John Mecklin, editor-in-chief of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, interviews James Acton, a physicist and wide-ranging nuclear policy expert who co-directs the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace:

John Mecklin: I gather you think it would be a bad idea for Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. Can you explain why for our readers?

James Acton: Sure. If Israel or the United States tries to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, my belief is that that will harden Iranian resolve to acquire nuclear weapons without eliminating Iran’s capability to do so. Israel would be motivated, in part, to punish Iran for its recent attack on Israel, using that as an opportunity to try and destroy Iran’s nuclear program, so the Israelis didn’t have to worry about it in the future. I think if they decide to attack Iran’s nuclear program, they will find themselves worrying much more about Iran’s nuclear program in the future. We’ll elaborate on this, but an attack would, I believe, simultaneously harden Iranian resolve to acquire nuclear weapons while also not destroying permanently their capability to achieve that goal.

Mecklin: In a sense, that’s essentially impossible, right? People in Iran have the knowledge to pursue nuclear weapons, right?

Acton: Yes. The situation is quite different from the Israeli attack on Osirak in Iraq in 1981. The Iraqis did have a nuclear weapons program that was centered around a reactor designed to produce plutonium. And I think the Israeli attack on Osirak in ‘81 did slow the Iraqi program very dramatically by many years. If the Iranian program today comprised a single reactor that had not been turned on, I think you could make a fair argument that it could be in Israel’s interests to attack it. But that’s nothing like what the Iranian program actually looks like. And I think the Osirak example many experts have at the back of their mind as a successful example of military nonproliferation. And also, the attack on the Syrian reactor in 2007.

But the Iranian program today is based around centrifuges, which are very small and can be manufactured quickly and placed almost anywhere. So even if an Israeli attack destroys Iran’s current centrifuge plants at Fordow and Natanz—and it’s not obvious to me that Iran has the capability to destroy Fordow, which is buried inside a mountain—but even if Israel can destroy Iran’s existing centrifuge plants, Iran is almost certainly going to reconstruct centrifuge facilities. In fact, it may already have clandestine centrifuge facilities. We don’t know. But even if it doesn’t, it will construct, I feel very certain, more centrifuge facilities, potentially at multiple sites, some of them potentially hidden in plain sight inside normal industrial buildings, and some of them buried even deeper than Fordow, so they’re definitely out of the range of the Israelis.

And I think Iran will likely kick out [International Atomic Energy Agency] inspectors and try to manufacture highly enriched uranium for weapons in the centrifuge plants. So even in the most optimistic case that this attack is highly successful, a centrifuge program can be reconstituted in a more survivable form relatively quickly. [Continue reading…]