In analyzing Israel’s pre-emptive strike against Iran in June of this year, I want to go back to the 1967 Six Day War, where at the time Israel was close to building a nuclear bomb in Dimona. We now know that in 1967 the Egyptians and/or Soviets believed that Israel could be stopped from reaching nuclear status by military action against it in 1967. According to Avner Cohen in "Hataboo", the threat of war in the weeks leading up to the Six Day War is what spurred Israel to make a rudimentary nuclear bomb operational just in time before the outbreak of the war.
There are grounds to believe that Six Day War was deliberately provoked by the Soviets in co-operation with Egypt and Syria with the intention of destroying Israel’s nuclear program and preventing Israel from becoming a nuclear power. This theory was the subject of a book published in 2007 by Israeli historians Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez called Foxbats over Dimona: The Soviets’ Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War.)
For years after the Six-Day War, the consensus view among historians was that it was set off as the result of a series of accidents. However, the declassification in 2015 of documents from the Israel Defence Forces archives at Israel's Ministry of Defence show that Israel's concern over protecting against the elimination of its nuclear reactor in Dimona, which it had begun constructing in 1958, played a far greater role in Israel’s decision to launch a pre-emptive strike in 1967 than was previously proven.
These declassified documents revealed that in a meeting of government ministers and IDF top brass on June 2, 1967 the IDF expressed deep concern that the Egyptians would launch an air strike on Israel's nuclear reactor in Dimona, if Israel didn't launch a pre-emptive strike and crush Egypt's air force.http://www.haaretz.com/june-67-idf-feared-egyptian-strike-on-dimona-1.322776
Israel decimated Egypt’s Air Force in the first two hours of the war, meaning the Soviets did not have air superiority to go ahead with their plan to destroy Dimona. Had Israel's nuclear reactor at Dimona been destroyed, there would have been radioactive contamination over all of Israel. Given this nuclear context, Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin’s nervous breakdown prior to the war, which was withheld from the Israeli public, is understandable. The suggestions is that Russia, Egypt and Syria wanted to provoke Israel into launching military action in 1967 which would have branded Israel as the aggressor and given them the necessary cover to act to destroy Israel’s infrastructure in Dimona.
Although declassified documents from 1967 refer to Egyptian warplanes which invaded Israel's airspace to photograph the nuclear reactor on Dimona, Ginor and Remez argue quite persuasively the planes were not in fact Egyptian, but rather Russian MIG 25's, (aka Foxbats), flown by Russian pilots. They claim the Soviets provocatively flew Foxbats over Israel’s most sensitive site while the Israeli army was mobilized to lure Israel into war. The Foxbat planes flew too high and too fast for Israel’s Hawk anti-aircraft batteries and Mirage III fighters to intercept or shoot them down.
As we consider this current war with Iran, Israel found itself knowing that it had to do what it did in 1967, which was to take a necessary preventative strike to avert an enemy from being able to strike Israel in a manner that would send radioactive material all over Israel, and wipe it out. In 2025, the preventative strike is to ensure that Iran can never drop a nuclear bomb on Israel, given one bomb alone would be enough to destroy all of Israel. Israel is simply a country too small to strike Iran back if Iran sent a nuclear bomb. The radioactive material from one Iranian nuclear strike would be enough to wipe Israel out. Israelis know that their only choice is to take action to stop Iran from going nuclear, as no one else has been willing to take the necessary action, notwithstanding the terrible costs of this war in terms of the large number of Israeli wounded and killed, with the home front in and out of bomb shelters, and fearful of being struck by incoming Iranian missiles, as well as extensive damage to Be’ersheba and the Weitzman Institute in Rechovot (allegedly a nuclear research facility) Haifa was struck by Iranian missiles because Israel’s oil refineries are there, and Israel struck Iran’s oil refineries. Sirens sounded in southern Israel, including in the desert town of Dimona, the heart of Israel’s nuclear arms program.
It is worth remembering that it will only be years from now that it will become known what the full Israeli deliberations were in taking this preventative strike. Further, time will tell how extensive the damage was to the Fordow and other nuclear sites. There have been various contradictory reports, such that it is very unclear how much Iran was set back in its drive to go nuclear. It further remains to be seen whether this war will mean that the Iranian regime will calculate that the best way for it to for protect against a future Israeli attack is to obtain a nuclear deterrent as quickly as it can. Interestingly, the Washington Post has reported that the most devastating aspect of Israel's campaign could well be targeting of Iran's leading nuclear scientists, who were killed at the outset of the war. These include all of Iran's first and second tier of physicists and other nuclear scientists, an as most of the third tier. It remains to be seen whether this will deter younger Iranian scientists from participating in a nuclear program that ended up being a death sentence.
