A secret nuclear programme deep underground, shielded from American eyes, slowly revealing the secrets and techniques of the atom — and disgorging the gasoline for an atomic bomb. Enemies closing in, the drumbeats of warfare rising louder.
After which, on the eve of battle, a hasty determination to drag collectively at the least one rudimentary nuclear gadget. If the nation confronted annihilation, possibly an atomic explosion — its mushroom cloud seen by the world — may put it aside?
This was Israel in 1967, when historians now perceive that the Jewish state first inched to the sting of the nuclear threshold. It stopped in need of the final resort, an indication check of a crude bomb, which its sudden victory within the six-day warfare rendered pointless.
However the story shouldn’t be so totally different from that of Iran within the months main as much as what US President Donald Trump has now dubbed the 12-day warfare — watching Israel debilitate the Islamic Republic’s allies, from Hizbollah in Lebanon to devastating the Syrian army after Islamist rebels toppled the Assad regime.
Now, with Israel threatening extra violence if Iran rebuilds its enrichment capability, the Islamic Republic faces the identical query Israel needed to confront in 1967: to create a measure of ultimate deterrence by sprinting to a nuclear weapon, or step again from the brink?
“Iran is now within the midst of a long-running, severe inner debate. It’s the do-or-die second,” mentioned Vali Nasr, former senior adviser to the US state division and creator of Iran’s Grand Technique. “It’s additionally paradoxical that Israel is pushing Iran to make that very same determination that they made.”
The six-day warfare modified the course of the Center East, with Israel’s shock victory over its bigger neighbours and the seize and occupation of the West Financial institution and Gaza. It additionally remodeled a younger Israel, and its ambiguous relationship with weapons of mass destruction, into a singular — if utterly opaque — nuclear energy, its dozens of gadgets each undeclared and undisputed.
The west’s toleration of Israel’s secret arsenal, estimated by the Federation of American Scientists at slightly below 100 refined weapons, is seen within the Center East as an emblem of its hypocrisy, permitting an ally to flout non-proliferation norms whereas punishing Iran, which has in lots of respects complied with its treaty obligations.
However Israel’s distinctive standing isn’t just the results of its strategic alliance with the US. It was the product of a unique historic interval, when the Jewish state was youthful and weaker, its enemies stronger and decided to wipe it off the map. The key 1969 take care of the US, which allowed Israel to maintain its nuclear weapons undeclared, mirrored how Israeli leaders turned their nation’s precarious place — so quickly after the Holocaust — into a rare exemption no different state acquired.
If Iran have been to lurch in direction of a nuclear weapon now, nonetheless, it might current world powers with an unimaginable alternative — settle for a brand new, brash entrant to the nuclear membership, tempting others to comply with swimsuit, or search to punish it like North Korea.
The third choice, to reap the political advantages of stepping again from the nuclear threshold, stays on the desk.
Avner Cohen, a number one historian of Israel’s nuclear secrets and techniques, mentioned the Center East had been dropped at this second by Iran’s emulation of a younger Israel: working a nuclear programme that was partly open, partly clandestine, “having a better and nearer proximity to the bomb” however delaying any ultimate determination till completely mandatory.
“Iran needed very a lot to be one other Israel, to comply with in Israel’s path,” mentioned Cohen, a professor on the Middlebury Institute of Worldwide Research in Monterey, California. He pointed to how Israel constructed up broad experience that may allow the creation of a nuclear gadget at a time of disaster — with out ever having explicitly chosen that path.
“Iran needed, and in some ways have been imitating, the opaque Israeli modus operandi however their political circumstances have been totally different — and extra adversarial,” he mentioned, referring to Israel’s 1969 take care of the US to maintain its arsenal secret.
“Ultimately, the world has been way more pleasant to Israel, and fewer forgiving of the Iranians.”
It took 4 and a half a long time for Israel and Iran’s regional rivalry to boil into direct battle, throughout which Iran’s leaders embedded the destruction of the “Zionist entity” deep into the Republic’s political discourse.
For Israel, Iran’s rising army prowess for the reason that flip of the century, nuclear programme and well-funded proxies have been more and more seen as an existential menace.
For Iran, Israel emerged extra abruptly as a menace on an existential stage: Israeli leaders converse overtly about regime change in Tehran, and its army has already demonstrated it could wreak harm throughout all of Iran at will.
Not like Israel, which succeeded in hiding its nuclear ambitions even from shut allies, Iran has inched nearer to the technical capabilities of a bomb after signing the non-proliferation treaty and enduring onerous inspections whereas swearing off utilizing nuclear weapons — the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei branded their use haram within the early 2000s.
And till Israel and the US attacked Iran’s nuclear programme, western intelligence assessments chimed with the UN’s view that Iran had not formally determined to pursue a nuclear weapon.
For Israel, impending battle in 1967 put paid to any doubts amongst policymakers. Historic information present Prime Minister Levi Eshkol musing to colleagues about “a sure weapon”, whereas army chief Yitzhak Rabin nervous a couple of shock assault on Israel’s solely nuclear reactor, which he warned had “an absence of worldwide legitimacy”.
In Iran final 12 months, as battle with Israel was brewing, policymakers started issuing ambiguous warnings that Tehran may contemplate altering its nuclear doctrine.
Months after Israel and Iran’s first volley of strikes in April 2024, Kamal Kharrazi, international affairs adviser to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, advised the Monetary Instances that “we aren’t for constructing nuclear weapons” however that if Iran confronted an existential menace, “naturally we [would] have to vary our doctrine”.
In February final 12 months, the previous chief of the Atomic Vitality Group of Iran, Ali-Akbar Salehi, had mentioned that Iran’s sprawling nuclear analysis programme had resulted in huge technical experience.
“What does a automobile want? It wants a chassis, an engine, a steering wheel, a gearbox,” he mentioned when requested whether or not Iran may construct a nuclear weapon. “You’re asking if we’ve made the gearbox, I say sure. Have we made the engine? Sure, however every one serves its personal objective.”
Within the lead-up to Israel’s 1967 warfare, analysis carried out by numerous elements of the federal government had resulted within the data and even the gasoline wanted for a nuclear gadget, however there isn’t any publicly accessible proof that its leaders had explicitly ordered the development of a bomb till shortly earlier than the battle.
On Iran’s half, as battle with Israel grew extra probably in current months, there was one main shift: it doubled its stockpile of uranium enriched to 60 per cent purity — far past what is required for nuclear vitality — to about 400kg.
That stockpile may in idea be shortly enriched to weapons grade. However any implosion gadget Iran may match it into could be a crude, if efficient, prototype — removed from a complicated weapon.
In Israel, it was simply such a prototype that nuclear scientists unexpectedly assembled and handed over to troopers in 1967, based on analysis by Cohen, together with an interview with the army official in command of what grew to become often called “The Samson Choice”.
That product emerged from analysis and subterfuge, together with on the Negev Nuclear Analysis Middle at Dimona within the late Fifties, the place Israel constructed a secret underground facility for processing plutonium.
Round that point, Israel’s safety issues didn’t contain Iran. The Shah, an ally of Washington, had acquired a nuclear reactor in 1967 as a present from the US beneath an Eisenhower-era programme, Atoms For Peace. A 12 months later he signed the NPT.
By the point of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, when the Shah was toppled, Iran’s nuclear analysis was rudimentary, and after the revolution most nuclear physicists left the nation.
Across the identical time, the US assembled a gaggle of scientists to review two flashes picked up in 1979 by an ageing satellite tv for pc. A number of months later, President Jimmy Carter wrote in his diary that “we have now a rising perception amongst our scientists that the Israelis did certainly conduct a nuclear check explosion within the ocean close to the southern finish of Africa”.
Round then, Israel made a coverage determination that remained unchanged, mentioned Uzi Arad, former analysis director at Israel’s spy company Mossad. That was the Start Doctrine: if a belligerent neighbour’s nuclear data was deemed a menace, Israeli warfare planes would assault.
“The nucleus of Israel’s strategy to proliferation has all the time been this: first, if and when a nuclear programme turns into a menace to Israel . . . it might exhaust all different means to stopping it,” he mentioned. “Then, it might fall again on an air strike.”
So in 1981, Israel attacked a nuclear reactor in Iraq. In 2007, it hit a North Korean-supplied secret reactor beneath development in Syria. “And now you’ve got in 2025 Israeli warplanes flying over Natanz and Fordow and Isfahan [in Iran],” he mentioned.
That partly formed Iran’s personal nuclear posture, which ebbed and flowed with geopolitics. Within the Eighties, after its warfare with Iraq, Iran started exploring a nuclear programme to forestall one other battle with its neighbour, mentioned Nasr, however the first Gulf warfare rendered this menace irrelevant.
A Pakistani nuclear scientist confessed in 2004 to promoting older centrifuge expertise to Iran within the Nineties, seen by many because the genesis of Iran’s enrichment experiments. And in 2003, after watching the US invade Iraq within the hunt for weapons of mass destruction, Iran declared and shelved a secret programme, known as Amad, which the UN watchdog mentioned had been researching — however not constructing — nuclear weapons.
The give attention to enrichment remained, mentioned Nasr. “The Iranians noticed an curiosity in really, for a really lengthy time frame, in utilizing their programme as a option to carry the US to the desk and get the US to comply with elevate sanctions,” he mentioned. “They understood there’s no different problem that may carry the US to negotiations.”
Its leaders have always maintained Iran was exercising its authorized proper as a signatory of the non proliferation treaty to have a peaceable nuclear vitality programme, and have allowed inspectors into declared services, even for shock visits.
However in addition they constructed new, secret enrichment services in Natanz, revealed by whistleblowers in 2002, after which at Fordow, a website found by western intelligence companies in 2008. Inspectors from the UN nuclear watchdog have been subsequently allowed to go to, together with within the days simply earlier than Israel launched its shock assault.
Now these services have been broken, alongside a lot of Iran’s standard deterrence. Proxy militias that surrounded Israel with a “ring of fireplace” have been considerably weakened. Many missile launchers and aerial defences have been destroyed. That leaves Iran with a dilemma because it sits on the sting of changing into a nuclear-armed energy.
On constructing a weapon, “Iran remains to be doing the cost-benefit evaluation,” mentioned Nasr, referring to negotiations with the Europeans and the US. “And proper now, maybe the controversy has swung way more within the course of those that say simply do the bomb.
“However the door shouldn’t be utterly shut. The one method you’re going to divert the trajectory that Iran is on is to place a deal on the desk that’s compelling sufficient and is resilient sufficient to affect this debate in Iran.”