Iran, Israel and the Bomb

For the past three decades, Iran and Israel have been engaged in a shadow war. Israel is determined to prevent Iran developing atomic weapons by whatever means necessary. Iran insists on its ‘inalienable right’ to enrich uranium and sees its nuclear programme as essential to its identity and the only way of maintaining regional hegemony.  It’s a struggle that serves as a common thread and a framework for explaining all the geopolitical tensions of recent years between Israel and the West on one side, and Iran, its Syrian and Russian allies, and the militias of Hamas and Hezbollah on the other.

Mossad and Israeli special forces have a long history of carrying out sabotage operations against Iran’s nuclear facilities. An Israeli commando unit stole the archives of Iran’s nuclear programme, a tonne and a half of documents, and  brought back to Tel Aviv to prove to the world Iran’s determination to possess the bomb. In the early 2010s, the Israelis created a computer virus called Stuxnet, designed to damage the centrifuges needed to enrich uranium. They have regularly carried out targeted assassinations of nuclear scientists. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the father of the Iranian nuclear programme, was shot dead by a killer robot controlled by an artificial intelligence system and connected live to a secret operations centre in Israel.

Israel’s blistering attack in June 2025 on Iran’s nuclear and military facilities was the culmination of a years-long strategy all aimed at weakening Iran before tackling the regime in power in Iran. The war in Gaza against Hamas, followed by the war in Lebanon against Hezbollah, the fall of Bashar Al Assad’s regime in Syria and the Israeli bombings of Houthi-controlled infrastructure in Yemen have all weakening pro-Iranian groups, enabling the Israeli military leadership to tackle what they consider to be the ‘head of the octopus’, the regime in power in Tehran. Iowever, one question remains: has Iran’s nuclear programme been destroyed or will it manage to rebuild itself even more secretly?

It’s a struggle that serves as a common thread and a framework for explaining all the geopolitical tensions of recent years between Israel and the West on one side, and Iran, its Syrian and Russian allies, and the militias of Hamas and Hezbollah on the other.