Nuclear Threats and Deterrence

A photo released by the semi-official Fars News Agency shows the scene where Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was killed in Absard, a small city just east of the capital, Tehran, Iran, Friday, Nov. 27, 2020 (Fars News Agency via AP); insert: Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in an undated photo

"[There were] serious indications of [an] Israeli role [in the assassination]."

"Terrorists murdered an eminent Iranian scientist today. This cowardice — with serious indications of Israeli role — shows desperate warmongering of perpetrators."

"[The international community must] end their shameful double standards and condemn this act of state terror."

"[Iran will] respond to the assassination of Martyr Fakhrizadeh in a proper time. The Iranian nation is smarter than falling into the trap of the Zionists. They are thinking to create chaos."

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif

 

"[Fakhrizadeh was] their senior-most nuclear scientist and was believed to be responsible for Iran’s covert nuclear program."

"He was also a senior officer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and that will magnify Iran’s desire to respond by force."

Former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East, Patrick Mulroy

 

"In the last days of their gambling ally’s political life, the Zionists seek to intensify and increase pressure on Iran to wage a full-blown war." 

"We will descend like lightning on the killers of this oppressed martyr and we will make them regret their actions!"

Hossein Dehghan, adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stands in front of a picture of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who he named as the head of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, April 30, 2018 (YouTube screenshot)

Iran's top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was not only "the father of Iran’s nuclear weapons program", according to Israel's Channel 12, but the man determined to ensure that "he delivered the bomb" for the Republic's ayatollahs. He had other talents to his credit, as a ballistic missiles expert, who was intimately involved in Iran’s missile development, which despite the signing of the nuclear accord with the West, continued apace, resulting in more sophisticated, longer-range ballistic missiles which would, needless to say, be required once nuclear warhead was achieved.

 

It is now assured that Mohsen Fakhrizadeh will no longer personally be capable of delivering on his long-held aspiration. According to Iranian state television, an old truck with explosives hidden under a load of wood was staged to explode close to where a sedan carrying Fakhrizadeh and his bodyguards passed on the highway. As the sedan came to a halt, five gunmen emerged to begin raking the car with rapid gunfire, according to the semiofficial Tasnim news agency. Israeli TV Friday night filled in the gaps, that the gunmen after fatally wounding Fakhrizadeh and shooting the three bodyguards dead, escaped.

To state that a pattern has emerged is to state the obvious, given the sequential mysterious deaths of other Iranian nuclear scientists. Clearly, someone, some entity, some group, has reason to believe the world would be better off without the Islamic Republic of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons. In early November, the New York Times reported al-Qaeda’s second-in-command had been fatally shot and killed in Tehran by two Israeli operatives on a motorcycle at Washington’s behest.

The senior leader, whose nom de guerre was Abu Muhammad al-Masri, was killed in August as unfortunately was his daughter, Miriam, widow of Osama bin Laden’s son Hamza, according to the Times, citing intelligence sources. Iran "carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device" in a "structured program" through the end of 2003, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency -- the Amad program -- which included work on the carefully timed high explosives needed to detonate a nuclear bomb.

The IAEA also revealed that Iran "conducted computer modeling of a nuclear explosive device" prior to 2005, between 2005 and 2009. The agency concluded on the other hand, that those calculations were "incomplete and fragmented". They had for years attempted to meet with Fakhrizadeh to question him on his activities, only to be rebuffed repeatedly by Tehran. In 2018, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu pointed out that Fakhrizadeh continued to lead Iran’s nuclear weapons efforts, despite the 2015 nuclear deal meant to prevent Tehran from constructing such weapons.

For an important scientist in the nuclear field with the example of previous Iranian scientists taken out of contention in Iran's constantly developing nuclear program Fakhrizadeh was held to be "one of the most closely protected people in Iran", surrounded by bodyguards accompanying him everywhere. Another powerful figure also considered to be inviolable was the head of Iran's Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Qassem Soleiman, yet an American airstrike at Baghdad International Airport in January put an end to his exertions on behalf of Iranian state terrorism. 

That led to the sordid event pf two Iranian missiles stricking a Ukrainian passenger jet leaving from Tehran en route to Ukraine, and then on to Canada. All 175 passengers and crew on board, 63 among them Canadians, and including Iranians bound for Canada on study visas, along with other nationals, being killed outright. This, after Iran fired missiles at a U.S. base in Iraq. The matter of the Ukrainian passenger flight still has not been settled, and likely never will be, Tehran insisting it was an accident, a series of misdirected missiles faulted to an unauthorized, overzealous IRGC officer.

This is yet one more event in an ongoing series of dramatic consequences for Tehran relating to its nuclear ambitions linked to its aspirations of attaining supreme control of the Middle East and beyond, its formation, training and equipping of proxy Islamist militias, its ongoing threats to annihilate the State of Israel, and its Shia axis of evil, aligning Lebanon through Hezbollah, Syria through the Alawite leadership, Yemen through the Houthi rebels against the majority Sunni Muslim states of the Middle East.

Previous manifestations of Israel's refusal to become a victim of the vicious plans set in motion to destroy it by the Iranian ayatollahs include the Stuxnet virus that temporarily set back Iran's uranium centrifuge enrichment project, the killing of Iranian nuclear scientist Majid Shahriari ten years ago, and other, associated targeted assassinations, all of which Tehran identified with Israel. Failing to grasp that as long as they continued to broadcast their intention to wipe Israel from the map of the Middle East, their target would take all necessary actions to set back that ardent plan of Islamofascism.

For the presence, Israel's national security and intelligence arms remain focused on deterrence. In the future, they may be called upon to expand measures to ensure Israel's security that would surely include military conflict. By that time, if matters continue to proceed as they are, other Middle East states that feel similarly threatened by Iran's nuclear ambitions and at the present time supportive of Israel's measures at impeding Iran's nuclear progress may themselves harbour a compelling desire to once and for all put a stop to the threatening posturing of the Islamic Republic.

It is entirely possible that while U.S.Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was in Saudi Arabia last week and Prime Minister Netanyahu flew to Saudi in the company of Yossi Cohen, director of Israel's spy agency Mossad, to meet secretly with Pompeo and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a plan was divulged that would remove another threat to the region as collaborationists for whom a successful mission would spell temporary relief. And perhaps serve to nudge MbS a little closer to persuading his father that full diplomatic ties and normalcy with Israel is a project whose time has come.

"Remember that name, Fakhrizadah", Mr. Netanyahu said in 2018 when he gave a presentation to the UN accusing Iran of continuing to seek nuclear weapons on the basis of new information revealed by Israel's secret service. It was known that this man headed a coordinated nuclear weapons program in Iran, the only Iranian scientist named in the International Atomic Energy Agency's 2015 "final assessment" of open questions on Iran's nuclear program where the IAEA's report stated Fakhrizadeh supervised  activities "in support of a possible military dimension to (Iran's) nuclear program."

"The story is not Trump, nor even Israel. The story is Iran -- the growing dread that a new U.S. administration will go back to the nuclear deal which threatens the very existence of the Gulf countries."

"We will know how to handle the issue of the Iranian threat, even if through our own means."

Tzachi Hanebi, member, Israeli security cabinet

Students protesting outside the foreign ministry in Tehran on Saturday.