Key Points and Summary – As part of its recent conflict with Iran, Israel reportedly carried out “Operation Narnia,” a series of targeted assassinations that killed at least eleven of Iran’s top nuclear scientists.
-According to a Wall Street Journal report, the near-simultaneous attacks were designed to decapitate the “brain trust” of Iran’s nuclear program and hinder its ability to weaponize its enriched uranium.
-This campaign, which follows the 2020 assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, is a key component of Israel’s strategy to dismantle Tehran’s nuclear capabilities.
-While the long-term impact is debated, the killings represent a significant blow to Iran’s decades-long atomic ambitions.
Israel’s Secret War Against Iran’s Nuclear Program
Israel, and later the U.S., bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities in June, in an attempt to remove, or at least set back, that country’s nuclear program.
Also part of the attack on the program, from Israel’s side, was the killing of several Iranian nuclear scientists.
Now, the Wall Street Journal has published a look at how Israel did it, and what it will mean for the Iranian program going forward.
The plan was called “Operation Narnia,” and it followed Israel’s spending many years tracking Iran’s leading nuclear scientists.
Per the Journal, “explosions shattered the homes of some of Iran’s top scientists, killing nine people who had worked for decades on Tehran’s nuclear program. All nine were killed in near-simultaneous attacks to prevent them from going into hiding, according to people familiar with the attacks.” Another attack, nearly two weeks later, killed a tenth scientist, a man the U.S. had sanctioned weeks earlier, while an 11th scientist was reportedly killed by a drone, in Tehran.
Israel has assassinated Iranian nuclear scientists before, including the 2020 killing of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, which was reportedly carried out using a remote-controlled machine gun. Other Iranian scientists have been killed, including between 2010 and 2020, but Israel has never confirmed its involvement in those deaths, the Journal said.
One of the scientists, Fereydoon Abbasi-Devani, had survived a car bomb assassination attempt in 2010.
The scientists who were killed had different roles in the Iranian nuclear program.
Striking a Blow
“It’s one thing to lose that expertise slowly over time, especially if you are not trying to actually build a bomb. You have time to replace them,” Eric Brewer, a former U.S. national security director for counterproliferation, told the Journal. “But if you’re in the middle of trying to build a bomb or if you see that as a potential near-term option, then it’s going to have a bigger impact.”
The Journal did report, however, that Iran has passed some of its nuclear expertise on to a “new generation” of scientists, so not all of its know-how was lost in the assassinations of the scientists.
The killings, though, took out the “brain trust of nuclear scientists,” Andrea Stricker, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies, told the Journal. Israel, with the killings, dealt “a blow to Iran’s ability to draw on people who have past and possibly ongoing experience in constructing specific components of nuclear weapons.”
A Surviving Archive
However, the report also found that Iran has maintained an archive of its nuclear knowledge, one that Israel successfully raided in 2018.
“Iran kept old nuclear-weapons-related equipment, including undeclared enriched uranium, just down the road from the archive. It was dispersed in 2018 and the U.N. atomic energy agency has been demanding answers ever since to where it was sent,” the report said.
Is It Legal?
However, not everyone approves of the killings.
Ben Saul, an international lawyer and United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism, told ABC News in Australia that the killings of the scientists were illegal.
“Every death, whether it’s a part of the military, whether it’s a nuclear scientist, whether it’s a completely uninvolved civilian, all of that is illegal,” Saul said in the interview. “Under international law, you can only use military force if it’s in self-defence because you’ve been attacked.”
Paul Pillar, of Responsible Statecraft, expressed similar views.
“The Israeli attack is in any case counterproductive as far as nuclear nonproliferation is concerned, as was true of an earlier instance of Israel attacking another state’s nuclear facility. The underground nature of key Iranian nuclear infrastructure, and the knowledge that Iranian scientists will retain, severely limit the extent to which any Israeli airstrikes will set back Iran’s program.”
Meanwhile, per Maktoob Media, the killing of one of the scientists, Sedighi Saber, also took out 11 of his family members.
About the Author:
Stephen Silver is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, and contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. For over a decade, Stephen has authored thousands of articles that focus on politics, technology, and the economy. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) at @StephenSilver, and subscribe to his Substack newsletter.
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