Israel will do whatever it takes

6 January 2007

Douglas Davis says that the Israelis are considering the nuclear option in response to President Ahmadinejad’s threat to ‘wipe Israel off the map’. An attack could be launched early this year

The neutron bomb has two advantages: first, the impact of its destructive force is limited to a radius of just a few hundred yards; second, it leaves virtually no radioactive fall-out. Israel’s own nuclear programme, which remains shrouded in ambiguity, is said to include a substantial stockpile of neutron bombs. It is now widely assumed that a mysterious double flash detected by an American satellite over the Indian Ocean in September 1979 was caused by the test of a three-kiloton Israeli neutron bomb.

In addition to warheads that can make the earth move, Israel also has a family of highly accurate delivery systems — missiles that can be launched from land, sea or air — that are capable of delivering a nuclear payload. The distance between Israel and Iran makes an air strike highly problematic, but Israel does have other options: it can, for example, launch a strike against the Iranian facilities by one or more of its three Dolphin-class submarines that have been acquired from Germany over the past eight years. Officials from both the Pentagon and State Department have reported that unarmed, nuclear-capable missiles were test-fired by an Israeli submarine in the Mediterranean in 2000.

A military strike by the United States or Israel will be the last resort, a sign that diplomacy has failed and that Iran is about to turn on the tap of weapons-grade material. In recent years, and with increasing urgency over the past 12 months, an alphabet soup of multilateral organisations — the industrialised world’s G8, Europe’s EU3 and the UN’s P6 — have huffed and puffed while Iran’s skilful negotiators ran rings around the infidels who were sent to buy them off. Hossein Mousavian, Iran’s delegate to the International Atomic Energy Agency, admitted as much in an interview on Iranian television. Iran, he said, had used its protracted negotiations with the EU3 — Britain, France and Germany — to ‘buy time’ while it completed its nuclear facilities.