“Fixed fortifications are monuments to the stupidity of man.”
- General George Patton Jr
The following are my thoughts on this matter...posted some time ago... I still see no alternative that is less appalling than this. If anyone has a saner plan they should step up.
Attacking Iran for a 1 - 3 year delay will not be enough. Israel will go well beyond that in my opinion.
Anyone expecting Israel to execute an ordinary sort of attack is mistaken. Circumstances call for something quite extraordinary.
Recent movements by Israeli subs were not sight seeing tours, they almost certainly were dropping munitions on the sea floor for retrieval during a future attack. The subs cannot carry adequate stores of cruise missiles for extended action so they have positioned a supply near Iran.
If Iran were geographically closer Israel could easily use conventional means to totally destroy their nuclear capabilities... but only the United States has the ability to do that, and we all know 0 is not going to step up.
So Israel must do something drastic, simple air strikes with conventional bombs and bunker busters won’t get the job done this time. Israel could of course annihilate Iran using nuclear weapons, but they will not do that unless they are forced to. They will try something else first, something not as drastic as an all out nuclear attack, something very risky and dramatic.
I wrote the following back in May after thinking a long time about what options Israel really has, months later I still can think of no other reasonable option. It is either suffer another holocaust, launch an all out nuclear attack, or try something like this.
The Iranian installations that are in bunkers are what really need destroying to stop their nuclear program.
Nuclear bunker busters might be used, but even a 400kt device like our B61-11 might have difficulty penetrating to a sufficient depth to contain the blast and thus prevent massive fallout when the blast breached the surface and spewed many tons of radioactive debris into the sky. And although a 400kt or even 1 megaton warhead is a very powerful thing...it is quite weak underground when the target for destruction is a fortified bunker. It would be the shock wave that would need to destroy the bunker and for that a 400kt device would need to detonate very close to the bunker, perhaps as close as 400-700 feet. The problem is that even though you know where the entrances to the bunker are the actual bunker might be anywhere within a mile or so from those entrances. This means you would need to somehow get a precise location of the bunker by placement of seismic sensors ahead of time (listening for the sounds from industrial machinery and determining where the sound originates from)
A much more promising attack would be to take control of all the entrances and exits to such an installation and the surrounding area for an extended time.
To hold such an area from the types of assaults the Iranians could bring to bear would require creating your own hasty underground fortifications near the entrances to the bunker.
Massive mine laying would be required to protect against human-wave attacks such as were used in the Iran/Iraq war.
Iranian missile attacks would be totally ineffective against even hastily made Israeli underground defenses and could be dismissed as a real threat.
Chem/biological weapons would be used and so preparations would need to be made for protection.
It might in extreme circumstances be necessary to use battlefield neutron weapons to keep attacking forces at bay... this would require the Israelis to first actually possess such weapons (likely) and be willing to use them in extreme circumstances (also likely), they would also need to be able to protect themselves from the heavy neutron bombardment...this can be done but is not an easy thing to engineer quickly in the field so preparation would need to be underway immediately upon taking control of the area.
The neutron weapons would be able to immediately incapacitate attackers (even inside tanks) inside a blast radius of about 1/3 mile with a radiation dose of roughly 80 Gy...after such a dose only a very few ‘walking deadmen’ would be able to remain active, and those for a very short time.
The small radiation weapons would release the force of about 1kt compared to a conventional nuclear weapon...this is a very small yield and would pose no threat at all to Israeli soldiers in even rudimentary underground shelter.
The Israeli force would need to be supplied with food and other essentials for a possible extended time...long enough to locate and destroy the Iranian underground installations by placing appropriate charges, nuclear or conventional.
This would certainly call for a dedicated force of extraordinary men....but such men do exist and I’m certain Israel has enough of them to do the job.
If anyone else has a better idea for an Israeli plan of action I’d like to hear it... Diplomacy is a dead end...literally.
although the structure might survive would not delicate machinery for nuke construction just be shaken of their legs and destroyed? ie centrifuges?