Juan Cole
Informed Comment / October 5, 2024
Ann Arbor – The dastardly Don Trump has urged Israel to strike at Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment sites, which include the uranium conversion center in Isfahan and the research complex at nearby Natanz.
All you had to hear “the Dastardly Don Trump” to know that this idea is the worst that could be imagined.
Here’s why. The toxic enriched uranium Isfahan’s uranium conversion center would be thrown into the air by an Israeli bombardment. As many as 70,000 casualties could be produced immediately in Isfahan: ” the casualties resulting from exposure to toxic plumes could range between 5,000-70,000 in urban areas around the city of Isfahan.” The nuclear weapon the U.S. Air Force dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki in 1945 killed 75,000 people directly.
The greater metropolitan Isfahan population is 4 million, about equal to Los Angeles.
Another 7,000 would die if Natanz were hit.
Author Khosrow Semnani pointed out that “In a worst-case scenario, fallout would get into the water table, contaminating much of Iran’s drinking water.” Iranians would go on dying from radiation sickness for decades.
The author has knocked down Israeli propaganda that since so much of these facilities is underground, the radioactive fallout would be limited. This is not true. People make an analogy to the 1981 Israeli airstrikes on OSIRAK, the French-built Iraqi nuclear reactor, but note that it was an empty shell then, still being constructed, and had no nuclear material on site.
Essentially, in hitting Iran’s civilian nuclear facilities, Israel would be turning the uranium at Isfahan into an enormous dirty bomb. ‘A “dirty bomb” is a type of “‘radiological dispersal device’ that combines a conventional explosive, such as dynamite, with radioactive material. The terms dirty bomb and RDD are often used interchangeably.” Only by hitting uranium stockpiles Israel would spread around much more radioactive material than would a small dirty bomb.
Such an airstrike would be a grave violation of the 2005 UN International Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism . That convention has been signed by 115 countries, including the United States and Britain.
There would be no difference between Israel and the terrorists in the 2012 HBO film, “Dirty Bomb,” where the target of the fictional attack is London.
An attack on Iran’s civilian nuclear facilities would have little effect on the country’s civilian enrichment program (Iran has no military nuclear program). Many Iranian scientists know how to enrich and the enrichment sites are sufficiently dispersed that they can’t all be hit, much less put out of operation.
The US military has concluded that Iran’s knowledge of how to enrich uranium cannot be wiped out and that there is therefore nothing to be gained by bombing Iranian nuclear sites.
Some worry that an Israeli strike on an Iranian nuclear enrichment facility will push Iran over the edge, so that it would shortly thereafter make and detonate an Iranian nuclear weapon.
I don’t think that can happen while Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is the clerical leader, since he opposes such weapons. But he is old and could soon pass from the scene, and a new, radical leadership could come to the fore. It is often pointed out that the 1981 Israeli airstrike on the proposed French-built OSIRAK nuclear reactor before it was “hot” convinced Iraq to seek an Iraqi nuclear bomb 1981-1991.
Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment; he is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan and the author of, among others, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
