The Iranian landscape is a blur of colours and textures. Deserts morph into mountains, rivers into plains.
The B-2 stealth plane’s top speed is classified, but today it’s flying at almost 700 mph. So far, its radar-absorbent materials and angled surfaces – which give it the appearance of an angry metal mosquito – have done their job. The flight remains undetected. Iran’s air defences have been rendered useless.
The Kuh-e Kolang mountain looms into view. Its surface of undulating brown and grey has a calmness that belies the reality. Buried scores of metres within is the target: a half-built uranium-enrichment plant. Once operational, it will produce enough material for several nuclear bombs.
It’s time. The payload, two 6-metre, 14,000 kg GBU-57 bombs that penetrate deep below the surface before detonating, is released. It’s a double tap: first one, then another. The roar of the explosion is colossal. The mountain seems to tremble before a part of it implodes, sinking in on itself.
‘Mission accomplished,’ says a calm voice with a Midwestern American accent, ‘back to Missouri.’
A little to the north two Israeli pilots are smiling. Earlier, they passed over Syria on their way to Iran and surveyed with satisfaction the shattered Syrian aircraft they had destroyed at the end of 2024. Now they are closing in on another target: Iran’s Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant in Natanz.
A US Airforce B-2 stealth bomber. This type of weapon could be used to wipe out Iran’s nuclear facilities
The Iranian regime murdered Mahsa Amini, pictured on poster, in September 2022 for incorrectly wearing her hijab
Their tools are US-made BLU-109 bunker-buster bombs. Jerusalem used these to kill Hezbollah terror leader Hassan Nasrallah back in September; today they are bringing the same vengeance to his Iranian paymasters.
The bombs are released. An inferno of flame and smoke erupts below. Smiles turn to grins. ‘Balagan,’ (chaos) says a voice in Hebrew. The planes turn sharply and begin the journey home.
The January 2025 strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities marked both a beginning and an end. Donald Trump had started his second administration in spectacular style. For Iran, decades of work and billions of dollars of equipment and research were no more.
This dramatic description of the obliteration of Iran’s nuclear ambitions is, of course, fictional. But the fact is that, for Israel, a nuclear armed Iran is unacceptable. And as far as it is concerned, the Iranians are intent on ‘the bomb’. Many years ago, I sat in a cafe with an Israeli intelligence officer and asked him how sure he was of this: ‘If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck – and it’s not a pregnant woman,’ he replied. ‘It’s a duck.’
Iran has consistently denied it seeks nuclear weapons, pointing to the fact that it signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and only wants peaceful nuclear power, as is its legal right. Either way, what is clear is that while it may not yet have a nuclear weapon, it is close to gaining the capability to produce one.
Jerusalem and Washington DC have repeatedly ‘war-gamed’ how to successfully strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. But it is not easy. As I discovered while writing my first book Nuclear Iran: The Birth Of An Atomic State, the Islamic Republic has been smart about the programme’s security.
In 1981 the Israelis struck Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor at Osirak. Operation Opera, as it was called, was a total success.
But Osirak was a single, above-ground facility built around one reactor – and the Iranians learned from it. Iran’s programme is very different: it has dispersed its faculties around its country and buried them deep underground.
Iran has two paths to any bomb: plutonium production and uranium enrichment, the latter of which it favours. It is now enriching uranium at up to 60 per cent fissile purity, close to the 90 per cent weapons grade it needs to manufacture nuclear bombs.
Its two key enrichment facilities are in Natanz, south of Tehran, which goes several floors underground, and Fordow, which is dug into a mountain, making it theoretically even better protected.
Then there is the nuclear technology centre on the outskirts of Iran’s second biggest city Isfahan, while Iran is also reportedly building another facility in Natanz. Satellite photos taken in April 2023 show that Iran is burrowing into the Kuh-e Kolang mountain just south of the existing complex – some experts have speculated that this facility is up to 100 metres below ground.
Rafel Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the watchdog that monitors nuclear proliferation, assessed in January 2023 that Iran had enough uranium to build ‘several’nuclear weapons. If enriched to the right levels and if it has sufficient technology to weaponise them with the appropriate delivery systems.
Iran also relies primarily on centrifuges to enrich uranium, which are small, 20-30cm in diameter and 1-2 metres tall, and can be constructed in a variety of locations. So if Israel launches strikes Iran would theoretically be able to rebuild and place them even deeper underground.
Israel does have bunker-busting capabilities. It reportedly used a BLU-109 bomb (which can go 35 metres deep) to assassinate Nasrallah. But whacking a podgy terrorist in a Beirut suburb is very different to destroying an Iranian nuclear site buried in a mountain.
For that it needs the US with its GBU-57 bunker-busting bombs, which penetrate at least 60 metres underground before detonating. Pentagon officials have discussed using two bombs in succession to ensure any nuclear site would be destroyed, but even then, success is not assured.
The GBU-57 is likely to be carried on the B-2 Stealth Bomber plane as it is so huge (about 6 metres long). The US used the B-2 to strike five Houthi facilities in October 2024, a clear warning to Iran. As US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said afterwards: ‘This was a unique demonstration of the United States’ ability to target facilities that our adversaries seek to keep out of reach, no matter how deeply buried underground, hardened or fortified.’
This speaks to an inescapable truth: set aside all the rhetoric, the Israelis cannot do this without Washington. For years, Israeli officials have tried to make the case that this is America’s problem. Avi Dichter, former head of Israel’s internal security service Shin Bet, once spent an hour telling me that the nuclear crisis was a superpower problem that required a superpower solution.
The Americans, though, are not having it. George W Bush reportedly rejected Israeli requests to give them the necessary bombs and the planes. Obama’s desire to make a deal with Iran meant he was never going to countenance Israeli strikes. Trump talked up a strike on Iran’s bomb-making facilities after the country attacked Israel with 200 missiles last October, saying he had advised Netanyahu to ‘hit the nuclear first and worry about the rest later’. But then he says a lot of things.
There is no doubt that Trump loathes the mullahs and fears an Iranian nuclear capability. A tough new strategy on Iran, which includes possible military action, sending more US forces to the region and selling Israel more advanced weapons, is a key foreign policy objective. But he is also reluctant to unleash a new war dragging in the US military.
Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), assessed in 2023 that Iran had enough uranium to build ‘several’ nuclear weapons
Airmen work on a GBU-57, or Massive Ordnance Penetrator bomb, at Whiteman Air Base in Missouri, US
All of which means that if the Israelis are immovable in their desire to take out Iran’s nuclear programme, they will probably need to do it themselves.
And if they cannot do that, can they target the regime directly?
The time has probably never been more propitious. Just over one year on from the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and Iran is reeling. Its Syrian vassal Bashar al-Assad has finally fallen and duly scuttled off to Moscow to enjoy a future of exile-cum-imprisonment as Putin’s guest there.
Make no mistake, Assad’s fall is a disaster for Tehran. Not only has it lost face for its failure to protect him, but without Assad it no longer has a land bridge to supply Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Meanwhile, its Palestinian proxy Hamas is ravaged: thousands of its fighters are dead, as are its Gaza leaders, while the Qataris have asked its ‘political’ cadre to leave Doha. (The billions they have stolen from their own people will no doubt ease that blow.)
The jewel in Iran’s proxy crown, Hezbollah, lost its charismatic leader Hassan Nasrallah to those Israeli bunker-busting bombs in September, while its officer class remain largely alive but also largely bereft of limbs following Israel’s pagers operation against them, when the country’s intelligence services turned the terrorist group’s communication devices into bombs.
The October 7, 2023, massacres did indeed change everything – just not in the way the axis of resistance planned.
Only the Houthis, a medieval-like Shia Yemeni terror group that brought child slavery back to their country, remain fully functioning, with the capacity to bomb Israeli – and indeed international – shipping at Iran’s behest. How long before Jerusalem turns its attention to them? And does international commerce a favour in the process?
Only last week, Israel’s ambassador to the UN warned that the Houthis risked the same ‘miserable fate’ as Hezbollah if they continued their missile attacks on his country.
With so many arms of the octopus now either amputated or crippled, I know that many Israelis are saying it’s now time to take out the head, the source of so much regional instability – the Iranians themselves.
To reiterate: the fall of Assad, the failed direct strikes on Israel and the smashing of Hezbollah and Hamas mean that the Islamic Republic’s entire policy toward Israel – which the mullahs use to garner support for their regime among the surrounding Arab population – is in ruins.
Indeed, this is unquestionably the most precarious period in the Islamic Republic’s history, more so than even the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War, when the country was at least united in the face of an external enemy.
Now, though, Iran’s people are furious with their leaders.
The huge sums the mullahs have spent on foreign adventurism when the country has chronic financial problems – brought about by decades of the regime’s economic mismanagement – are a long-standing source of anger for Iranians.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an overnight strike on Beirut in September
Now that it has seemingly all been for nothing, that anger has turned to rage. Former Iranian MP Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh articulated the thoughts of millions of Iranians when he posted that ‘no one will be able to waste Iran’s dollars for maintaining a spider web anymore’.
And it has been a lot of dollars. Iranian government documents, cited by The Times, indicate that Assad accrued a £39 billion debt to Iran for oil and military supplies during the Syrian civil war.
Between September and October this year, US based research firm Stasis Consulting conducted a poll of 1,189 Iranian citizens living across all 31 provinces, which found, among other things, that 64 per cent of Iranians think ‘Iran’s foreign policy is a cause of Iran’s economic problems’.
Critically, 60 per cent agreed with the statement that ‘Iranian officials do not care about solving the issues that matter to the Iranian youth’.
They are not wrong. Across Iran the people are revolted by the regime’s barbarity. According to a March 2024 UN fact-finding mission, after Iranian police ‘murdered’ Mahsa Amini in September 2022 following her arrest for incorrectly wearing her hijab, its security services went on to slaughter at least 550 people in the subsequent protests, the highest number killed since the Islamic Republic’s founding.
Security services fired assault rifles and shotguns loaded with metal pellets at protestors, as well as beating them with batons. This ‘unlawful killing of hundreds of protestors and bystanders’ included ‘scores of children’.
Amnesty International, meanwhile, has claimed that authorities ‘committed widespread torture’ as well as ‘the use of rape, including gang rape, and other forms of sexual violence’.
Add to this that Iran’s 85-year-old supreme leader Ali Khamenei is finally dying and is doing everything he can to ensure that his son Mojtaba succeeds him. This means implementing a dynastic succession model fundamentally opposed to the guiding principles of the Islamic Republic. When Khamanei does die, the transition period is likely to be one of acute vulnerability for the regime.
The Israelis know this. At the end of September Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu filmed a three-minute video posted on social media, in which he directly addressed the Iranian people. ‘When Iran is finally free — and that moment will come a lot sooner than people think — everything will be different,’ Netanyahu said. ‘Our two countries, Israel and Iran, will be at peace.’
In the video’s key phrase he declared that ‘the people of Iran should know – Israel stands with you’. It was smart politics, expressing support but stopping short of any specific promise of action. But the message was clear: rise up and overthrow your oppressors.
Again, there has probably never been a more opportune moment. According to Holly Dagres, a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, and a recent guest on the Mail’s weekly global news podcast, 90 Seconds To Midnight, ‘the Iranian people are fed up with the status quo and want the Islamic Republic gone. This was most evident by the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom uprising that has since evolved into a movement.
‘Just because mass protests aren’t in the streets doesn’t mean their demand for the downfall of the clerical establishment has changed’.
Yet what can the Israelis do? Even if Iranians want the regime gone, allying with Israel to do this would be a treason too far for many. Also, Israel’s foreign operations are generally in response to Iranian aggression, and they revolve around the business of sabotage and assassinations; political warfare is, ironically, far more of an Iranian speciality.
In truth, if the Israelis want to help bring about regime change the best thing they can do is carry on as they are: humiliating the regime at every turn, showing it for the weak and corrupt and falling entity that it is. Show the Iranians that those who oppress them are not only vile but incompetent. Show them that if they do overthrow the mullahs, they will have a friend in the region, should they so wish.
Until then, Tehran remains committed to Israel’s destruction, as do its proxies and millions of people across the world. The odds are long for the Israelis, but then they usually are and it’s probably wisest not to bet against them.
The Middle East is littered with the corpses of those who thought they could torture and kill Jews with impunity, and who have paid the ultimate price for this hubris.
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