WaPo (“Israel strikes Iran, as Trump officials say no U.S. military support“):
Israel launched military strikes on Iran early Friday, potentially plunging the Middle East into a new round of violence and signaling the likely end for now of President Donald Trump’s hopes for a negotiated peace deal to halt Tehran’s nuclear development.
In a video statement early Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “This operation will continue for as many days as it takes to remove” what he called a “clear and present danger to Israel’s very survival.” Iran, he said, could “produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time. It could be a year. It could be a few months.”
Netanyahu said that Israeli aircraft had “struck at the heart” of Iran’s nuclear enrichment and “nuclear weaponization” programs, including Iran’s main uranium enrichment facility in Natanz. “We targeted Iran’s leading nuclear scientists working on the Iranian bomb. We also struck at the heart of Iran’s ballistic missile program.”
Iranian media reported that Hossein Salami, commander in chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, had been killed, along with Fereydoun Abbasi, the former head of the country’s Atomic Energy Organization. Unconfirmed reports said that those targeted included Armed Forces Chief of Staff Mohammad Bagheri and his deputy and other senior military officials.
Airstrikes were reported in several cities, including Tehran, where residential buildings were said to have been hit, including in a neighborhood said to house senior military officials. Video posted on media sites showed structures destroyed and in flames.
Iran state television said the Israeli attacks also struck sites in Khorramabad, in western Iran, home to a large missile base.
[…]
Should Iran retaliate, it was not immediately clear whether the U.S. would assist Israel’s defense, including shooting down Iranian drones and missiles as it did twice last year. “That’s up to the president,” said a U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing operation.
NYT (“Israeli Strikes Wipe Out Iran’s Top Military Chain of Command“):
Israel launched a stunning series of strikes on Friday morning against Iran’s nuclear program and killed three of the nation’s security chiefs, in a remarkable coup of intelligence and military force that immediately decapitated Tehran’s chain of command, prompted threats of severe retaliation and raised fears of a wider conflict.
[…]
For years, Israel fought Iran’s proxy forces across the Middle East and more recently it has exchanged previous volleys of strikes with Iran. Yet Friday’s strikes were the first time it successfully hit Tehran’s nuclear facilities. Though the extent of the damage at the nuclear sites was not yet clear, the scale of the strikes astonished Iranians and Israelis alike.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said that Israel “should anticipate a harsh punishment.” Later on Friday morning, the Israeli military announced that Iranian forces had fired about 100 drones at Israel, as Mr. Netanyahu vowed the fighting would last “as many days as it takes.” The Israeli military said it was working to intercept the Iranian attack, and there were no immediate indications of significant damage caused by the drones.
[…]
Rafael Grossi, the head of the U.N. nuclear agency, said that so far there are ”no elevated radiation levels” detected around the Natanz nuclear site. He also said there were no indications of attacks so far at two other major Iranian nuclear sites, the deep-underground enrichment center at Fordow or the Isfahan nuclear fuel site, where much early processing of nuclear fuel takes place. Isfahan is also suspected of being a core location for secret nuclear weapons research, American officials say.
[…]
Leaders of Israel’s major opposition parties — including bitter critics of Prime Minister Netanyahu — struck notes of unity over the attack on Iran. “Israel executed a first-rate strategic operation tonight. In this historic hour, we stand united behind the defense establishment, and I want to send strength to the political leadership,” wrote Benny Gantz, a major Netanyahu rival.
David Sanger, NYT (“Israel’s Ambition: Destroy the Heart of Iran’s Nuclear Program“):
When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday evening that Israel had struck “Iran’s main enrichment facility in Natanz,” he was signaling the scope of his country’s ambitions in the largest strike it has ever aimed at Iran: It sought to destroy the beating heart of the Iranian nuclear program.
The Natanz facility is where Iran has produced the vast majority of its nuclear fuel — and, in the past three years, much of the near-bomb-grade fuel that has put the country on the threshold of building nuclear weapons.
There are no reports yet of whether Iran’s other major enrichment site, called Fordow, was targeted as well. It is a much harder target, buried deep under a mountain, deliberately designed to be out of Israel’s reach.
As a result, it may take days, or weeks, to answer one of the most critical questions surrounding the attack of Iran’s facilities: How long has Israel set back the Iranian nuclear program? If the program is delayed only a year or two, it may look as if Israel has taken a huge risk for a fairly short-term delay. And among those risks is not only the possibility of a long-lasting war, but also that Iran will withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, take its program underground, and race for a weapon — exactly the outcome Mr. Netanyahu was out to prevent.
Sanger then notes that several actions by Israel and/or the United States over the years, most notably the Stuxnet malware attack, caused temporary setbacks for the Iranian nuclear program that were quickly overcome.
[T]he centrifuges at Natanz continued to spin, until the 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran forced the country to give up 97 percent of its fuel and slow the enrichment at Natanz to a crawl. That agreement also capped the level of enrichment to a level useful for generating nuclear power but not sufficient to make a bomb.
For three years, it seemed like the threat posed by Natanz had been contained. Most American officials believed that while the agreement had not terminated the program, it had contained it. The output of the Natanz plant was minimal.
But then President Trump pulled the United States out of the accord in 2018, calling the deal a disaster. And within a few years, Iran began revving up the facility, and putting new, far more efficient centrifuges in place. It increased enrichment levels to 60 percent purity — just shy of bomb grade. Experts said it would take only a few weeks to further raise the level to 90 percent, commonly used in atomic weapons.
Iran also made other moves that painted an even bigger target on Natanz. Over the past few months, international inspectors have concluded, Iran sped up its enrichment. On Thursday night — Friday morning in Israel — Mr. Netanyahu used its recent progress to argue that Iran now has enough fuel for nine weapons and that the country could “weaponize” that fuel within a year. That accords with what inspectors reported a week ago.
Tactically, the operation looks to have been brilliantly executed. Israel has done long-term damage to all of Iran’s regional proxies and has now taken the fight to Tehran. In so doing, it has demonstrated, yet again, that it is a far superior fighting force and can attack Iranian targets essentially at will. That has to be a hell of a psychic blow.
Strategically, though, I’m less sure how useful this operation will be. Like Sanger, I’m skeptical that this attack will end the program. Iran is a rich country with a huge cadre of scientists. If they want to acquire 80-year-old technology, they will. And the very fact that they’re so vulnerable to a conventional attack will likely increase their appetite for a nuclear deterrent.
