ADVOCATES of airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities have long held that the attacks would delay an atom bomb for years and perhaps even buy Israel enough time to topple the Iranian government. In public statements, the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, has said that an attack would leave Iran’s nuclear program reeling, if not destroyed. The blow, he declared recently, would set back the Iranian effort “for a long time.”
Quite the opposite, say a surprising number of scholars and military and arms-control experts. In reports, talks, articles and interviews, they argue that a strike could actually lead to Iran’s speeding up its efforts, ensuring the realization of a bomb and hastening its arrival.
“An attack would increase the likelihood,” Scott D. Sagan, a political scientist at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, said of an Iranian weapon.
The George W. Bush administration, it turns out, reached an even stronger conclusion in secret and rejected bombing as counterproductive.
The view among Mr. Bush’s top advisers, recalled Michael V. Hayden, then director of the Central Intelligence Agency, was that a strike “would drive them to do what we were trying to prevent.”
Those who warn against attacking Iran say that such a move would free officials in Tehran of many constraints. An attack, for instance, would all but certainly lead to the expulsion of international inspectors, which, in turn, would allow the government to undo hundreds of monitoring devices and safeguards, including seals on underground storage units. Further, an Iran permitted to present itself to the world as the victim of an attack would receive sympathy and perhaps vital imports from nations that once backed trade bans. The thinking also goes that a strike would allow Iran to further direct its economy to military ends.
Perhaps most notably, an attack could unite what is now a fractious state, these analysts say, and build an atmosphere of mobilizing rage. As the foreign ministers of Sweden and Finland wroteearlier this year, “It’s difficult to see a single action more likely to drive Iran into taking the final decision.”
History, the analysts say, demonstrates that airstrikes and military threats often result in unbending resolve among the beleaguered to do whatever it takes to acquire nuclear arms.
“People always assume the bad guys want nukes,” says Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear nonproliferation specialist at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. “But I think there’s usually a hesitation about the balance of risk. My sense is that the threat of military action makes bad guys feel like they need the bomb.”
Pakistan’s foreign minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, seemed to have embodied that kind of determination when he said famously in 1965, “If India builds the bomb, we will eat grass or leaves, even go hungry, but we will get one of our own.”
Mark Fitzpatrick, a senior nonproliferation official at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a prominent arms analysis group in London, said in an e-mail interview that it was “almost certain” that a military strike on Iran would result in “a Manhattan-style rush to produce nuclear weapons as fast as possible.”
These analysts maintain that the history of nuclear proliferation shows that attempting to thwart a nuclear program through an attack can have consequences opposite of those intended. Mr. Lewis of the Monterey Institute and other experts often cite Iraq. Israel’s attack on the Iraqi Osirak reactor in 1981, they argue, hardened the resolve of Saddam Hussein and gave his nuclear ambitions new life.
“All of the historical evidence that I have seen,” Mr. Lewis wrote recently, “suggests Saddam had yet to decide to seek nuclear weapons until the humiliation of the strike.”
Top Israelis disagree. Amos Yadlin, one of the pilots who attacked the Iraqi reactor and a former chief of Israeli military intelligence, argued early this year that Iraq’s nuclear program “never fully resumed” and cited the bombing episode as a compelling rationale for military action against Iran.
But a number of former Israeli officials have echoed those who think the attack emboldened Mr. Hussein and worry that an attack on Iran could do the same there.
Yuval Diskin, who retired last year as director of Israel’s internal security agency, told a gathering in April that “many experts” cite the acceleration risk. “What the Iranians prefer to do today slowly and quietly,” he said, “they would have the legitimacy to do quickly and in a much shorter time."
Nuclear historians say intimidation alone can spur an atomic response, as when American hostility prompted China to seek nuclear arms. Beijing succeeded in 1964 with a thunderous blast.
In “China Builds the Bomb,” John Wilson Lewis and Xue Litai wrote that Washington’s threats provoked “defiant anger and the decision to undertake the costly nuclear weapons program.”
The question of what prompts the speedups would seem to go far beyond the Iranian crisis and atomic history because the number of latent nuclear states (ones that could make bombs but choose not to, like Japan and Germany) has risen around the globe in recent decades. The estimated number now stands at around 40.
Scholars have long debated the social factors that keep countries from crossing the line.
Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told his colleagues before they won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 that the bomb decision often turned on nothing more complex than a “sense of security or insecurity.”
In a turbulent world, he added, that kind of evaluation could change rapidly. “Thin,” he called the margin of safety, “and worrisome.”
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