WarSclerotic

I’ve often expressed doubt about whether Israel’s air force has the striking power to inflict enough damage on Iran’s nuclear installations to make war a rational option.  It’s impossible to answer this question definitively, but on balance the answer is “probably not”. A quick reminder: the key factor here is whether Israel has enough air-to-air refuelling capacity to get its strike aircraft and the necessary fighter escorts all the way to their targets in Iran and back again.

On paper, the Israeli air force has only 7 KC-707 tanker planes. It’s hard to see how this would be enough to keep the attack fleet of 125 F-15Is and F-16Is airborne for long enough.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies has published an interesting analysis of this issue by Josef Joffe of Stanford University. His conclusion is that Israel could not hope to destroy all of Iran’s nuclear plants. Instead, its air force would aim to knock out key elements of the nuclear supply chain by destroying perhaps two installations. Joffe suggests they would target the uranium conversion facility at Isfahan (without the ability to convert uranium into UF6 gas, Iran would have to stop enriching). He thinks the other target would be the more vulnerable of Iran’s two enrichment plants, located at Natanz (Joffe thinks, probably rightly, that Israel lacks the bombs powerful enough to destroy the other installation at Fordow).

This analysis looks sound to me, but it raises an important issue. The only rationale for the military option would be to delay the nuclear programme and buy time before Iran gets the ability to build a bomb. But the fewer nuclear plants that Israel would destroy, the quicker Iran’s recovery time from any strike. It’s impossible to forecast the impact of the kind of scaled down attack that Israel is capable of launching. But it seems unlikely that it would set back Iran’s efforts by more than a handful of years, even on an optimistic measure. So would the Israeli government really be willing to start a regional war and precipitate a global crisis for the sake of destroying perhaps two nuclear plants that Iran could replace pretty quickly? Somehow, I doubt it.

The alternative would be to rely on America, which really could destroy all of Iran’s nuclear plants, probably including Fordow, and set back the programme by considerably more years. Trusting the Americans is an unappealing option for Israel’s leadership. After all, the whole point of the state of Israel is to avoid relying on outside powers when it comes to national security. But my hunch is that, in reality, Israel’s government will have little choice.