Israel might be able to destroy only two Iran nuke facilities

David Blair:

I’ve often expressed doubt about whether Israel’s air force has the striking power to inflict enough damage on Iran’s nuclear installations to make war a rational option. It’s impossible to answer this question definitively, but on balance the answer is “probably not”. A quick reminder: the key factor here is whether Israel has enough air-to-air refuelling capacity to get its strike aircraft and the necessary fighter escorts all the way to their targets in Iran and back again.

On paper, the Israeli air force has only 7 KC-707 tanker planes. It’s hard to see how this would be enough to keep the attack fleet of 125 F-15Is and F-16Is airborne for long enough.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies has published aninteresting analysis of this issue by Josef Joffe of Stanford University. His conclusion is that Israel could not hope to destroy all of Iran’s nuclear plants. Instead, its air force would aim to knock out key elements of the nuclear supply chain by destroying perhaps two installations. Joffe suggests they would target the uranium conversion facility at Isfahan (without the ability to convert uranium into UF6 gas, Iran would have to stop enriching). He thinks the other target would be the more vulnerable of Iran’s two enrichment plants, located at Natanz (Joffe thinks, probably rightly, that Israel lacks the bombs powerful enough to destroy the other installation at Fordow).

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Israel has other weapons delivery systems that would probably come into play, such as submarine launched cruise missiles, and their on long range missile systems.  But I think any attack on Iran would need to include a sustained bombing campaign that would go after Iran's ability to make war.  Iran might just invite such an attack by striking at US bases and those of our allies in the region.  Doing that would unleash destruction that is well beyond teh capacity of Israel at this point.