Can Israel kill off Iran's nuclear programme?

A satellite image shows damage to the Isfahan enrichment facility in Iran following Israeli air strikes. EPA

As a clandestine enterprise, Iran’s nuclear programme was always as much about the scientists inside it as the leadership behind it. So it came as little surprise that the name Fereydoon Abbasi was on the target list when Israel launched its offensive against the programme last week.

Abbasi had a distinguished career, which included a stint as head of the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran. In a TV panel appearance not so long ago, he sounded sanguine about the known threat to his life. He said that he was living normally, having handed over the duties under the programme to younger colleagues.

This does beg the question as to why he was still on Israel's target list. But what cannot be denied is the importance of leading figures in programmes like the one Abbasi and his colleagues operated for Iran over several decades.

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Parallels can be made with Pakistan's nuclear programme, which made the late Abdul Qadeer Khan something of an international man of mystery. Had Khan not acquired the drawings of centrifuges while working in the Netherlands – blueprints that were later used in the Iranian programme as well – it is highly unlikely that Pakistan’s nuclear capability would ever have been built. Khan also set up a procurement network that stretched far and wide to allow his country’s programme to assemble the highly engineered equipment to master the atom and then weaponise it.

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Alex Younger, the former head of the UK’s intelligence agency MI6, said on Monday that he did not believe Iran had crossed the threshold necessary to make a dash towards weaponisation, despite the outbreak of war. Instead, Mr Younger viewed Iran’s programme of enrichment as its tool of leverage against isolation that had resulted from its failures to comply with the International Atomic Energy Agency’s inspections regime.

There is little doubt Abbasi was the central figure in the long-running interplay between Iran and the IAEA. The enrichment sites in Natanz, Fordow, Arak and Isfahan were built under his aegis and chosen for particular qualities, including factors such as the aridity of the region or its geological properties to facilitate maximum protection of underground facilities.

In the game of nerves that lies behind these operations, Abbasi had known the value of these precautions. He had over the years seen his colleagues being assassinated with regularity by Mossad. The first attempt on his own life came in 2011.

Something of a technological arms race has gone into these assassinations. A series of detonations involving magnetic bombs delivered on motorbikes or hidden on cars killed at least five of the scientists around that time. The 2011 attempt on Abbasi’s life involved a motorcyclist attaching an explosive device on the side of the scientist’s car. His colleague Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was killed on a Tehran highway almost exactly a decade later, when a satellite and AI-controlled device used a machinegun mounted on a Nissan pickup.

These attacks continued over the years.

In 2015, the distinguished experts Siegfried S Hecker and Abbas Milani argued that the assassination campaign was in principle deeply counterproductive. Within the field of nuclear research, the attacks amounted to a setback for the kind of international collaboration that was needed to “deal effectively” with nuclear risks. “Killing nuclear scientists makes reducing the threat of nuclear war harder, not easier,” their paper said.

In 2015, distinguished experts argued that an Israeli assassination campaign against Iranian nuclear scientists was in principle deeply counterproductive

In the world of procurement, there is a view that the opportunities for theft and replication of advanced weapon systems is diminishing – as is the role of people like Abbasi and Fakhrizadeh. The size of Iran’s nuclear programme and the wider advanced missile manufacturing industry have grown so large that key figures could not possibly hold it all in their heads. A wide range of individuals is now undoubtedly involved. Eliminating one key figure is no longer a magical intervention.

Ultimately, it is still an open question as to whether or not Abbasi’s lifetime work will have opened the gate to an Iranian nuclear arsenal. Others from the same firmament have recently talked in these terms, indicating that the consensus at the highest levels of the system was now pointing in that direction.

Former Iranian foreign minister Kamal Kharazi, who heads supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s Strategic Council on Foreign Relations advisory body, last year intimated that his country had the technological capability to make weapons and was under pressure to widen its military doctrine so that it could have access to its resources. Kharazi’s intervention put a question mark over the role of the religious doctrine governing the policy, too.

Nonetheless, Israel has set out to dismantle the matrix that has brought Iran to the brink of being a nuclear-armed state. The targeting of scientists shows that these men played a role every bit as important as the leaders in Iran’s military ranks and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, some of whom were also killed last week.

With Iran having dedicated much of its resources to its nuclear and military build-up, the leaders of those endeavours have been made to pay the ultimate price.