By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The Real Threat From Iran: Tehran’s Most Dangerous Option for Responding to Israel

48 hours ago, the government of Israel decided to roll the dice on a military solution to Iran’s decades-long pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability. Given the remarkable capabilities of the Israel Defense Forces, the operation could do tremendous damage to the Iranian nuclear program. But then comes the hard part.

Iran has limited options to respond directly. The danger, however, is that Israel has opened a Pandora’s box: the worst Iranian response might also be the most likely, a decision to withdraw from its arms control commitments and build nuclear weapons in earnest. Containing those furies over the long term is likely to be the real challenge for both Israel and the United States. If the two parties fail, the Israeli gamble could ensure a nuclear-armed Iran rather than preventing one.

 

Tehran’s Bad Options

It’s very early in this latest battle between Israel and Iran, too soon to know how long the fighting will last or how much damage the Israelis will do. Still, Iran now faces some significant constraints on its ability to fight back, end, or even retaliate against the Israeli campaign.

Iran’s first problem is distance, and its second problem is Israel’s defenses. Because of both, Teheran has little ability to use its air force against Israel. What’s more, with roughly 700 miles of Iraq, Syria, and Jordan separating them, Iran cannot mount a ground attack against Israel—which would be suicidal against the far more competent Israeli army in any event. Consequently, if there is going to be a direct Iranian military retaliation, it will almost certainly be shouldered by Iran’s missile and drone forces, which have proved to be of limited capability against Israeli defenses.

Iran’s leaders might have learned from the embarrassing fizzles of attempted retaliations against Israel in April and October of last year that another such response will just make them look weaker. But both of those exchanges suggest the opposite: that Iran will feel compelled to respond against Israel, even if only for the sake of honor and to try to impose some cost on Jerusalem for its attack. The Iranians have been working hard to improve their missile and drone capabilities in the intervening months, and there are reports that they have had help from Russia, which might make them believe that they can do better than before. Accordingly, a retaliation using missiles and drones is a very real possibility, although whether it will be one big salvo, several smaller ones, or constant, staggered attacks is hard to say. Israel may have its own aircraft and drones looking for Iranian launchers to try to prevent such attacks and could also be striking known Iranian storage sites.

Whatever the exact approach, it seems unlikely that another missile or drone attack would have much impact on Israel. Israel still has formidable missile defenses, its population is well sheltered, and Iranian munitions have small payloads and are relatively few in number. Even if more Iranian missiles and drones manage to penetrate Israeli defenses this time, they probably would not do much damage or kill many people, especially compared to what the Israeli strikes are likely to do to Iran.

Another option would be a cyber strike. Iran has worked hard on its cyber capabilities in recent years and mounted some potent attacks, including against Israel. In the summer of 2023, Iran began shutting down electricity to Israeli hospitals—that is, until Israel began shutting down much larger numbers of Iranian gas stations.

This back-and-forth illustrates the uncertainties on both sides. It’s not entirely clear what cyber weapons Iran has up its sleeve or what vulnerabilities it may have discovered in Israel’s infrastructure. But the Iranian leadership doesn’t know what cyber weapons Israel has up its sleeve or what vulnerabilities it has discovered in Iran’s infrastructure. Moreover, Israel has tended to trump Iran in the cyber realm, and Iran’s populace is more unhappy and prone to revolt than Israel’s, which could add to Iran’s caution.

Although Iran is routinely ranked as a leading state sponsor of terrorism, a terror attack on Israel, especially in the short run, would be equally hard. Israel’s counter-terror defenses are formidable, and terror attacks, especially large damaging ones, can’t be conjured up overnight. They take months of planning, reconnaissance, preparation, and infiltration. Unless Iran has a long-planned terrorist operation that they have been holding in reserve, this, too, would be difficult to implement as a response to the Israeli campaign.

Then there is the prospect of a long-threatened and long-feared Iranian attack on oil exports in the Gulf, or even an effort to close the Strait of Hormuz. This also seems of low likelihood. First, this move would have such an enormous effect on oil prices and the global economy—and through them, on every national economy—that Iran would quickly go from being a sympathetic victim to a dangerous nemesis in the eyes of most other countries. Moreover, despite the fact that the Trump administration did nothing to protect Gulf oil exports from Iranian attack in its first term, closing the Strait of Hormuz would be such a severe threat to oil exports that the U.S. and other Western powers (and conceivably even China) would be virtually certain to use force to re-open the export routes. Although it might take the American military a number of bloody weeks to crush Iran’s military forces and re-open the straits, the Iranians do not seem to be under any illusion regarding the ultimate outcome. And Tehran would have to worry that such a reckless threat to the world’s economies would convince Washington that the Iranian regime had to be removed. That fear is surely greater with Trump, the U.S. president who ordered the death of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in January 2020, back in office.

Firefighters at a building damaged by Israeli strikes, Tehran, June 2025

 

Letting The Genie Out Of The Bottle

The most threatening possible response from Iran is not one that would play out in the coming hours or days, but over the long term. Tehran could withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968, which is the legal basis for the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (or JCPOA), announce that it will build nuclear weapons as the only way to deter such “unprovoked” attacks on Iran, and then dare Israel, the United States, and other countries to stop it from doing so.

Iran already has enough highly enriched uranium to build several nuclear weapons. This is containerized and believed to be stored at three different locations, and it is unclear whether Israel will be able to get all of it in the ongoing military strikes. Iran also has large quantities of uranium feedstock (called “yellow cake”) that could be enriched to weapons grade. The Israelis (and the U.S. government) believe that they know about all of Iran’s functional centrifuge cascades, but the International Atomic Energy Agency believes that Iran has built many more centrifuges, the whereabouts of which are unknown. Even if they are not part of operational cascades, they could be integrated into them fairly easily, and Iran can build still more. Without IAEA inspectors in country to enforce the terms of the NPT and JCPOA, Israeli and other Western intelligence services may have a very hard time finding new, secret Iranian nuclear sites. It may also have trouble destroying those sites even if they are identified, since Iran will likely harden them even beyond what it has done for its current facilities.

Discussions of Israeli options for stopping Iran’s nuclear program often refer back to the 1981 Israeli strike on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor. The mythology of that strike holds that the operation critically set back Baghdad’s nuclear program, saving the world from having to deal with a nuclear-armed Saddam Hussein. But in reality, as anaylsts learned from Iraqi documents and scientists after the 1991 and 2003 wars, Saddam responded by pouring additional resources into his nuclear program, making it many times more dangerous than it had been before the Israeli operation. He likely would have produced an Iraqi bomb sometime between 1992 and 1995 had the Gulf War and the subsequent inspection regime not ended his program.

Accordingly, the real challenge - for Israel, the United States, and any other government intent on preventing nuclear proliferation in the Middle East - is to find ways to prevent Iran from following the path that Iraq did following the Osirak strike. If anything, the situation is more dangerous now than it was then, since Iran’s nuclear program is so much more advanced, its scientists so much more knowledgeable, and its nuclear infrastructure so much more capable than Iraq’s was in 1981. This creates the Catch-22, in which the best way to prevent Iranian reconstitution would be an aggressive pursuit of a new nuclear deal with Tehran, at precisely the moment when Iran’s leadership will be least interested in one given their likely outrage at the Israeli attack. And without such a new deal, Israel may have succeeded in setting the Iranian nuclear program back in the short term - perhaps for a year or two - only to ensure the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran not long thereafter.

 

 

For updates click hompage here