WarSclerotic

Israel Hayom.

If Iran does not halt its pursuit of nuclear weapons, it will face a choice between “keeping the bomb or surviving,” Vice Prime Minister and Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe (Bogey) Ya’alon said on Thursday, according to Army Radio.

Speaking at a conference organized by Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, Ya’alon said Tehran must be prevented from acquiring nuclear military capabilities, “in one way or another.”

He said the “non-conventional” Iranian regime should not have access to “non-conventional” weapons, and stressed that Israel must deal with Iran according to the principle of, “The work of the righteous is done by others,” but also remembering Hillel’s principle of, “If I am not for myself, then who will be for me?”

“This is a critical time. The Iranians need to be convinced that if they don’t meet the conditions placed on them, they will face a choice between keeping the bomb or surviving,” Ya’alon said.

The vice prime minister’s comments came after the news website The Daily Beast reported on Wednesday that a possible Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear sites would likely include “electronic warfare” on the country’s civilian infrastructure including its electric grids, Internet and cellphone networks, and emergency frequencies used by its firefighting and police forces.

Current and former U.S. intelligence officials told The Daily Beast that based on a U.S. intelligence assessment conducted over the summer, Israel has developed, for example, a weapon capable of imitating a maintenance cellphone signal that instructs a cellphone network to “sleep,” therefore effectively stopping transmissions. Israel also has “jammers” capable of triggering interference in Iran’s emergency frequencies for first response services, the officials said.

“In a 2007 attack on a suspected nuclear site at al-Kibar, the Syrian military got a taste of this warfare when Israeli planes ‘spoofed’ the country’s air-defense radars, at first making it appear that no jets were in the sky and then in an instant making the radar believe the sky was filled with hundreds of planes,” Daily Beast reporter Eli Lake writes.

Israel would also likely take advantage of U.S.-detected vulnerabilities in Iranian cities’ electric grids, the Daily Beast report said, quoting the intelligence officials. The electric grids are not “air-gapped,” which means they are connected to the Internet and are therefore susceptible to a Stuxnet-style cyber-attack, the officials said.

The electronic components in such an attack would be delivered using unmanned aerial vehicles the size of jumbo jets, the officials told The Daily Beast. The Israeli reconnaissance UAV, the Eitan, can fly at altitudes above commercial air traffic for 20 straight hours and can carry a payload of one ton.

Lake notes that similar unmanned drones have been a critical tool used by the U.S. in its wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, to collect intelligence and fire missiles at suspected terrorists. “But Israel’s fleet has been specially fitted for electronic warfare,” Lake writes, quoting the intelligence officials.

In recent weeks, talk over a possible Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear sites has increased.

The International Atomic Energy Agency released a report recently claiming that Iran has been secretly developing nuclear weapons since 2003. Citing “credible” information from member states and elsewhere, the Vienna-based U.N. nuclear watchdog listed a series of activities tied to developing nuclear weapons, such as high explosives testing, the development of nuclear warheads for missiles and the development of an atomic bomb trigger.

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