Can Israel Stop Iran’s Nuke Effort?

The potential targets are scattered and hidden all over Iran. They range from a uranium mine in the middle of the country to a nuclear power plant on the Persian Gulf coast to a complex in the northwest doing research on the use of atomic science in agriculture. There is an underground uranium-enrichment facility about a three-hour drive south of Tehran, centrifuges spinning outside the holy city of Qum and a precision-tools factory that makes them in Mashhad, way over by the Turkmenistan border. These are nearly a third of the suspected sites for the much prophesied nuclear Iran that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calls “an existential threat” to his country.

The threat of an Israeli attack has for years been a component in the international campaign to get Iran to halt its nuclear program–as have ever more stringent economic sanctions. “All options, including military action, should remain on the table,” says Colin Kahl, until recently deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, “but force should be a last resort, not a first choice.” If it is the final option, would it solve the problem? How much punishment could Israel–or the U.S., for that matter–inflict? And would it be enough to stop Iran from getting the bomb?

A senior Israeli official serving in the country’s security apparatus tells TIME that Netanyahu’s Cabinet was advised in late September that the Israel Defense Forces lack the ability to deal a decisive blow to Iran’s atomic effort. “I informed the Cabinet we have no ability to hit the Iranian nuclear program in a meaningful way,” the official quoted a senior commander as saying. “If I get the order, I will do it, but we don’t have the ability to hit in a meaningful way.”

The key word is meaningful. The working assumption behind Israel’s military preparations has been that a strike, to be worth mounting, must delay Tehran’s nuclear capabilities by at least two years. But given the wide geographic dispersion of Iran’s atomic facilities, combined with the limits of Israel’s air armada, the Jewish state can expect to push back the Iranian program by only a matter of months–a year at most, according to the official. He attributes that estimate to the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, which is charged with assessing the likely effect of a strike.

It is not that Israel cannot do damage; it can. The U.S. commitment to keeping Israel’s military dominant in the Middle East–in the policymakers’ phrase, “Israel’s qualitative military edge”–allowed it to lock in on Iran’s nuclear ambitions years before most of the world had any clue what Tehran was up to. U.S. military aid, which in 2011 was $3 billion, allowed Israel to lift its gaze beyond its immediate neighbors and begin assembling an arsenal to confront an Iranian threat that Israeli leaders began warning about in the mid-’90s.

By August 2002, when published satellite photos revealed an underground enrichment plant being built in the central Iranian city of Natanz, Israel had already taken possession of F-15Is, U.S.-made fighter-bombers specially outfitted to carry the extra fuel needed to reach the Islamic Republic. Israel also has scores of F-16I fighters modified to escort the bombers, enough satellites to keep images of Iran arriving around the clock and fleets of drones, a technology Israel pioneered. The mammoth Eitan, wide as a 737, can carry either bombs or cyberwarfare gear programmed to jam Iranian radar, communications and computers.

Twelve months after the Natanz plant was revealed, Israel demonstrated the range of the F-15I by sending three of them 1,600 miles (almost 2,600 km) to Poland, ostensibly for a ceremonial role in the anniversary of the Polish air force. On the way back, the craft staged a flyover above the Auschwitz death camp. For the sake of comparison, Tel Aviv is just short of 1,000 miles (1,600 km) from Tehran.

Lessons of History

If Israel is playing the bad cop to Washington’s good cop in some tag-team effort at marshaling global resolve to confront Iran, that doesn’t mean the talk of an Israeli strike is just talk. “I don’t think it’s bluster,” says Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “One wave can do a lot, depending on the quality of the penetrating munitions and the targeting abilities.”

Besides, Israel has done something similar before. Twice. In 1981, Israeli F-16 fighter-bombers destroyed the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq in a daring surprise strike. In 2007 a secret Syrian reactor in the desert west of Damascus was leveled in a midnight raid that Israel still does not officially acknowledge.

But this time is different. Iran learned a lesson from the assault on the Osirak reactor. When leaders of the authoritarian theocracy quietly revived Iran’s moribund nuclear program, setting out to master every step and obtain every component in the entire nuclear fuel cycle, they took care to scatter their facilities across a half-million square miles (1.3 million sq km). The most critical facilities of all, housing the centrifuges that enrich uranium, went underground. Military experts say reaching them all would require an air campaign of hundreds of sorties and would have to last for weeks. Think of the extended opening salvos of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 rather than the lightning strike on Osirak.

“I think a modern air force like the U.S. Air Force can deal with it easily,” said a former senior official from Israel’s security establishment in a recent background briefing with foreign reporters. And Israel’s air force? “I say, ‘U.S. Air Force,'” the official repeated with a smile.

It’s unclear how effective any air force will be against the main targets. The massive enrichment facility at Natanz may be vulnerable to Israel’s bunker busters, even six stories underground. But Iran this month announced that centrifuges are spinning in the new Fordow facility outside Qum, which is thought to be protected by a shelf of rock more than 260 ft. (80 m) thick. That may be beyond the reach even of the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, a 30,000-lb. (13,600 kg) bomb built for the U.S. Air Force and delivered in recent weeks to B-2 stealth bombers newly modified to carry it.

Plus, getting the necessary ordnance over the targets isn’t easily done. “The Israelis just don’t have the reach to launch a sustained campaign,” says Tim Ripley, a Middle East defense analyst for Jane’s Defence Weekly. In “Mission Improbable,” his report assessing the prospects of an Israeli strike, Ripley notes that Israel lacks aircraft carriers or other forward bases to shorten the distance to Iran. Which means that in order to reach targets more than 1,000 miles away, Israel must rely on aerial-tanker planes to refuel scores of fighters en route, on the way back or even in both directions should pilots find themselves doing a lot of maneuvering. And Israel has only a handful of such flying filling stations. “The Israelis have loads of fighters,” says Ripley. “But it’s not quite like the U.S. Air Force, which has got hundreds of tankers.”

The sheer number of targets makes any strike even more daunting, says Yiftah Shapir, a former Israeli Air Force intelligence officer whose duties involved planning for such strikes. “What you really have to calculate is not targets but aiming points,” says Shapir, now an analyst at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. “Each target has numerous aiming points.” Shapir tells TIME, “A strike could be done, but it could never do the damage we did to Osirak, where Osirak was all they had.”

Cordesman reckons Israel probably has enough aircraft and enough range to do serious damage to 10 to 12 of Iran’s atomic facilities. But damaged labs can be rebuilt, he notes, and Iran has announced plans for 10 new enrichment sites–further dispersing later-generation centrifuges in places smaller, harder to locate and easier to harden. The issue, Cordesman says, is not simply capability but consequences. “If anyone tells you this is sort of binary, either ‘Yeah, they can do it’ or ‘Oh, no, they can’t,’ they don’t know what they’re talking about,” he says. “Israel is going to act strategically. It’s going to look at the political outcome of what it says and does, not simply measure this in terms of some computer game and what the immediate tactical impact is.”

One forgotten lesson of Osirak is that, as a consequence, Saddam Hussein took his nuclear weapons program into the shadows and got much closer to a bomb before the rest of the world caught wind of his intentions. An attack on Iran, even one led by the U.S., might produce only a temporary halt in its nuclear program–and a greater resolve to develop weapons out of sight of international inspectors, if only to buttress Iranian security in years to come.

Whatever the state of Israel’s military preparation, the countdown to war seems to have slowed in recent days. An accelerating cascade of events–the overrunning of Britain’s diplomatic compounds in Tehran, the assassination of yet another Iranian nuclear scientist and a genuinely bellicose back-and-forth over whether Iran could shut down oil traffic through the Strait of Hormuz–threatened to generate momentum toward war just when sanctions were growing teeth. After 20 years of indecision, the European Union agreed to an embargo on Iranian oil, and Japan, Turkey and even China were seeking alternate suppliers

A suddenly chummier joint front between Washington and Tel Aviv will keep Tehran guessing. A visit to Israel by U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey underscored how close cooperation remains between the allies, however fraught the relationship between Netanyahu and President Obama. Israel and the U.S. postponed a joint military exercise originally set for May, which would have brought Patriot missile batteries to Israel to supplement its own air defenses. Because missile attacks from Iran’s proxies Hizballah in Lebanon and Islamic Jihad and Hamas in the Gaza Strip would be the first signs of retaliation for any Israeli attack on Tehran, the postponement of additional Patriot defenses was seen as a sign that the region was, at least for the moment, not in a rush to war.

Two days after the postponement, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said any decision on launching an attack on Iran “was very far away.”

TO SEE A POSSIBLE U.S. RESPONSE TO A STRAIT OF HORMUZ CRISIS, GO TO TIME.COM/HORMUZCRISIS