along with Iranian air bases and missile complexes would probably be hit first by Jericho ballistic missiles equipped with MIRVd warheads.
To ensure that hardened Iranian nuclear sites are permanently rendered inaccessible there are things that can be added to our nuclear weapons that would turn these facilities into lethal zones for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
One argument raised against this type of all or nothing nuclear strike option holds that a more limited operation against Iran’s nuclear weapons plants and military industrial facilities might be more cost efficient or humane.
This touches on yet another concern with our suggested plan that says that it’s immoral to target an enemy country’s entire civilian population, particularly if it’s only a matter of time before it overthrows its ruling government.
Unfortunately, we don’t have the luxury of time to wait for a successful popular uprising to remove the Ayatollahs from power. And given the fact that the religious thugs running Iran are more than capable of ordering the deaths of millions of protesters, it’s not entirely clear that the latter will be successful in deposing Iran’s clerical regime.
As far as a more limited strike plan is concerned, we have to understand that the Iranian regime’s nuclear knowledge base is spread throughout their cities, at various universities and dedicated research institutes.
In order to ensure that what’s left of Iran never again poses a nuclear threat to us, we must do whatever is necessary to completely wipe out the country’s scientific elite and military command establishment. That requires what’s called a city busting strategy, that will also go far towards reestablishing the credibility of our deterrence against other potential regional threats.
The bottom line is that given the serious nature of Iran’s threat to our existence, we must allow ourselves the option of acting on the otherwise unthinkable use of nuclear weapons.
It’s not a policy I’d look forward to implementing, but it’s far better than losing our country to a bunch of mad fanatics, who want to finish what Hitler started.
When the dust settles from our nuclear strikes, the world may hate us, but at least they’ll be scared to death of us. Maybe then they’ll finally learn to leave us alone, to live out our age old dreams of statehood in peace.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/378156
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