The Impact of an Iran Strike

September 7, 2012 | Edited by Leah Fae Cochran

“All-out effort” - Defense analyst Anthony Cordesman assessed what it would take for Israel or America to carry out a preventative strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. In addition to the nuclear facilites, targets would include Iran’s eight ballistic-missile bases, 15 missile production facilities, and 22 launch facilities- all which would have to be struck preemptively while keeping Iran from blocking the Strait of Hormuz, according to Cordesman.

-- “Setting back Iran’s nuclear efforts will need to be an all-out effort, with squadrons of bombers and fighter jets, teams of commandos, rings of interceptor missiles and whole Navy carrier strike groups — plus enough drones, surveillance gear, tanker aircraft and logistical support to make such a massive mission go. And all of it, at best, would buy the U.S. and Israel another decade of a nuke-free Iran,” writes Danger Room’s Noah Shachtman on the report. http://bit.ly/QqSwSb

--In true military planning fashion, the report contains a scenario for using Low Yield Earth Penetrating nuclear weapons to destroy Iran’s underground facilities. As Shachtman puts it, “You don’t even want to know what the Middle East would look like the day after Israel attempts a nuclear strike on Iran."

Full report here: - “Analyzing the Impact of Preventive Strikes Against Iran’s Nuclear Facilities,” by Anthony H. Cordesman at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (.pdf) http://bit.ly/Q2Ql7J

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Tweet - @plough_shares: Confused by the technical details in the #IAEA report on #Iran? @plough_shares blog clarifies what it all means http://tinyurl.com/cwtom5t

The naval side - Speaking of capabilities, Robert Haddick at Foreign Policy weighs in on the naval burden of dealing with the commitment of keeping an extra aircraft carrier strike group in the Central Command area to contain Iran. The USS John C. Stennis strike group was sent back to the area four months early to close the gap. “This ongoing commitment, mostly in preparation for trouble involving Iran, is absorbing at least 60 percent of the Navy's total carrier fleet and is requiring an operating tempo that is not sustainable for long,” writes Haddick.

-- “Regarding Iran, although the U.S. Air Force has abundant tactical air power, political sensitivities on the Arabian Peninsula, combined with the vulnerability of forward bases to missile attack, apparently prevent the deployment of much of this tactical air power as a hedge. This has left Central Command excessively dependent on aircraft carriers instead.” Full story here. http://bit.ly/SoG5tI

Threat - Pakistan’s police and army are bulking up defenses around Dera Ghazi Khan, a nuclear fuel-cycle installation, after Pakistan intelligence intercepted a Taliban phone call that unveiled a “serious” security threat to the site, reports Abdul Manan in The Express Tribune.

--The threat, confirmed to The Express Tribune by a Dera Ghazi Khan district police officer, has sparked the deployment of heavy military forces around the site and the region to guard against an attack. Full story here. http://bit.ly/Q9GXRn

Promising a strike might cause one - Heeding Israeli calls for a more explicit American threat to use force against Iran is the wrong way to prevent a unilateral Israeli strike, writes Dahlia Dassa Kaye of the RAND Corporation.

-- “Rather than public posturing aimed at encouraging the United States to make such firm declaratory policies – creating a sense of mistrust and tension in U.S.-Israeli relations that can only benefit Iran – Israeli officials should work with their American counterparts to quietly seek common strategic understandings on what type of Iranian endgame is acceptable and what conditions would need to be in place for force to be contemplated,” Kaye writes. CNN’s Fareed Zakaria has the post on his blog. http://bit.ly/haEbdr

Uranium for medical isotopes - Health providers said that there is not enough incentive built-into the Obama administration’s plan to reduce the role of bomb-grade uranium in the production of medical isotopes. The plan offered payments to providers who used isotopes derived from LEU to treat their Medicare patients. The providers argue that the $10 per dose payment is insufficient to cover the costs of switching current practices. Global Security Newswire has the story. http://bit.ly/Q30ZLO

Tweet - @armscontrolnow: Is the NSG & nonproliferation system better as a result of the exemption for India 4 yrs ago? No. http://tinyurl.com/75xprhy