Can Israel successfully bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities? That was the question that my colleague Whitney Raas and I set out to answer in our 2007 article “Osirak Redux? Assessing Israeli Capabilities to Destroy Iranian Nuclear Facilities,” published in the journalInternational Security. Relying on extensive mathematical calculations, we argued that an Israeli Air Force strike had at least as good a chance of succeeding as Israel’s 1981 raid on the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq. Success wasn’t a guarantee—but it was definitely within the realm of the achievable.
Things have changed since then. For starters, we learned in 2009 that Iran has a second uranium-enrichment facility buried deep in a mountain just north of Qom. Indeed, an International Atomic Energy Agency report released this month indicates that Iran’s nuclear program continues to make steady progress. That report has only intensified talk of a possible Israeli strike. The question is whether such a strike still has a good chance of succeeding. I believe it does.
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