Why "Osirak" Won't Work on Iran
Via Larison, Paul Pillar provides details here and here why an "Osirak-style" military strike on Iran's nuclear facilities is based on an erroneous understanding of what actually happened. After Israel attack, Pillar notes, Iraq really got serious:
The Iraqis instead responded by redoubling their nuclear efforts using an alternative route to the production of fissile material; a decade later they were far closer to having a nuclear weapon than they were in 1981.
Pillar also pointed to recent research that took advantage of documents discovered after the U.S. invasion of Iraq:
One of the articles, by the Norwegian scholar Malfrid Braut-Hegghammer, revisits the Israeli attack against the Iraqi Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981, making use of materials unavailable before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Braut-Hegghammer's conclusion is that the Israeli attack was counterproductive, for two sets of reasons. One concerned the state of the Iraqi nuclear program at the time of the attack, which was basically drifting and, although providing some of the technological base that possibly could have been used in the future toward acquiring nuclear weapons, was not geared up to produce such weapons. The political momentum to develop a weapons option was â??inconsistent at best.â? The Osirak reactor itself was not well designed for purposes of supporting a weapons program. The International Atomic Energy Agency later assessed that visual verification and materials accounting would have detected any diversion to a weapons program. On-site French engineers constituted an additional safeguard. Saddam Hussein had not â??secured the basic organizational resources or budget.â? Iraqi pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability was â??both directionless and disorganized.â?The other set of reasons involved the Iraqi response to the Israeli attack, which was to establish for the first time a nuclear weapons program that not only had direction and organization but also was clandestine and kept away from international scrutiny.
In other words, a military attack galvanized Hussein to proceed with an actual, ambitious nuclear weapons program where before the steps were tentative and ineffectual. Of course, that doesn't mean that the Iranians won't react to a military strike by folding up the nuclear shop and calling it a day, but the evidence doesn't look good.
