Two countries on the threshold of a nuclear bomb

A deep underground nuclear program, protected from American eyes, slowly reveals the secrets of the atom – and avoid fuel for an atomic bomb. The enemies are closed in, and the war shield grows with a louder voice.

After that, on the eve of the conflict, a hasty decision to assemble at least one primitive nuclear device. If the nation faces extermination, a atomic explosion – the mushroom cloud that the world sees – can save it?

This was Israel in 1967, when historians now understand that the Jewish state had first moved to the edge of the nuclear threshold. She stopped the last resort, a test of a raw bomb, whose unexpected victory in the six -day war has become unnecessary.

But the story is not different from the story of Iran in the months before what US President Donald Trump calls a 12-day war-and it is watching Israel as it explodes the allies of the Islamic Republic, from Hezbollah in Lebanon to the destruction of the Syrian army after the Islamic rebels prolonged the Hamsad regime.

Now, with Israel threatening more violence if Iran re -building its ability to enrich, the Islamic Republic faces the same question that Israel had to confront in 1967: to create a degree of final deterrence by running to a Nuclear weaponOr retreat from the edge of the abyss?

Valley Nasr, the former chief adviser to the US State Department and author of “Iran”, is now in the midst of a long -term internal discussion. Iran’s major strategy. “It is also irony that Israel pushes Iran to make the same decision they made.”

The six -day war changed a course The Middle EastWith Israel’s sudden victory over its largest neighbors, capturing and occupying the West Bank and Gaza. Israel has also turned a young woman, and its mysterious relationship with weapons of mass destruction, into a unique nuclear force – although it is completely unfamiliar, and dozens of unpopular and undeclared devices.

The West’s tolerance of Israel’s secret arsenal, which the Union of American Scholars estimates in less than 100 advanced weapons, is seen in the Middle East as a symbol of its hypocrisy, allowing the ally to rotate the criteria of non -spread while the punishment of Iran, which was confronted in many respects with its treaties.

But the unique situation of Israel is not only the result of its strategic alliance with the United States. This was the product of a different historical period, when the Jewish state was smaller and weaker, its enemies are stronger and determined to wipe it outside the map. The 1969 secret deal with the United States, which allowed Israel to preserve its unannounced nuclear weapons, reflects how Israeli leaders turned into their country’s position – shortly after the Holocaust – to an extraordinary exemption that no other country has received.

If Iran is heading towards a nuclear weapon now, it will provide global powers with an impossible choice – accepting one of the new participants in the nuclear club, or tempting others to follow his example, or seeking to punish him like North Korea.

The third option, to reap the political benefits of retreating from the nuclear threshold, is still on the table.

Aveler Cohen, the leading historian of Israel’s nuclear secrets, said that the Middle East had been brought to this moment by Iran’s simulation of Israel: the operation of a nuclear program that was partially open, partially sound, “there is a near and closest bomb” but it is late for any final decision until absolute necessity.

“Iran wanted Israel to be another, followed on the way of Israel,” said Cohen, a professor at the Middlebberry Institute for International Studies in Monterey. California. He pointed to how Israel has built a wide experience that would be able to create a nuclear device at a time of the crisis – without choosing this path explicitly.

“Iran wanted, and in many ways it was a tradition, the mysterious Israeli Running method He said that their political circumstances were different – and more than hostility, “referring to the 1969 Israel deal with the United States to maintain the secret of arsenal.

“In the end, the world was more friendly for Israel, and less tolerant with the Iranians.”

It took four and a half decades to compete with Israel and Iranian Iranian to boil in the direct conflict, as Iran’s leaders included the destruction of the “Zionist entity” in the depths of the political discourse of the republic.

For Israel, Iran’s growing military ingenuity since the end of the century has been seen by the nuclear program and the agents of well -funded as an existential threat.

For Iran, Israel suddenly appeared as a threat at the existential level: Israeli leaders spoke frankly about changing the regime in Tehran, and its army has already shown that it could harm all Iran at the will.

Unlike Israel, which succeeded in hiding its nuclear ambitions, even from the close allies, Iran has approached the technical capabilities of the bomb after signing the non -spread treaty and the hardships of arduous inspections in the early 2000.

Until Israel and the United States attacked the Iranian nuclear program, Western intelligence assessments are in harmony with the UN view that Iran has not officially decided to follow a nuclear weapon.

For Israel, the imminent conflict in 1967 receives any doubts between policy makers. The historical records of Prime Minister Levi Ishkol, who meditates for the colleagues about a “specific weapon”, appear, while the military chief Yitzak Rabin was concerned about a sudden attack on the only nuclear reactor of Israel, which warned of “the absence of international legitimacy.”

In Iran last year, since the conflict with Israel was brewing, politicians began to issue mysterious warnings that Tehran could consider changing its nuclear doctrine.

After months of Israel and the first Iran of strikes in April 2024, Kamal Kharazi, Adviser to Foreign Affairs to Ayatollah Ali Khounai, He said Financial times that “we are not to build nuclear weapons”, but if Iran faces an existential threat, “it is normal to change our faith.”

In February last year, the former head of the Atomic Energy Organization in Iran, Ali Akbar Saleh, said that the sprawling nuclear research program in Iran had led to extensive artistic experience.

“What does the car need? You need a structure, engine, driving wheel, gearbox,” he said when asked whether Iran could build a nuclear weapon. “You ask if we had made the gearbox, I say yes. Did we make the engine? Yes, but everyone serves his own goal.”

In the period before the 1967 Israel war, research conducted by various parts of the government resulted in knowledge and even the fuel needed for a nuclear device, but there is no evidence available to the public that its leaders were explicitly ordered to build a bomb even shortly before the conflict.

On the part of Iran, with the growth of the conflict with Israel most likely in recent months, there has been one major transformation: its inventory of enriched uranium has doubled to 60 percent purity – much further than what is required for nuclear energy – to about 400 kg.

This inventory can theoretry to the theory to the degree of weapons. But any collapse device that Iran can suit may be a preliminary model, if effective, away from an advanced weapon.

In Israel, it was just a preliminary model that nuclear scientists gathered in a hurry and handed over to the soldiers in 1967, according to a research conducted by Cohen, including an interview with the military official responsible for what became known as the “Samson Option”.

This product appeared in research and resourcefulness, including at the Necclear Research Center in Dimona in the late fifties, where Israel built a secret underground facility to treat plutonium.

Almost at that time, the security concerns of Israel did not include Iran. The Shah, Washington’s ally, received a nuclear reactor in 1967 as a gift from the United States under the Eisenhower era, ATOMS for PEACE. After a year, he fell on NPT.

By the time of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, when the Shah was prolonged, Iranian nuclear research was primitive, and after the revolution most nuclear physics left the country.

Almost at the same time, the United States collected a set of Scholars To study two of the gifts it took in 1979 by an aging satellite. A few months later, President Jimmy Carter wrote in his memoirs that “we have a growing belief among our scientists that the Israelis have already conducted a nuclear test in the ocean near the southern end of Africa.”

Ozi Arad, a former research director of the espionage agency in Israel in Moussad, said that Israel had made a political decision that remained unchanged. This was the first doctrine: If the nuclear knowledge of the warning is considered a threat, then the Israeli war planes will attack.

He said, “The nucleus of Israel’s approach to spread was always: first, and if the nuclear program becomes a threat to Israel … it will exhaust all other means to stop it,” he said. “Then, it will return to an air strike.”

So in 1981, Israel attacked a nuclear reactor in Iraq. In 2007, it struck a secret reactor from North Korea under construction in Syria. “And now in 2025, you have Israeli warplanes that flies over Natanz, Fordo and Safhan (in Iran),” he said.

Which partly formed the nuclear position in Iran, which emerges and flow with political geography. In the eighties of the last century, after its war with Iraq, Iran began exploring a nuclear program to prevent another conflict with its neighbor, but the first Gulf War made this threat not related.

In 2004, a Pakistani nuclear scientist admitted the sale of the oldest centrifuge technology to Iran in the 1990s, which many see as the emergence of Iran’s enrichment experiences. In 2003, after watching the United States invading Iraq in the search for weapons of mass destruction, Iran declared and promoted a secret program called Amad, which the party’s observer said is looking – but not building nuclear weapons.

Nasr said that the focus on enrichment remains. He said: “The Iranians have actually saw attention, for a very long time, in using their program as a way to bring the United States to the table and carry the United States to agree to lift the sanctions.” “They understood that there is no other problem that will bring us negotiations.”

Its leaders have constantly maintained Iran, which was exercising its legal right as a learning of the non -spreading treaty for the peaceful nuclear energy program, and they allowed inspectors to enter the declared facilities, even for sudden visits.

But they also built new facilities for secret enrichment in Natanz, which were revealed by violations in 2002, then in Fordo, a site discovered by Western intelligence agencies in 2008. Inspectors of the International Nuclear Diseases Agency were allowed later to visit, including in the days that Israel had previously launched its sudden attack.

Now these facilities were damaged, along with a lot of traditional deterrence for Iran. The militia of the agent that surrounds Israel has greatly put a “ring of fire”. Many missile launchers and air defenses have been destroyed. This leaves Iran with a dilemma because it falls on the edge of becoming a nuclear armed force.

When building a weapon, “Iran is still analyzing cost and interest,” Nasr said, referring to negotiations with Europeans and the United States. Currently, the debate may have swing more towards those who only say they are doing the bomb.

“But the door is not completely closed. The only way will turn the path that Iran faces is to put a deal on the table convincing enough and flexible enough to influence this discussion in Iran.”