Abhijit Iyer-Mitra

Three things are almost certain from the recently concluded Israeli-US air campaign against Iran. First: Iran will now almost certainly go nuclear. Second: this is just the first round, several more rounds will follow either till Iran tests a bomb or permanently loses its fissile material.

Third: Israel’s achievement of air superiority within the first 8 hours, so far from home, is something that has rankled Putin and Xi along with the Iranians and Taiwan for one seems to have gotten some respite.

Let us be clear Iran has a right under the NPT to make as much enriched uranium and plutonium to whatever percentage of enrichment it deems fit. What it does not have the right to do is to weaponise said uranium. This is where a stark contrast emerges between Japan and Iran.

Japan is one country that has enough of a plutonium stockpile to produce an estimated 120 nuclear bombs, yet the same suspicions and sanctions have not been applied to Japan why? Because Japan has always been extremely transparent with every single new nuclear facility it has built, and stockpiles it has accumulated and has never attempted to build a bomb.

Iran on the other hand has a long history of covert actions from actively hiding the Arak heavy water plant, the co-located plutonium production facility, and the Natanz enrichment facility, not to mention active collaboration with the AQ Khan network and a vast trove of incriminating materials showing active and ongoing activity for the design and production of an implosion-type nuclear bomb.

Moreover, some of this material unambiguously indicates that Iran has fairly advanced plans for mating these implosion warheads to the Shahab 3 ballistic missile. In short, the argument is that Iran’s persistent, multi-year lying about facilities and intent automatically cancels its rights under the NPT.

Logically, no country needs the nuclear bomb today more than Iran. Having alienated all its powerful friends and benefactors within one year of the 1979 revolution, Iran has for the last 45 years, had to rely on sub-state actors (Terrorists) to protect itself.

This of course is classic where a conventionally weak country adopts asymmetric strategies, terrorism being the most effective and cheap. The issue is terrorism also needs to be carefully calibrated or else it ends up boomeranging: 9/11 and 7th October being classic cases.

This is why every country that uses terrorists as a tool of policy also needs nuclear weapons to both escalate terrorism to make it more effective, but also to prevent blowback of the kind Afghanistan and Hamas suffered in 2001 and 2023 respectively.

Cumulatively, nobody should be in doubt therefore that Iran will weaponise — its massive conventional inferiority, repeated history of lying and concealment, repeated covert weaponisation attempts, and enrichment to 60 per cent (no civil reactor required this level of enrichment) all point to inevitability. However, now that need has only increased.

The decimation of the Iranian air force and its air defences within the first 8 hours of the Israeli campaign has only made its need for nuclear weapons more dire. The Iranian collapse was so spectacular that by day 3 of the campaign, no Iranian plane could take off, Israeli F-15s were flying with just bombs and no air-to-air missiles and Iranian air defences were so inadequate that all they could bring down was 2 Israeli propeller-driven drones flying at a mere 250 kilometres per hour.

Compounding this is the fact very mysteriously Israel did not attack one crucial facility Kuh E Kolang the mountain overlooking Natanz under which Iran has built a new nuclear facility. Unlike Fordow which had approximately 300 feet of rock over it, Kuh E Kolang has well over a thousand feet of rock.

This is also where a lot of intelligence sources indicate that most of Iran’s 60 per cent enriched uranium has been stored. While damage assessments of Fordow dispute whether it was obliterated or entombed, the discussion is academic. It doesn’t matter how much you damage as long as access is denied.

With Kuh e Kolang even basic entombment (the bombing of access tunnels) was not attempted. Basically what this means is Iran now has a very secure facility where enriched uranium is stored and possibly centrifuges too. Even if there are no centrifuges, Iran has a demonstrated capability to manufacture these rapidly.

All of this means that not only will Iran try to go nuclear but also has some residual means to do so. This can only be delayed with limited airstrikes and a full defanging can only happen with a ground operation which Israel does not have the capability for and Trump doesn’t have the political will or capital for given his bedrock promise to the MAGA movement of no invasions or occupations and certainly not regime change.

At best threats of regime change that Israel (directly) and America (indirectly) indicated can be viewed as psychological warfare. There is good precedence for this. When NATO bombed Yugoslavia for almost 3 months in 1999, the Yugoslavs despite heavy loss of material and life, were not willing to yield, till the threat of a land invasion started being publicly talked about.  

All of this brings us to how Russia and China view this. First, it exposed their continuing impotence at being unable to shape world events in their favour or even deter a “small” power like Israel from acting. In the case of Russia, Iran is the fourth successive case of failing a friend it failed Armenia, it failed Syria and now it has failed Iran despite Iran having supplied Russia with crucial equipment and technologies for the Ukraine war.

Moreover, the war has also demonstrated the complete impotence of Russian equipment from Mig 29 & Su-24 fighters to S300, TOR & Pantsyr variant air defence systems. That a tiny country with half the population of the Moscow metropolitan area and the same size as the Moscow metropolitan area was able to achieve absolute air superiority over a country half the size of India has not gone down well in Moscow.

What is worse is that Israel was able to do this in just 8 hours, something that Russia has not been able to do even a fraction in Ukraine in about 3 and half years.

For Xi Jin Ping the Israeli operation is a political debacle. In May he saw the abject failure of his air defence & offence systems in Operation Sindoor. India hit what it wanted to hit, when it wanted to hit, deep inside Pakistan at will. Worse when Pakistan tried to do the same, every single attempt failed and was intercepted by India’s air defences.

Iran only compounded this every single Chinese system be it air defence, be it aircraft everything was taken out within hours and unable to provide even rudimentary protection. Taiwan operates very similar equipment on similar doctrines as Israel. So Xi’s pet ambition of reuniting China just gave a hard reality double check.

All up the results for India are excellent. Iran has been contained but not destroyed – both nuclear non-proliferation and the Shia-Sunni split is crucial to our interests. That China has been given a hard reality check is a bonus. That all this has been achieved without India having to say or do anything – is the icing on the cake.