Military Action Against Iran: Impact and Effects

While these would be the main targets, there might also be attempts to kill elements of the technocratic leadership, especially those experienced technocrats who are responsible for planning and even leading Iran’s nuclear and missile programmes. While some might be based in locations close to the nuclear and missile facilities, such as Natanz, Tabriz and Khorramabad, many would be based in Tehran. It follows that one consequence of the need to target such people as well as factories, research centres and university departments, is that war would come directly to the capital of the country for the first time since the “war of the cities” (the exchange of Scud missile attacks during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s). With many civilian casualties, Iran would have the feel of a country at war, rather than one receiving specific, if substantial, attacks in relatively remote localities. This may be at variance with accepted opinion. In the public mind, there is the idea that a military strike on Iran, like that on Iraq in 1981, would consist primarily of a series of bombing attacks on nuclear infrastructure - it would, in effect, be a “war against military real estate”, the aim being to destroy physical targets such as centrifuge cascades. While these would indeed be hit, at least as important would be the requirement to do as much damage as possible to Iranian attempts to resuscitate a nuclear research and development programme after the attack. It is for this reason that so much attention would be focused on technical personnel, with a determined effort to kill as many such people as possible. Since this would include university facilities and other research centres, the end result would be an attack with a very broad effect.

In such circumstances, it is fundamentally unacceptable to the “political right” in the United States for a “rogue” state, such as Iran, to be allowed to get even remotely near having its own nuclear capability. Such a “deterrent” would greatly limit US options in the region, and would provide a threat to its closest ally – Israel. While the Obama administration may have persisted with the diplomatic option, many others in Washington believe that the destruction of the suspected nuclear weapons infrastructure and associated facilities is going to have to be undertaken at some stage. One influential commentator has argued that a direct US military strike on Iran must be considered and has cited polling evidence to show that there would be majority domestic support for this.

Units of the Israeli Air Force destroyed the Iraqi experimental Osiraq reactor near Baghdad in 1981, limiting Iraq’s potential to take the plutonium route to nuclear weapons. More recently, on 6 September 2007, Israeli strike aircraft attacked a facility in Syria that was a suspected nuclear site, possibly a nuclear reactor involving North Korean personnel in the early stages of the construction. (8) The 1981 Baghdad target was within range of Israeli aircraft whereas the Iranian facilities were, until recently, at the limit of Israeli Air Force capability. That has now changed with the deployment of long-range versions of the US F-15 and F-16 strike aircraft – the F-15I Ra’am and the F-16I Sufa. 25 of the F-15I are now in squadron service together with a force of 102 F-16I aircraft in four squadrons. (9) Deliveries of the planes started in 2003 and are now complete. The Israeli Air Force is also acquiring 500 earth penetrating bombs from the United States for use against underground facilities. There are unconfirmed reports that some or all of the F-15I strike aircraft have been fitted with conformal fuel tanks to increase range, but the Israeli Air Force does in any case have a fleet of tanker aircraft. The most significant of these are the KC-707 Re’em aircraft. Although based on the elderly Boeing 707 airframe, these have been substantially upgraded and an eighth plane was recently added to the fleet, following a $23-million contract with Israeli Aerospace Industries.