Israel May Attack Iran Soon
A major escalation in Middle East tensions is forecast.
NYT (“Israel Appears Ready to Attack Iran, Officials in U.S. and Europe Say“):
Israel appears to be preparing to launch an attack soon on Iran, according to officials in the United States and Europe, a step that could further inflame the Middle East and derail or delay efforts by the Trump administration to broker a deal to cut off Iran’s path to building a nuclear bomb.
The concern about a potential Israeli strike and the prospect of retaliation by Iran led the United States on Wednesday to withdraw diplomats from Iraq and authorize the voluntary departure of U.S. military family members from the Middle East.
It is unclear how extensive an attack Israel might be preparing. But the rising tensions come after months in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has pressed President Trump to seize on what Israel sees as a moment of Iranian vulnerability to a strike.
Mr. Trump waved off another plan by Israel several months ago to attack Iran, insisting that he wanted a chance to negotiate a deal with Tehran that would choke off Iran’s ability to produce more nuclear fuel for a bomb. Two weeks ago, Mr. Trump said he had warned Mr. Netanyahu about launching a strike while U.S. negotiations with Iran were underway.
It is not clear how much effort Mr. Trump made to block Mr. Netanyahu again this time, but the president has appeared less optimistic in recent days about the prospects for a diplomatic settlement after Iran’s supreme leader rejected an administration proposal that would have effectively phased out Iran’s ability to enrich uranium on its soil. Mr. Netanyahu has walked up to bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities in the past, only to back off at the last minute.
[…]
Iran’s atomic program has progressed dramatically since Mr. Trump abandoned the 2015 deal. Analysts say that Iran is now on the brink of being able to manufacture enough nuclear material to fuel 10 nuclear weapons.
Constructing a workable device, if Iran chose to pursue that option, could take several more months. But many top Israeli officials already consider Iran’s progress to be unacceptable and have openly threatened military action against its nuclear facilities.
Many Israeli officials believe they have a golden opportunity to solve a decades-long problem. Israel has recently decimated Hezbollah and Hamas, Iranian proxy groups that Tehran has long relied on as a deterrent to Israeli action. And Israeli airstrikes last year severely reduced Iran’s air defense systems.
Some analysts warn that Iran has been restoring those defenses, making Israeli action against Iran’s nuclear program riskier by the week. It is also unclear whether Israel can inflict decisive damage on Iran’s nuclear program without U.S. military assistance.
We’ve seen similar warnings before, but they seem to be widespread in this instance. And the precautionary recalling of US diplomatic personnel is certainly a strong indicator that we’re taking it seriously.
It’s not clear from the reports what the targets would be, but presumably, it would be the nuclear development facilities. Targeting them has been talked about for more than twenty years now, with the consensus that Iran has hardened the targets sufficiently to render them immune to an Osirak-like attack. We may be about to put that theory to a test.
Glad you covered this. I just remarked this morning that the drumbeats of war are sounding and they weren’t being heard in our little US bubble.
BTW, I find it remarkable on the different attitudes toward war in Ukraine and the Middle East. We are now an energy exporter. By the Trump Administration own rhetoric we shouldn’t be caring what goes on in the Middle East. And yet….
Heckuva job, Trumpie!!
And it is maddening that they are now trying to get deal that would likely be very similar to JCPOA.
The people elected a famous incompetent leading a party that repeatedly demonstrates inability to govern and disinterest in governing. We’ll be fortunate if I things only stay as bad as they are getting.
And my statement doesn’t even begin to account for what Israel elects. We’re elect thoughtless and indolent agents of chaos, the Israelis have repeatedly elected a professional.
Obama wanted to negotiate in good faith with Iran and that was enough to make any negotiations suspect.
There’s an alternative timeline where Gore officially wins Florida, his security team manages to connect the dots and stop 9/11 and then get bin Laden by negotiating with the Taliban; the 2000s are then spent watching the Israeli right and Hamas burn themselves out after the second Intifada and liberalizing reformers in Iran hold their own. In America, instead of focusing on finding and then forgetting about WMDs, the Surge, tax cuts, and privatizing social security, the opiate crisis and the financialization of housing are dealt with before they explode. This averts the nutso moral collapse of Republicans, and in 2016 there’s a functioning American state, a Palestinian state, an Iran which is connected to the rest of world, and Iraq and Syria are slowly inching towards liberalization without any major violence.
This isn’t even like a utopian pipe dream. Iran and Gaza have Starbucks and Lululemon and annoying Instagram tourists coming for raves, and they’re part of the same global culture we’re part of.
But if you handed this counterfactual to the right here or in Israel they would think it sucks. They love the present and its pointless violence.
@Steven L. Taylor:
110% this!
Even the UN isn’t covering for Iran anymore
Since the at least the mid-90s Israel has been claiming that Iran was 5 years or less away from having nukes. They arent really that hard to build. The JCPOA gave us the best inspection program ever of any country and it got rid of Iran’s plutonium and enriched uranium. So I think it’s pretty clear that Iran hasn’t really been that interested in having nukes. Could they be now that they are facing future attacks? Sure. However, what has been clear all along is that what Israel really wants is for Iran to have no nukes and also not have any IBMs so that they would pretty much be at the mercy of Israel for air attacks.
I assume Israel is planning only air attacks. I think Israel would be willing to send in a lot of US soldiers in a ground attack but not any of their own.
Steve
@Steven L. Taylor:
@Matt Bernius:
You seem to expect us to believe someone who successfully negotiates a complex, multilateral treaty is a better negotiator than someone who incessantly brags about his negotiating skills while producing little of substance.
Seriously?
Putting on my analyst hat, I think we are at more danger of a major war in the ME since 2003, so I would take what’s going on very seriously.
There is a confluence of events and factors that make an Israeli attack more probable than has previously been the case:
– Iran is significantly weakened. It depended on proxies and allies as a conventional deterrent, and almost all of those are destroyed – Hezbollah, the Assad regime, Hamas. Only the Houthis remain, and they aren’t a significant threat to Israel. In short, Israeli planners understand that the asymmetry in terms of military capabilities between the two countries will probably never be greater than it is now. And Iran understands that too. Iran’s other ally, Russia, is occupied and will be unlikely to provide any military or other support, such as air defense systems, several of which Israel destroyed in the tit-for-tat engagements – it’s actually Iran that has been assisting Russia for the past couple of years.
– Iran was today formally found to be in serious material breach of its obligations under the IAEA. Uranium particles have been discovered in places they shouldn’t have been, and Iran has refused to provide an explanation for that or allow inspectors to properly investigate. This is very similar to 2001-2003 when particles were detected at several undisclosed sites that eventually unraveled and exposed Iran’s program. This is a fundamental breach of the core requirements of the NPT.
The fact that Iran is not cooperating and announced a new enrichment site today after being censured gives Israel a political justification for an attack. It’s also a sign that Iran may actually be trying to weaponize, given the previously named factors and Iran’s current weakness and lack of allies.
In short, from Israel’s perspective, there really has not been a better set of conditions to hit Iran’s nuclear program than exist right now.
What has long been in question is Israel’s ability to significantly damage Iran’s program and capabilities without US participation in an attack. To me, those questions remain and while I have little doubt Israel can cripple certain aspects of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, destruction and a serious setback to Iran’s program is still unlikely IMO.
One of the reasons I’ve always been skeptical and against striking Iran’s program is that it is ultimately a temporary measure. You can’t bomb knowledge, and so reconstitution is inevitable. And if Iran is attacked, then it seems certain they will reconstitute secretly and attempt to weaponize as quickly as possible. It’s quite likely they already have contingency plans in place to preserve key assets and technologies for that eventuality. So, it will be like bombing Iraq’s Osirak reactor in the 1980’s, where Iraq changed to uranium enrichment and a clandestine program that was extremely close to being able to make a bomb before Saddam stupidly invaded Kuwait a decade later.
@Andy:
I think it’s also worth noting that Netanyahu is also facing a LOT of political challenges and instability at home. See for example: https://apnews.com/article/israel-politics-netanyahu-government-parliament-coalition-7d4cfee79f4dedae5a63ee947b0c5af5
My understanding is that he survived the dissolution vote due to last minute deal making, but the overall issue of political weakness still stands.
Given his legal issues and his desire to cling to power, attacking Iran, like prolonging the Gaza war, is in his political best interests.
@Matt Bernius:
While there may be something to that, I don’t think it’s a major factor compared to the ones I mentioned. I’d also add a couple of points:
– Israel’s system of government doesn’t allow the PM to unilaterally order this kind of operation. At a minimum, the security cabinet (and maybe even the full cabinet) must agree to this course of action, and the factors I cited are much more likely to get the cabinet to agree than Bibi’s desire to save his own political skin.
– It’s not certain that this would benefit Netanyahu politically. This kind of operation is incredibly complex and risky. If it goes well, then yes, Bibi would benefit politically (as would any politician). But if it goes sideways, or the attack fails at its goals, then that won’t go well for him politically. In short, it only benefits him if the operation is seen as a success, and that’s far from certain.
@Andy:
The fact that Israel is not a signatory of the NPT doesn’t strike you as major chutzpah?
As our 2nd Amendment enthusiast friends are fond of saying, “an armed society is a polite society.”
Iran is just trying to create that polite society.
I saw a report the other day asserting that Iran had mastered the explosives needed to detonate an implosion-style bomb. That and some simple-minded fusion boosting could enable yields in the range of a few hundred kilotons.
If Iran is indeed aiming to make a nuke arsenal, they’re going about it sloooooowly.
There are two ways to make a nuke: uranium 235 or plutonium 239.
The former is only found in natural sources. alas, it makes up only 0.72% of all uranium, most of the rest being U238. Separating it is hard, because isotopes are chemically identical, and the sole difference is the mass of 3 neutrons among 235-238 other nucleons. Still, with 1940s technology, the US managed to obtain several kilograms of it within 3 years, enough for some crude first generation bombs.
Plutonium does not exists in nature (at least on Earth*). It needs to be manufactured in a breeder reactor, which does require some U235. the downside of this method is that nuclear reactors are big and conspicuous, and in a fixed location. This is why Israel could take out Saddam’s early nukes program with one blow.
All this is for “mere” nuclear weapons. if you want thermonuclear ones (H bombs) with megaton yields, you need tritium (hydrogen with two neutrons). Tritium does not exist in nature. If any did, it decays into helium 3, which cannot be used in nukes, with a short half life of about 12.5 years. It can be made in a breeder reactor by exposing lithium to the neutron flux.
this is all vastly oversimplified, and about at the edge of my understanding of such things.
My guess is that Iran does have enough U235 for a few weapons, but nothing past that. Very likely no plutonium and no tritium. If they have made any bombs, they haven’t tested them (it’s all but impossible to hide a nuke test, even if done underground).
They may not need to test them. The first nuke used in war, unofficially named Little Boy, was a U235 bomb that managed detonation by the simple expedient of slamming together two sub-critical masses of uranium into a supercritical mass. The scientists at Los Alamos in the 40s were so confident of this design, they didn’t test it. If Iran has a half dozen such bombs, they don’t need to test them either.
The advantage of testing a nuke is that it unmistakably lets the world know you have one, and lets it suspect you may have more. And at the same time it’s not an attack on anyone. So, we may find out soon if the Mullah’s have a few. If they believe an Israeli strike is imminent, they may test one to warn them off.
*If any existed in Earth’s starter composition, it has long since decayed to something else, seeing it’s half life is under 25,000 years. uranium, in contrast, has a half life measured in billions of years
@Kathy:
Not really. That’s been the fact on the ground since I was born.
@Gustopher:
What’s the saying that’s become so popular lately, something along the lines of “Believe authoritarian leaders when they tell you what they intend to do.”
They have a large amount (~400kg) of 60% enriched uranium, which could be enriched to 90%+ in days, or at most a couple of weeks.
The problem, from the standpoint of turning it into an actual weapon, is that it’s under IAEA monitoring, so such an effort would probably be detected. This is why it is so concerning that the IAEA has found uranium in places where it’s not supposed to be and Iran refusing to cooperate or explain where it came from – it points to an unmonitored stash of uranium and potentially a parallel enrichment infrastructure that isn’t being monitored.
@Andy:
It doesn’t work that way. Enrichment means how much U235 there is. So 400 kg at 60% enrichment means 400*0.6=240 kg of U235 and 160 kg. (400*0.4) of U238. That is, 400 kg of 60% enriched uranium will not yield 400 kg. of 90% enriched uranium.
The bad news is 240 kg may be enough for a couple dozen bombs. More if they do implosion (and, really, that’s the thing to do). But implosion detonation is far form a sure thing, no matter how well you test the explosive lenses on steel blanks.
An unsuccessful test might not be noticed, depending on how well they conceal the test area, and how the failure happens. if it fails to detonate at all, maybe no one will notice. if it detonates to a lower yield, say 10 kt rather than 100, it will be noticed.
ETA: why shouldn’t Iran, or anyone for that matter, bomb the Dimona reactor and/or send troops to secure Israel’s rogue nukes? Or for that matter India’s, Pakistan’s, and North Korea’s.
Game in. The war has started.
Oops, that last one was me.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/12/middleeast/israel-iran-strikes-intl-hnk?cid=ios_app
And away we go!
What i wonder is how the IDF is routing their strikes and refueling/support aircraft. The map suggests they need to overfly Syria and Irak, possibly Jordan as well.
The irony that this is exactly why Iran wants a nuclear deterrent in the first place is lost on many who, you’d think, should know better.
@Kathy:
A U235 “gun” type is pretty much certain to work.
But with the downsides of massively inefficient “fission burn” and a very heavy and bulky device,
The Hiroshima type “Little Boy” was about 4 tons.
I don’t think any missile or military aircraft available to Iran has anything close to that payload capability.
(I have a vague recollection that South Africa developed a gun design of only one ton which might just put it within the max throw-weight of some Iranian ballistic missiles.)
The most likely (for an arbitrary value of “likely”) delivery method would have to be a modified transport aircraft of some sort. And good luck with that.
On the other hand, implosion methodology is probably better understood now than it was, and commonplace computers can handle the mathematical modelling required.
On the gripping hand, iirc most U235 based imploder designs also have some use of plutonium and other finicky details. So mastering those without live testing might be problematic.
@DeD:
Except Iran would be in a lot less danger of being attacked if it was not pursuing a nuclear weapon.
And one thing that people are not mentioning at all: if Israel decides it MUST end the program and do so both URGENTLY and TOTALLY, it has an obvious option.
An option with massive political consequences, but an option nonetheless.
Iran is in fact running existential risks for the arguable military strategic cover nuclear weapons might provide for the ideological luxury of pursuing a “front of resistance” posture.
One which has, in fact, proved of limited real use, even before the recent reverses of Iranian allies in Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza.
@JohnSF:
*You can’t have a nuclear weapon, because I say so.
*You can’t have an abortion because I say so.
*You can’t love who you want freely and openly because I say so.
*You can’t vote because I say so.
White Western domination and arrogance has gone way past tiresome. But, that’s just my welfare two cent opinion.
Call me odd, but I fail to see a necessary connection beetween nuclear waepon on the one hand, and abortion rights, romantic affinities, and voting
Nor between “White Western domination and arrogance” an those last three.
Especailly if you consider that at least some “white westerners” have been, and are, among the most prominent supporters of all three.
And still more as it’s not hard, on ithernational social media, to find a fairly large numebr of people condemning advocacy of your last three points as exemplifying “White Western domination and arrogance”.
@JohnSF:
When you view Whiteness as the political system of power and domination that it is rather than a race of individuals, set up for the sole benefit of a particular demographic, with the purpose of keeping that demographic politically, culturally, and economically superior above everyone and everything else, you understand the connection.
Let’s not forget that the U.S. and UK are the birth parents of today’s Iranian regime. The U S. has had multiple chances to engage Iran and normalize relations, but it seems there was no Iran before 1979, and here we are, with the U.S. continuing to boss and bully its own people and other countries into doing whatever it wants. Again, the shytz beyond tiresome.
@DeD:
“Whiteness” in that sense seems to become little more than a rhetorical label.
It seems to me like the same ol’ same ol’ mix of pararnoiac class-warfare assumptions among a section of the upper-middle class, and related appeals to the grievances and fears of sections of the working class.
With, American history being what it is, a large admixture of evangelical nuttery and post-slavery racism.
However, attempting to map American domestic politcal sociology onto either international relations, or the domestic politics of other countries seems likely to lead to misperceptions.
I’m aware of the historical links back to Mossadegh and all that; and indeed well before then.
But it should not be dicounthed that in 1979 and subsequently, the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary governments were not obliged, by some inevitable force of history, to chose and to adhere to “Death to America!” as basic doctrine.
Or to make the “rejectionist” anti-Israel cause as the bedrock of their foreign policy (more recently rivaled by the cause of Shia particularism).
Thoese were CHOICES, made for reasons of Iranian domestic politics and regional ambitions.
It’s notable that the US in fact did NOT attempt effectively to sustain the Shah in power, or to resort to military intervention to overthrow the new regime.
(The Iraqi war on Iran was NOT such,)
The US is not the sole sinner in the world, nor even the worst, imho.
ymmv