Israel's strike has Iran facing a stark nuclear option

Israel’s long-awaited retaliation against Iran has highlighted the clerical regime’s conventional military weakness and sense of strategic vulnerability. Designed to make Iran “pay” for its Oct. 1 missile barrage — which marked the largest single-day ballistic missile operation in history — Israel struck more than 20 military targets in three essentially uncontested waves of attack. It remains unclear, however, if these strikes will be sufficient to elicit a change in the right direction from Tehran.

In the wee hours of Oct. 26, Iranian authorities watched as Israel gutted two of their traditional pillars of deterrence — the ability to “deny” an adversary the chance to land a blow, and their ability to “punish” an aggressor.

Iranian radars, as well as air and missile defenses such as Russian-provided S-300 platforms, were reportedly taken offline or destroyed. So too, were several ballistic missile facilities tied to solid-propellant missile production, such as those at Parchin, Khojir, and Shahroud, as well as other sites believed to support Iran’s domestic missile supply chain.

While Iran’s arsenal of ballistic missiles — assessed by the U.S. intelligence community to be the largest in the Middle East — numbers around 3,000, it appears to have been untouched by the recent strike. Instead, Israel targeted Tehran’s ability to produce over time more medium-range systems capable of reaching the Jewish State from Iranian territory.

This puts Tehran in a bind. Retaining an ability to fire but not produce these projectiles significantly devalues their utility. This could help prevent or limit any response by a regime already willing and able launch missiles. On the other hand, it could spur risk-taking and escalation, including in unconventional ways, to prevent what it may assume are merely opening moves in a larger campaign.

Back in April, Iran responded to Israel’s bombing of what it alleged was a diplomatic facility in Damascus, which had killed several high-ranking Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders. The response involved the launch of Iran's first-ever direct and overt attack against Israel. In addition to intercepting most of that barrage — which featured ballistic missiles as well as low and slow flying drones and land-attack cruise missiles — Israel responded by targeting a radar platform tied to the S-300. Despite witnessing Israel’s ability to cripple one battery of the regime’s most prized defenses, Tehran was not deterred.

On Oct. 1, the Islamic Republic responded to a string of more recent Israeli attacks killing Hamas and Hezbollah leaders by doubling the number of high and fast-flying ballistic missiles it fired in April. In so doing, it disproved the assessment of American generals that its April attack was a “maximum effort” and that the regime did not have more munitions to strike Israel directly. Despite also being largely intercepted, 30 missiles reportedly hit an Israeli airbase.

In the aftermath of Israel’s retaliation, Iran’s choices of how to respond grow starker.

Initially, Iranian outlets downplayed the attacks, trying to enable a face-saving line of retreat that would prevent the strike from generating domestic unrest in Iran. But those denials soon morphed into calls for revenge that continue to be amplified by military elites. Last Sunday, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei threaded the needle by calling for the strike to be neither “exaggerated” nor “minimized,” while also publicly shifting to “officials” the burden of deciding how best to reply.

But in a critically overlooked portion of his address, Khamenei mocked those calling for restraint, or as he termed it, “weakness,” and for not pursuing “sensitive tools of power.” While the example Khamenei gave pertained to missiles, his vagueness allows for inferences about pursuit of the ultimate tool of power: a nuclear weapon.

Although it’s too soon to tell if this constitutes a pale-green light to Iran’s scientific community and defense-industrial base to further their already reported hedging activities — which have led to changed assessments within the U.S. intelligence community pertaining to Iranian weapons-related activities — it is a dangerous indication of where Tehran may go with its back up against the wall.

Importantly, Khamenei’s comments do not come in isolation. There have been numerous official statements in Iran brandishing the country’s threshold status and calling for a revision of its nuclear policy. Such statements have been an increasingly important element of Iranian deterrence in the face of Israeli military successes against the “Axis of Resistance.”

Indeed, on the same day as Khamenei’s address, an Iranian parliamentarian called for altering the Islamic Republic’s nuclear doctrine. That followed calls in hardline newspapers tied to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and even from members of the organization to change Iranian nuclear doctrine. Some politicians have even overtly declared that Tehran would have been able to safeguard the leadership of its Axis had it possessed a nuclear weapon already.

Faced with the handicapping of its long-range strike production and an inability to effect a new “equation” for deterrence against Israel through overt missile attacks, the attractiveness of nuclear saber rattling and perhaps even an atomic fait-accompli is growing for decision-makers in Tehran. This raises the imperative of closer political, intelligence and military cooperation and coordination between the U.S. and Israel as Iran thinks through its array of responses, which may not be limited to the conventional military space.

Behnam Ben Taleblu is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington.