Israel crushed Ayatollah's regime, but stopping Iran's nuke programme will need total overthrow
As the Americans and British did in 1953, Israel will likely need to go further and dismantle the regime for its strategy to succeed. The reason is simple: Israel has acted to ensure that no rival power in the Middle East can threaten its undisclosed nuclear arsenal. Nuclear experts like David Albright say there is so far little sign that deeply buried uranium enrichment facilities, such as those at Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz, have suffered severe damage .
This week, precision Israeli air strikes blew apart the ferocious imperial façade of the theocracy that governs Iran, a system long sustained by bluff. Iran's doddering Cold War-era air force and much-hyped homegrown air defences failed to protect critical military facilities, and the country's highest-ranking officials were scythed through in precession attacks. Iran's retaliatory strikes, launched with a fleet of low-cost, homemade ballistic missiles, proved largely ineffective .
When the assassins' knives had done their work, scholar, journalist, and diplomat Lawrence Paul Elwell-Sutton ruminated about why it had to be done : 'Really, it seemed hardly fair that dignified and correct Western statesmanship should be defeated by the antics of incomprehensible orientals.' In the summer of 1951, the radical Iranian politician Mohammad Mossadeq had nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, Britain's prized oil concession. Furious, the West began quietly plotting his downfall, fearing that Iran was sliding towards communism.
Ending the war with the regime intact, then, could lead Iran to make the fateful decision to produce and test a nuclear weapon. That process could take far less time than most imagine. As physicist Hui Zhang points out, China could assemble a testable nuclear device in just three weeks in 1964, even without advanced equipment.
Israel hopes its assault will open the door for Iranians fed up with their regime to bring down the Ayatollahs—or, alternatively, for groups like the Islamic State or ethnic Baloch insurgents to turn the regime's gaze inward. It's a high-stakes gamble—and one that could prove to be the undoing of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Also read: Attacking Iran's nuclear programme won't bolster Israel's national security
A triumph foretold
Even though Iran's missile capabilities have been talked up by experts across the world, the truth is the Ayatollah's military core is rusted through. Last year, a rare leak of radar-screen images aired on Iranian news channels revealed that Natanz was being defended by radar systems made by the Soviet Union in the 1970s, and homemade missiles lacked the capacity to effectively coordinate. Even the limited number of Russian-made S-400 systems supplied to Iran proved incapable of shielding against Israel's advanced F-22 and F-35 jets.
To make things worse, Iran's air force still relies largely on the Cold War-era F-4 Phantom II and locally built derivatives of the Northrop F-5, both originally supplied by the United States. The air force also has a small number of MiG29 jets from the Soviet era. But neither China nor Russia has been willing to provide the Islamic Republic with modern fighter platforms or advanced missile systems.
Iran's retaliatory missile strikes on Israel in 2024 exposed the limitations in its 'Atmanirbhar' missile programme. Many missiles failed to launch, were intercepted, or struck far off their intended targets. These shortcomings are largely because Iran has been denied access by sanctions to technologies needed for precision guidance.
The Iranian response to Israel's strikes this week further demonstrated these weaknesses. While drones like the HESA Shahed 136 have seen some success in Ukraine, that success comes in a vastly different battlespace—where adversaries are in close contact and not protected by air defences. Israel, in contrast, has been able to provide its thinly inhabited territories with a layered air defence network, helped by the vast distances that slow-moving drones have to travel from Iran.
Iran's top leadership, The New York Times reporter Farnaz Fassihi noted, also miscalculated the risk of an Israeli strike, assuming Israel would not act just days before scheduled negotiations with the United States. This allowed Israeli special forces to target top officials using agents already stationed on the ground.
What remains unclear, though, is the strategic question: Can Israel's strikes actually prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, and what might happen if they do not?
Also read: New round of Iran nuclear negotiations begins. Time to talk about Israel's atomic bombs too
The Iran-Israel nuclear dyad
Twin flashes of light over a remote island in the Indian Ocean, captured by an American spy satellite in September 1979, established to the world that Israel had become the sixth nuclear power, following the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, and China. French assistance, historian Avner Cohen writes, helped Israel overcome the substantial technical and financial barriers to developing nuclear weapons.
France, ironically, also helped lay the foundation for Iran's nuclear programme. Faced with the threat of the Soviet Union and unpersuaded by Western security guarantees, Iran's monarch, Shah Reza Pahlavi, authorised a civilian nuclear programme that ran alongside a secret weapons project. In 1974, Iran signed contracts with the French company Framatome to build two pressurised water reactors, followed by a deal with Germany to construct six more.
Throughout the 1970s, commercial competition among France, Germany, and the United States, scholar Mustafa Kibaroglu writes, enabled countries like Pakistan, South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, Iran, and Libya to access sensitive nuclear technologies with relative ease. Ironically again, scholar Trita Parsi records, Israel itself built the missile production facility that laid the foundation for Iran's modern guided missile programme.
Following the 1979 Islamic Revolution that toppled the Shah, Iran also signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Pakistan in 1987. This agreement gave Tehran access to blueprints and equipment from the black-market network run by Abdul Qadeer Khan, as political scientist Molly MacCalman's authoritative work shows.
These developments were driven by the regime's lessons from the savage war with Saddam Husain's Iraq, where it found itself facing a brutal conflict supported by the West. In response, then-Parliament Speaker and military chief Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani declared, 'We should fully equip ourselves both in the offensive and defensive use of chemical, bacteriological, and radiological weapons.'
For Iran's clerical regime, these existential concerns made nuclear capabilities a necessity. For Israel, they created a rising threat that the country's leaders could not, and would not, tolerate.
Also read: Analysis—Israel's attacks on Iran hint at a bigger ambition: regime change
The endgame in Iran
Stolen documents acquired by Israeli intelligence make it clear that Iran made a firm political decision in the late 1990s to pursue nuclear weapons capability. Likely, multiple circumstances shaped the decision of Iran's clerical leadership. First, the Gulf war in 1990 had demonstrated that the United States could rapidly dismantle Saddam Husain's military—forces that were far superior to Iran's. Then, despite the war's end, Iran continued to face a threat from Iraq. The Iranian leadership ordered scientists to develop five 10-kiloton nuclear bombs as an initial deterrent.
The events of 9/11, though, and the discovery of the Khan nuclear smuggling network changed the world. In an effort to seek a rapprochement with the West, Iran partially halted its nuclear weapons work and opened its nuclear facilities and uranium stockpiles to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
In 2015, Iran finally hammered out a deal with the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany. In exchange for an end to sanctions, Iran committed to capping its uranium enrichment at 3.67 per cent—well below the 20 per cent threshold that allows for rapid refinement to weapons-grade levels.
But in 2019, under pressure from Israel, President Donald Trump resiled on the agreement. Israel argued that Iran's missile programme gave it the capability to deliver a nuclear bomb, which—as its own experience showed—could be secretly assembled.
Learning from that experience that sanctions didn't stop the development of an Iranian bomb, Trump's second term saw him reach out to reinstate the nuclear deal. Trump's public statements suggest he tried to delay an Israeli strike while using it as a tool to extract new concessions from Iran's leadership. Khalid Bin Salman, Saudi Arabia's defence minister and the son of its monarch, King Salman bin Abdulaziz, is also reported to have delivered a secret message to Iran in April, warning of Israeli military action if a deal was not made.
Israel and the United States are now betting that Iran's leadership will acknowledge their military and economic weakness and return to the negotiating table. Trump, in particular, has held out an olive branch after Israel's strikes, promising Iran 'a second chance.'
But like all gambles, the outcome of this one is impossible to predict. Iran's leaders may conclude that they're better off rapidly producing a nuclear weapon and then using it to secure a better bargain. And that could lead Israel to escalate its military campaign, with unpredictable consequences not just for Iran, but for global energy markets and Arab states like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Even if Iran's regime were to collapse, the new dispensation will be driven by the same existential anxieties that led the Ayatollahs to seek a nuclear weapon. The CIA-facilitated coup that overthrew Mossadeq might have beaten back the Left in Iran, but it also laid the groundwork for the very missile and nuclear programmes that now threaten Israel.
The dangerous truth is that the breakdown of the world order—whether through Russia's war in Ukraine, or China's threats to countries like South Korea and Japan—is leading more and more states to wonder whether the nuclear weapons are worth the price. That is leading all into a new kind of world, with hazards we can now only dimly conceive.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)
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