A Better Way to Stop Iran from Getting the Bomb

Any day now, if it hasn’t already, Israel will decide how to retaliate against Iran for its latest  ( October 1^st) missile barrage.  Under obvious consideration will be  bombing its underground uranium enriching facilities at Nantaz and Fordow.

Every single commentator/ expert in his own mind  I have read on the subject warns against such a strike because, he ( it is always a male) says, it cannot  not succeed.

A typical warning is that of Alon Pinkus writing in Haaretz:

An effective attack on Iran’s deeply buried and heavily fortified nuclear research installations and uranium enrichment plants requires two fundamental capabilities: a sustained aerial strike capability; and an arsenal of heavy, high-payload, penetrative munitions. Israel has neither…A sustained air campaign is almost impossible because of the distance between Israel and Iran, the refueling needs and the payload capabilities. To actually destroy those facilities, particularly Natanz, you would need 30,000-pound (or 15-ton) “bunker buster bombs” ( which Israel lacks.)

Actually, that pronouncement is incorrect because that  is not how Israel needs to  go about it.

It could exploit the vulnerability of a  nuclear facility, stupidly and at enormous cost built  three stories below an “impregnable”  mountain. Such a location needs connections to the outside world for air, water and electricity, as Joby Warrick noted in The Washington Post twelve years ago. It also needs entry points for those employed within and for trucks bringing in equipment. It needs egresses for waste water and fumes from gas powered generators.

These openings are obviously known to Israel through satellite imaging and other forms of intelligence gathering.

Such  entrances and exits  can be bombed to smithereens using conventional bombs or guided missiles, thus entombing forever  all the scientists working and advanced centrifuges  spinning away inside. If Iran tried to reopen these entrances and exits Israel would repeat its bombardment.

We have recently seen that  Israel  warned  the Lebanese Shiites living on the other side of  its northern border to leave their homes if their living rooms and garages  were being used by Hezbollah to store missiles or other weapons. Because every house along the border housed a tunnel entrance,  missile or other weapons cache  this succinct  message resulted in a mass exodus from the towns in southern Lebanon.

Similarly,  Israel would be wise to send cell phone texts to the scientists and anyone else in the Iranian nuclear facilities warning them that their workplace is being considered and may well be selected  as the target of the next  Israeli bombardment . I expect there would be a very high rate  of absenteeism the following  day . Eventually the employees who had called in sick  would all be forced  back to work at gunpoint by Revolutionary Guards. This would last only  until these Revolutionary Guardsmen themselves   started receiving ominous sounding text messages on their cell phones. The weakness with that plan is that the Revolutionary Guards  may no longer have cell phones  and they certainly will not be picking up messages from  pagers and walkie talkies. But would it not be nice if Iran’s race to acquire a nuclear bomb could be halted, not by killing and destruction but  just by talking sensibly to a small,  carefully selected number of Iranian citizens?