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

Last month, the UN Security Council finally adopted a resolution which imposes a sanctions-lite regime on Iran. Mr Ahmadinejad’s electoral setback just a few days earlier clearly affected neither the defiant substance nor the menacing style of his response to the UN vote. Iran, he declared, has started installing 3,000 new centrifuges. Whether the West likes it or not, he continued, Iran is a nuclear state and ‘it is in their interests to live alongside Iran’. Sanctions, he added, would not harm the Iranian people, but, he warned, ‘the signatories of this resolution ...will soon regret this superficial and trivial move’.

Tehran’s official insistence that its nuclear programme is intended strictly for civilian use is universally discounted by military experts. Why, they ask, does one of the world’s richest oil and gas states need to develop more complex and more expensive nuclear power? Why, if its intentions are peaceful, did Iran deliberately deceive the UN nuclear inspectors for years? Why is Iran seeking to hide its facilities underground? Not least, why is it acquiring thousands of centrifuges capable of enriching uranium to produce weapons-grade material?

Iran’s nuclear programme has also, significantly, been accompanied by a vigorous drive to develop appropriate delivery systems. Already, the entire Middle East and parts of southern Europe are within range of the Iranian missiles. By the end of the decade their reach will have been extended to cover all of Europe. They will then be approaching global range.

Israel is not the only state in the region with cause for concern about the prospect of a nuclear Iran. Intra-Islamic fault lines are becoming more sharply defined even as the fog of Iraq’s internecine conflict grows thicker. Saudi Arabia, centre of gravity of the Sunni world, is particularly wary about the rise of Shia Iran as the hegemonic power of the Gulf — and, perhaps, beyond.

Officials from Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf states of Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are already reported to be exploring the prospect of creating a joint nuclear programme. Egypt will not be far behind in its quest for nuclear capability, nor will Turkey.