It's time Israel got serious to tackle the Iran threat - opinion

• Author: YAAKOV KATZ
• Published date: 30 September 2021
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

Here's the bad news: Iran is continuing to advance toward a nuclear weapon at an unprecedented pace, and in a few years' time Israeli F-35s and F-16s might need to take off and attempt to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities.

This might seem contradictory, but it is not. Iran remains the threat it has been for 20 years, constantly straddling the nuclear threshold while toying with the West. Its strategy has remained the same: advance its program while trying to pay the lowest price possible. Something like a dance – one step forward and another backward, and vice versa.

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Here is another piece of bad news: Israel does not currently have an effective military plan in place against Iran's nuclear installations. The good news there is that in the near future, all is expected to change.

Here is where the situation gets complicated. On the one hand, Naftali Bennett was not wrong after becoming prime minister when he said that his predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu, was so focused on speaking against Iran that he neglected to take action to stop it.

The fact is that Netanyahu's strategy failed. The Israeli defense establishment pretty much agrees that while the 2015 nuclear deal, the JCPOA, was a bad pact, convincing Donald Trump to withdraw from it in 2018 did not achieve the desired result. Not only did Iran not cave to the sanctions nor return to the negotiating table, it insisted that if America pulled out of the deal, it could also violate it.

That it has. Iran currently has about five tons of low-enriched uranium, 85 kg enriched to 20% fissile purity, and another 10 kg enriched to 60 kg. Under the JCPOA, Iran is not supposed to have more than just a couple of hundred kilos of low-enriched uranium.

According to Military Intelligence, Iran could decide to take all of that low-enriched uranium and use it, within two months, to create enough fissionable material for a nuclear weapon, what is referred to as SQ – a "significant quantity."

In IDF simulations, such a move is referred to as a "declaration of war," but it does not mean that Israel will need to go to war immediately. Even with a SQ of military-grade uranium, Iran would still need to take the gas and turn it into uranium metal, a highly complicated process that – together with assembling a warhead installed on a ballistic missile that could reach Israel – would take at...