Israel forgot about Iran's nuclear threat - will it pay the price?

Israel is very ready to defend against a massive Iranian conventional missile and drone strike, against a massive rocket and drone strike from Hezbollah, it has for now mostly neutered Hamas in Gaza, has terrorists on the run in the West Bank, and is ready for attacks from Syria, Yemen, or Iraq.

But sources have given the Jerusalem Post mixed signals about how ready Israel is to stop an Iranian nuclear weapons breakout.

In several high level briefings the Post has been part of where discussion of Iran’s nuclear weapons threat used to take up a significant amount of the time, the issue is often not mentioned at all or only discussed briefly as a response if the issue is pushed.

The last significant briefing on the IDF’s capabilities in this area was given before the war. For several months, the Post has sought to consult on the issue with a special Iran desk within military intelligence which was revealed to the public in mid-2023, but has been denied access.

Is it because the division is so busy (almost every part of the IDF’s normally classified units have been repeatedly shown off to reporters during the current war), because the IDF does not think its work is important enough to be covered, or to avoid drawing attention to the unit being distracted by other threats?  

The fact is that when your attention is diverted to seven fronts, there is no way you can focus as much on the eighth front – the nuclear front.

Also, all of those seven fronts are actually threatening right now.

The nuclear weapons threat from Iran has hovered over Israel on different levels for around 25-30 years, but there has never been a point where the Jewish state felt that the sword might come down on it within a period of months, let alone weeks or days.

Threats from every direction

There is another major distraction.

Usually, Israel’s lead in combating Iran’s nuclear threat is the Mossad.

Israeli military intelligence and the air force also play important roles, but it is a given that their attention is always divided elsewhere even during peacetime, which is why the Mossad has been the “point-person” on Iran for so long.

But Iran has not been Mossad Director’s main job now for 10 months.

He has been distracted by being the lead Israeli negotiator to recover the Israeli hostages from Hamas.

This is not a guess or a brilliant scoop.

There have been literally dozens of Barnea’s trips abroad, once hidden in veils of secrecy, which have been publicly announced.

No matter how hooked in we can be to foreign areas using modern communications, there is no way Barnea can focus as much on some hidden nuclear move in Iran when he is off globe trotting to Doha, Cairo, Paris, and elsewhere.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – who used to be “the” harbinger of doom on Iran – almost never talks about the nuclear threat, other than with a generic line drop.

No one in Israel has publicly campaigned globally about Iran’s recent progress in installing huge numbers of advanced centrifuges at its underground Fordow facility. This change is the first time that Iran could enrich enough uranium for a nuclear weapon entirely underground without even using other nuclear sites like Natanz.

If before, Iran’s nuclear breakout would be easier to watch because many components would need to be moved around more from site to site above ground, now that is less true.

Further, the Post reported from Institute for Science and International Security President David Albright on Wednesday along with an Iran International report, that Iran is making real progress in the nuclear detention arena.

If at one point, worries about an Iranian breakout could be assuaged by saying that all of their uranium enrichment progress still left them two years away from addressing “weapons group” issues – that time may now have shrunken to less than six months and may be shrinking even more.

The IAEA is the most blind it has been in around a decade, freely publicly admitting that it may not even be able to restore what it has missed over the last few years since the Islamic Republic shut off or removed various surveillance cameras and kicked out some key inspectors.

Israel’s domestic political arena is mostly focused on being pro or anti a hostage deal and ceasefire with Hamas, with some temporary headspace for Iran’s and Hezbollah’s conventional threats, but none of the government’s critics attacking the government for its silence on the nuclear issue.

The Post has heard from some sources that Israel is always acting on this issue behind the scenes, but when so much progress has been made by Tehran, one worries if these activities are enough especially compared to the 2020-2022 period when numerous Iranian nuclear facilities publicly went up in smoke.

The US has not had any policy on Iran’s nuclear program since fall 2023 when its unofficial deal with Tehran of a partial nuclear progress freeze for partial sanctions relief fell apart.

There has been zero new public US campaigning to put the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program “back in a box” even as the US intelligence community in July made strong implied warnings of Iran’s progress with its nuclear weapons group.

And why would America spend time or energy on a nuclear Iran when it is so distracted by Russia’s war on Ukraine, competition with China, and the multi-front Middle East war.

The current presidential candidates are not talking about it at all. If they did, what would they say? Neither the Trump nor the Biden-Harris administrations succeeded in blocking Iranian nuclear progress.

The Trump administration certainly tried harder using coercive means and the Biden administration using diplomatic means, but at best each of them sometimes temporarily slowed the nuclear progress, and some of their actions may have led to that progress speeding up.

All of this means that Iran may be closer for real to a nuclear bomb than at any prior time at the exact moment that Israel is most distracted – about as dangerous a recipe as there could be.