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This week’s news from the Middle East has been alarming: Israel’s surprise attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Iran’s missile barrage on Israel in response. US bombers joining in Israel’s attack on Iran. Iran’s Foreign Minister seeking military support from Vladimir Putin. All pointing toward the growing danger of World War III.
And yet, hidden within all this bad news there are some signs of hope that should not be overlooked.
First, Israel did not (at least so far) use a nuclear weapon to achieve its stated objective of destroying Iran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon.
It was reported incessantly – and incorrectly – in almost every news outlet in the world that Israel needed the US to bomb the Fordow underground nuclear facility in Iran because only the US had bombs “big enough” to penetrate a target buried so deeply under a mountain.
That’s nonsense. Israel has a stockpile of at least 90 nuclear weapons, any one of which could have done far more damage than the US bombs used on Fordow. Although the exact nature and destructive power of those weapons are not publicly known, the Israeli arsenal is generally assumed to include nuclear warheads that range in size from a few kilotons (i.e. equivalent to 1,000 tons of TNT) to at least a megaton or more (i.e. one million tons of TNT).
By comparison, the 30,000-pound GBU-57 “bunker buster” bomb that the US used to attack the underground facility at Fordow produces a blast effect equivalent to 3-5 tons of TNT, according to Scientific American. That’s 0.003-0.005 kilotons. The GBU-57 has other features that allow it to go deep into the ground before detonating, but a 1 megaton nuclear weapon is roughly 200,000 times more destructive than the GBU-57.
So why the pretense that “only the US” could damage the Fordow facility in Iran? Israel has nuclear weapons – but it pretends that it does not (mainly because the Glenn Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act prohibits the US from providing military aid to any country having nuclear weapons outside of the NPT). So, of course, it would be rather embarrassing for Israel to suddenly use a weapon that it claims it does not have.
It would also be wildly hypocritical for Israel to use the very weapon it is trying to convince the world Iran should not have. After all, if Israel already has nuclear weapons, why all the fuss about Iran getting them?
More good news: The US also did not use a nuclear weapon to attack Fordow. The US has far more nuclear weapons than Israel does (over 5,000 of them). It could have used a nuclear bunker buster bomb to do the job, but it chose not to.
Of course, there were lots of reasons for the US to use its new GBU-57 bomb. Until now, that bomb had been tested, but it had never been used in a war situation. The bomb-droppers love to see how their products perform in real life – especially Boeing, the company that makes the GBU-57 and stands to make millions more dollars in profit if it turns out that it is as effective a weapon as they claim it is.
Nevertheless, if the US had really wanted to “obliterate” Iran’s underground nuclear facility at Fordow, they could have used a nuclear weapon to do it. The US has been designing its nuclear weapons for decades with the express purpose of being able to destroy “hardened” targets such as bunkers and missile silos that are buried under layers of steel-reinforced concrete or hidden inside mountains.
There is no guarantee that a nuclear bunker buster bomb, such as the B61-11, even though many times more powerful than the GBU-57, would be any more successful at destroying an underground facility like Fordow. But the probability of it doing so would have been much greater. And yet the US chose not to go down that route.
Why did both Israel and the US choose not to use a nuclear weapon when they knew that it would have had a much higher chance of success?
Ah, more good news. Because although using a nuclear weapon might have been more effective militarily, it would have been enormously counterproductive politically. That’s an indication of just how damaging they assess the political fallout would have been had they gone down the nuclear route.
Breaking the 80-year old taboo against the use of nuclear weapons at this point could certainly have ended Netanyahu’s political career in Israel and even landed him in prison. It might even have proved too much for Republicans in the US, who would be hard-pressed to justify such a heinous crime to their constituents.
We can hope that Netanyahu and Trump also considered the radioactive fallout in choosing not to use nuclear weapons against Iran. A nuclear attack on Iran would certainly have impacted large numbers of civilians in Iran, but also, depending on wind speed and direction, it could well have impacted civilians (and US military personnel) in Qatar, Oman, Kuwait, UAE, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Georgia – not to mention India, Russia, China, and, of course, Israel itself.
Fallout also rises with the mushroom cloud into the upper atmosphere, and can still be lethal when it comes down as rain, potentially thousands of miles away, like, say, in the US. We know from the nuclear tests conducted in the Pacific during the 1950s and 60s that radioactive fallout eventually spreads right across the globe, potentially exposing millions of people worldwide to cancers and other radiation-induced diseases.
A nuclear attack under the ground, as it might have been at Fordow, also would have created considerably more fallout than an airburst bomb like those used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
We still don’t know at this point – and we may never find out – just how much damage was done to the Fordow facility and by how much it may have hindered Iran’s ability to make a nuclear weapon. So the jury is still out as to whether Israel and/or the United States will try again to destroy this facility. And if they do, might they still decide to use a nuclear weapon next time?
If it turns out that the GBU-57 did cause significant damage to Fordow, that would strengthen the military argument for simply getting rid of nuclear weapons. Why use a nuclear weapon, with all the risks that entails, if a conventional weapon can do the same job?
If it turns out that the GBU-57 did not cause significant damage to Fordow, there will certainly be voices inside the Pentagon urging the President to use a nuclear weapon next time. But for now, the taboo against nuclear weapon use has actually been strengthened by this episode, and we should all be grateful for that.
Every time one of the nine nuclear-armed states (US, Russia, China, UK, France, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea) could use a nuclear weapon to achieve a military objective and chooses not to, it becomes that bit more difficult to imagine them using a nuclear weapon ever. And the sooner those countries come the realization that these weapons are actually too dangerous and too politically explosive to use ever, the sooner we can get rid of these weapons once and for all.
If Israel and the US don’t want Iran to have a nuclear weapon, the surest way to prevent that is to use the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons to facilitate the total elimination of all nuclear weapons from all countries. Half the countries of the world have already signed this treaty, and once the other half join, nuclear weapons will go the way of dum-dum bullets, mustard gas, landmines, cluster munitions and other weapons that have long since disappeared from the arsenals of nations that once had them and claimed they were “essential” for their security.