The Case for Destroying Iran’s Nuclear Program Now

Following Iran’s massive but largely ineffectual missile barrage launched at Israel on Tuesday, the world is bracing for Israel’s response. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Iran’s attack was a “big mistake” and that Tehran “will pay for it.” The White House agrees that Iran must suffer “severe consequences” for launching an attack on a U.S. ally. Many commentators, including the Wall Street Journal editorial board, have argued that Iran’s nuclear infrastructure should be on Israel’s target list, but when asked about this possibility on Wednesday, U.S. President Joe Biden said he would not support an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear sites.

He should reconsider.

Indeed, now is an ideal opportunity to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. The country’s breakout time to a bomb is down to one to two weeks. There is no new nuclear deal in the cards. Hamas and Hezbollah are in no position to retaliate. And the Islamic Republic just asked for it. In fact, this may be the last best chance to keep Tehran from the bomb.

A military strike on Iran’s key nuclear facilities—to further the goal of nonproliferation—has been debated for more than a decade. Israel has conducted conventional military strikes against aspiring proliferators in the past, including Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007. Every U.S. president since George W. Bush has threatened that all options are on the table to keep Tehran from the bomb, and the United States has developed new military capabilities, such as the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, tailor-made to destroy Iran’s underground nuclear facilities.

Skeptics of military action have raised several major objections, but conditions have changed in recent weeks and months—and all of the previous obstacles to military action have melted away.

Critics of the military option maintain that a diplomatic solution would be the best possible  outcome to the Iranian nuclear crisis. They are correct in theory, but in practice, there is no new nuclear deal on the horizon.

One can debate whether the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), negotiated by the Obama administration with the goal of constraining Iran’s nuclear program, was a good enough deal or whether it was wise for the Trump administration to pull out, but that is now ancient history. We are where we are.

The Biden administration had hoped to reenter the JCPOA and then use that as a baseline to negotiate a “longer and stronger” deal, but that approach did not work. The Iranians were unwilling to return to the terms of the JCPOA and instead repeatedly flouted several of its provisions. After years of talks, a new nuclear deal proved impossible.

There is no Plan B. The United States and its allies currently do not have a clear strategy to stop Iran from building the bomb. The plan appears to be to hope that Iran does not take the final steps to weaponize its advanced nuclear program. That means that without a major outside intervention, the world is on a path to stand by and watch as Iran becomes a nuclear power.

This gets to the second objection long invoked by critics of the military option: Talk of military action is premature because the world has time to solve the problem. That is no longer the case. We are running out of time.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated in July that Iran’s breakout time was one to two weeks. In other words, if Iran’s supreme leader gave the order, the country could produce one bomb’s worth of weapons-grade uranium in that time.

Granted, it might (or might not) take Iran more time to fashion the uranium into a functioning warhead and more time still to fit the warhead to the nose cone of a ballistic missile, but that is false comfort.

Once Iran has the weapons-grade material, the game is over. Now, the international community has the option of destroying Iran’s large nuclear facilities in known locations to prevent the production of fissile material. Once Iran has the material (which is lightweight and can be easily moved and concealed) they can move it to secret locations beyond the reach of U.S. or Israeli bunker-busting bombs. The military option would be off the table, and the world could then pray that Iran does not build a deliverable warhead—but they could no longer physically stop it.

The most serious objection to a strike on Iran’s nuclear program was the fear of retaliation from Iran and its so-called Axis of Resistance. Experts warned that Iran would order Hamas and Hezbollah to attack U.S. and Israeli interests in the region and around the world. They expressed alarm that Iran could launch dozens of ballistic missiles or drones against population centers or military targets in the region. Finally, they predicted that Iran or its proxies could harass or attack international shipping in the Persian Gulf. But all of that—and worse—has already happened.

Because Israel and the global economy have weathered such attacks, these fears are less salient now. Following the Oct. 7 atrocities and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza, Hamas has been largely dismantled and now lacks the ability to conduct large-scale attacks on Israel.

In recent weeks, Hezbollah’s capacity to attack has also been greatly diminished. Israel has decapitated its leadership and degraded its missile and rocket stockpiles in a string of audacious attacks in September, from exploding Hezbollah pagers and walkie-talkies to military strikes on Beirut that eliminated Hezbollah’s longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Israel is now pressing on with a ground invasion into Hezbollah’s stronghold in southern Lebanon. The group is no longer in a position to gravely threaten Israel on Tehran’s command.

Moreover, Iran’s missile and drone inventory has also been revealed to be a paper tiger. Iran has already conducted two large-scale attacks on Israel, in April and this week, and neither did much damage. Nearly all of the missiles were shot down by air and missile defenses, and others fell in outlying areas, causing few casualties. Iran has threatened that it would respond to any further Israeli military action with more missile attacks, but such attacks would also likely be largely ineffectual.

Finally, Iran’s Houthi allies have been harassing and attacking international shipping for the past year without facing serious repercussions, and while international trade has suffered, the global economy continues to operate.

In short, the wider regional war feared by critics of military action against Iran’s nuclear program is already here, and Israel is on the verge of winning it. If Israel and the United States were to attack Iran’s nuclear infrastructure in the coming days, Iran and its Axis of Resistance have few good or menacing retaliatory options.

Iran had planned for its Axis of Resistance to provide a deterrent against attacks on its nuclear program, but with the Axis degraded, Iran is now exposed. Some analysts have argued that this fact makes it more likely that Iran will dash for a bomb—a possibility that only strengthens the case for military action now.

Critics of military action have long argued that the United States and Israel cannot just conduct an unprovoked preemptive strike on another sovereign nation, but a strike now would not be a bolt out of the blue; the Islamic Republic just asked for it. Following Iran’s massive drone and missile attack, Israel and the United States have already vowed serious consequences, and the criticisms leveled in the past are simply no longer convincing; Israel is entitled to retaliate against Iran’s act of aggression, and the risks are far lower than they once were.

It would be a missed opportunity to conduct a mere symbolic response, like Israel’s precision strike on a radar following Iran’s April attack. Instead, Israel and the United States have an opening to do real damage to Iran’s nuclear program. This would have the benefits of stopping Iran from building the bomb and restoring deterrence by showing Tehran and the rest of the world that the costs of attacking a sovereign nation and close U.S. partner greatly outweigh the benefits.

The United States and its allies face a threatening international security environment, with growing threats from an axis of revisionist autocracies that are working closely together—China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

If Iran joins these other countries in the nuclear club, the threat will be much worse and harder to contain. The past year’s events in the Middle East would have been far more destructive if Iran had crossed the nuclear threshold; indeed, Tehran’s large-scale attacks on Israel might have included nuclear weapons.

With a few months left in his presidency, Biden is likely thinking about his foreign-policy legacy. He has a choice to be the president who finally stopped Iran’s nuclear program or the one who let Iran go nuclear by passing up the last best chance to stop it.