Jerusalem
Center for Public Affairs
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| Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (left) and President Ebrahim Raisi (right) |
A version of this article appeared on the N12 website in Hebrew.
On
August 4, both Minister of Defense Benny Gantz and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid
briefed ambassadors from the member states that sit on the UN Security Council.
While the occasion for their joint appearance was the escalation of terror
attacks using UAVs against international shipping, most of the international
attention was drawn to the statement by Defense Minister Gantz that Iran had
violated all the guidelines established by the JCPOA (the Iran deal) and, as a
result, it was only “around 10 weeks away from acquiring weapons grade
materials necessary for a nuclear weapon.” This was not speculation by yet
another columnist, but rather a statement in the clearest terms by the defense
minister of Israel.
In
response to the interviews, Lapid added several weeks later that he wanted to
save the public from a sense of panic from the news that Iran had become a
nuclear threshold state. He based his argument by drawing a distinction between
a state that had become a threshold state and a state that had become a
threshold state only with respect to the amount of enriched uranium it had in
its possession. While not defining how much time Iran needed to actually
produce a nuclear bomb, he did say it was not just a matter of months. When
asked how close Iran was to a nuclear weapon, he answered: “It was a lot
more.”
Israel’s
situation with Iran poses a real dilemma for diplomacy. On the one hand,
diplomacy must always be accurate. The Iranians specialize in deception. Israel
does not and should not play that game. On the other hand, Israel must build an
international coalition against Iran’s determination to deploy nuclear forces
and threaten the security of Israel, the Middle East, and the entire world. It
must motivate potential members of that coalition to understand the urgency of
the situation and why the time to act together has arrived.
It
is important to lay out what specialists mean by Iran having an operational
nuclear weapons program. There are three elements involved. First, Iran needs
delivery systems to carry its nuclear weapon to a target. In 1998, Iran
first tested its Shahab-3 missile which was based on North Korean technology.
In 2003, the Shahab-3 missile became operational in the Iranian armed forces.
It had a range of 1,300 kilometers – the distance required to strike Israel
from bases located on Iranian territory.
Between
1998 and 2017, Iran conducted 21 flight tests using the Shahab-3. In 2015, the
Iranians released video tapes for the first time showing that Iran had created
a system of underground missile bases, from where it could launch its missiles
from silos. In other words, the need for a delivery system to launch nuclear
weapons should not hold up Iran’s quest for a fleet of nuclear weapons. Iran
was already there.
Second,
commentators like to point out that the weaponization of uranium into an actual
explosive device (in Hebrew “kvutzat haneshek”) takes time
to develop. However, the quarterly reports from the International Atomic Energy
Agency during 2011 already contained worrying information back then. The May
2011 report presented Iranian military research that had taken place including
“the removal of the high conventional explosive payload from the warhead of the
Shahab-3 missile and replacing it with a spherical nuclear payload.”
Iranian
documents that were in the hands of the IAEA acknowledged that detonation of
its warhead was to take place at an altitude of 600 meters. That happened to be
the height of the first atomic explosion in 1945 over the Japanese city of
Hiroshima.
Third,
while uranium is normally found in two forms or isotopes – U-238 and U-235 –
only U-235 can undergo nuclear fission and release the energy of an atomic
bomb. Natural uranium is only 0.7% U-235. Enrichment seeks to increase that
level to 3.5% for a civilian reactor and to 90% for an atomic weapon. While the
Iran deal limited the level of permitted enrichment to 3.5%, by 2019, Tehran
was enriching to 4.5%, and later to 20%, declaring that it was ready to go up
to 60%.
Because
uranium enrichment is the most difficult step for states with nuclear ambitions
to take, Tehran’s massive investment in enrichment is the most important
indicator of Iranian determination to go the whole way to become a nuclear
weapons state. Finally, when the enrichment process begins, the uranium that is
injected into centrifuges is in a gaseous form. To build a nuclear warhead, the
uranium has to be in the form of metal. In August 2021, the IAEA verified that
Iran was producing uranium metal. It now seemed that Iran was preparing to make
the final push to an atomic weapon, but that would not take years or months but
rather, far less.
It
would be a mistake to conclude that Israel has a great deal of time because the
Iranians work sequentially, completing one component of their program before
moving on to the next. The authoritative Institute for Science and
International Security has made clear that the Iranians worked under the
assumption that their work on the components would not be sequential and not be
separated but rather had to be conducted “in unison.”
In
Israel there has been a tendency for political leaders to blame each other for
the situation that has emerged. There is only one party that is to blame and
that is the Iranian leadership. Right after the first nuclear agreements were
reached between Iran and the European Union’s EU-3 in 2005, Tehran was burying
the evidence of its nuclear work at various facilities that were supposed to be
inspected. This has been the pattern ever since. Unfortunately, the Western
powers have been torn between their own naivete and their desire to protect
their commerce with Iran. The inaction that resulted is what allowed the
Iranian nuclear program to continue to expand.
Amb. Dore Gold
Ambassador Dore Gold has
served as President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs since 2000. From
June 2015 until October 2016 he served as Director-General of the Israel
Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Previously he served as Foreign Policy Advisor to
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Ambassador to the UN (1997-1999),
and as an advisor to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
