Israel’s Attacks on Iran Are Not Working | Iran Israel Updates

The recent sabotage of the Iranian nuclear program has been spectacular—and strategically incoherent. Israel’s clandestine activities inside Iran have undoubtedly delayed the production of material Iran needs to make a bomb—and done so in spectacular fashion.
Spies deployed months in advance to plant explosives inside an Iranian nuclear plant, a lethal cyber attack to corrupt computers that control centrifuges spinning uranium, and bullets showered on a leading nuclear scientist by remotely activating a machine gun—each of these incidents could be an episode in a gripping spy thriller.
Whether they were a success, however, is another question. These covert attacks, together with the debilitating sanctions imposed in recent years by Washington, have imposed setbacks on Iran but have not managed to convince the country to abandon its nuclear ambitions altogether. Instead, they have failed to change Iran’s approach to nuclear negotiations; if anything, they have strengthened its resolve to continue enriching uranium and thus achieve a “breakout” capacity for nuclear weapons.
However impressive Israel’s attacks, they do not seem to be a sustainable strategy. On April 11, an explosion caused a power blackout at the Natanz uranium enrichment site, one of Iran’s known nuclear facilities. Nuclear activities there were halted anywhere from a few weeks, said Iranian officials, to nine months, according to Israeli and U.S.
intelligence officers quoted in news reports. This was the third attack, and the second in a year, at the Natanz nuclear station. Last July, a bomb exploded in a part of the premises that was producing a new set of centrifuges and delayed the program by months. Experts said both attacks could have only been carried out with physical infiltration. Neither Iran nor the United States walked out of the meetings being held in Vienna. Instead, Iran used the recent attack to up uranium enrichment from 20 percent to 60 percent, further shortening the breakout time needed to build a bomb.