It was exactly a year ago. A small Falcon jet - favored by top Iranian military officers - crashed in northwest Iran near the Turkish border. Among those killed were Brig.-Gen. Ahmad Kazemi, commander of the elite Revolutionary Guard ground forces division, and at least 12 other officers.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Photo: AP
Rumors quickly spread that the plane had been sabotaged and that Kazemi had been killed in a devious Israeli plot.
While Iranian official statements blamed bad weather and dilapidated engines for the crash, there was room for speculation that foul play may have had a hand. Kazemi had been responsible for the production and development of Iran's Shihab ballistic missile series, capable of delivering a nuclear warhead into the heart of Europe, not to mention Israel.
He was also a close confidant of Iranian Defense Minister Mostafa Muhammad Najjar, from their days together in the Revolutionary Guard, where Najjar served as the head of the Middle East department, responsible for Israel and Lebanon.
Since last January's crash, air travel for Iranian military officials has become increasingly dangerous. On November 27, a military transport plane crashed just after take-off from Teheran. More than 40 people were killed including 30 members of the Revolutionary Guard, some of them reported to be close advisers to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. A week before, a helicopter crashed into the central town of Najafabad, killing six, including a senior Revolutionary Guard officer.
The combined effect of these crashes, some Iranian analysts claim, has effectively gutted the high command of the Revolutionary Guard. But whatever the truth concerning the cause of these mysterious crashes, they show that numerous stumbling blocks confront Iran's efforts to develop nuclear-tipped missiles capable of reaching Israel.
One of the IAF's 25 F-15Is.
Photo: Ariel Jerozolimski
International pressure - in the form of UN-approved sanctions such as those imposed last month - as well as internal strife and recent technological challenges all serve as obstacles the Islamic Republic has had to face throughout its 20-year effort to obtain nuclear weapons.
Within the Israeli leadership, there is one clear voice - Prime Minister Ehud Olmert - that refuses to come to terms with a nuclear Iran and claims that Teheran must be stopped, even at a heavy price, from obtaining weapons of mass destruction and rocking the balance of power in the Middle East.
Currently nine countries are known to have or are suspected of having nuclear weapons: the US, France, the UK, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel. Adding Iran to the mix will not only constitute an existential threat to Israel, but will also impair its operational independence.
"What if a soldier is kidnapped in Lebanon and we want to go to war?" asks one senior official. "All Iran would need to do is wave its nuke at us and make us reconsider."
Israel currently has invested most of its intelligence-gathering resources into the Iranian issue. The Mossad holds the "Iran File" and the Foreign Ministry is spearheading diplomatic efforts.
There are additional, top-secret committees, whose members are appointed by the prime minister and include senior officials from the intelligence community and former politicians with a strategic background. These committees, one participant says, meet from time to time and are responsible for amalgamating all of the details gathered by the different security branches and brainstorming on strategy.
At the end of the day, however, as one former IAF commander involved in the successful strike on Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981 points out, it is solely up to the prime minister to decide what course of action Israel will take - military or diplomacy.
The way things looks now, D-Day might not be too far away.
STATUS REPORT
Iran has built at least two dozen suspected nuclear facilities and, according to recent revelations, intends to produce fissile materials on two parallel tracks: the uranium track and the plutonium track.
Using the excuse of a plan to produce fuel for nuclear power plants, Iran is building uranium enrichment capabilities with gas centrifuges in Natanz.
According to latest assessments by Western intelligence sources, it has encountered "serious" obstacles on its way to crossing the nuclear threshold and obtaining independent research and development capabilities. These obstacles have pushed back predictions regarding the point when Iran would obtain these capabilities, with Western sources now claiming Iran will cross the technological threshold only in late 2007.
Despite the setbacks in the enrichment of uranium - a critical step in the development of a nuclear bomb - Ahmadinejad last month announced plans to build 60,000 additional centrifuges, leading Western sources to believe that it is only a matter of time before Iran overcomes the technological obstacles. (Pakistan encountered similar difficulties in its nuclear program but eventually overcame them.)
Experts speculate that the enrichment difficulties Iran is encountering at its plant at Natanz could be behind its second track - the construction of a heavy-water production facility near the town of Arak to produce plutonium. Israeli observers note that Iran is also building - in the same location - a "research reactor" which will probably be used for irradiating uranium and later separation of plutonium from the irradiated rods.
According to nuclear experts, Iran would need 3,000 working centrifuges to successfully enrich uranium, and Ahmadinejad has announced plans to immediately begin installing these centrifuges in defiance of last month's UN Security Council decision to impose sanctions. At the moment at Natanz, Iran has two working cascades - each consisting of 164 centrifuges - with which it claimed in April to have enriched uranium to 3.5 percent. For a bomb, uranium needs to be enriched to 90 percent or SQ, a nuclear technical term for Significant Quantity.
Once Iran completes the construction of the centrifuges and masters the technology, it will still take another year to reach SQ and then another two years to assemble a nuclear device, putting current assessments for when Iran will have a nuclear weapon at 2010.
