Israel killed at least 14 scientists in attack on Iran’s nuclear know-how

Paris: Israel’s tally of the war damage it wrought on Iran includes the targeted killings of at least 14 scientists, an unprecedented attack on the brains behind Iran’s nuclear programme that outside experts say can only set it back, not stop it.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Israel’s ambassador to France said the killings will make it “almost” impossible for Iran to build weapons

from whatever nuclear infrastructure and material may have survived nearly two weeks of Israeli airstrikes and massive bunker-busting bombs dropped by US stealth bombers.

“The fact that the whole group disappeared is basically throwing back the programme by a number of years, by quite a number of years,” Ambassador Joshua Zarka said.

But nuclear analysts say Iran has other scientists who can take their place.

European governments say that military force alone cannot eradicate Iran’s nuclear know-how, which is why they want a negotiated solution to put concerns about the Iranian programme to rest.

“Strikes cannot destroy the knowledge Iran has acquired over several decades, nor any regime ambition to deploy that knowledge to build a nuclear weapon,” UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy told lawmakers in the House of Commons.

Closer look at the killings:

Chemists, physicists, engineers among those killed

Zarka told AP that Israeli strikes killed at least 14 physicists and nuclear engineers, top Iranian scientific leaders who “basically had everything in their mind”.

They were killed “not because of the fact that they knew physics, but because of the fight that they were personally involved in, the creation and the fabrication and the production of (a) nuclear weapon”, he said.

Nine of them were killed in Israel’s opening wave of attacks on June 13, the Israeli military said. It said they “possessed decades of accumulated experience in the development of nuclear weapons” and included specialists in chemistry, materials and explosives as well as physicists.

Experts say that decades of Iranian work on nuclear energy — and, Western powers allege, nuclear weapons — has given the country reserves of know-how and scientists who could continue any work toward building warheads to fit on Iran’s ballistic missiles.

“Blueprints will be around and, you know, the next generation of Ph.D. students will be able to figure it out,” said Mark Fitzpatrick, who specialized in nuclear non-proliferation as a former US diplomat.

Bombing nuclear facilities “or killing the people will set it back some period of time. Doing both will set it back further, but it will be reconstituted”.

“They have substitutes in maybe the next league down, and they’re not as highly qualified, but they will get the job done eventually,” said Fitzpatrick, now an analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London think tank.

How quickly nuclear work could resume will in part depend on whether Israeli and US strikes destroyed Iran’s stock of enriched uranium and equipment needed to make it sufficiently potent for possible weapons use. “The key element is the material. So once you have the material, then the rest is reasonably well-known,” said Pavel Podvig, a Geneva-based analyst who specialises in Russia’s nuclear arsenal.

He said killing scientists may have been intended “to scare people so they don’t go work on these programmes”.

“Then the questions are, Where do you stop?’ I mean you start killing, like, students who study physics?” he asked. “This is a very slippery slope.”

The Israeli ambassador said: “I do think that people that will be asked to be part of a future nuclear weapon program in Iran will think twice

about it.”