Can Israel take out Iran's nuclear facilities?

Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant

In contrast to the recent Elisabeth Bumiller piece in the New York Times aimed at showing that Israel's ability to take out Iran's nuclear facilities is highly doubtful, a much greater German authority in fact thinks that Israel is highly capable of destroying Iran's major nuclear facilities and setting back their goal of developing a nuclear device by at least a decade.

Benjamin Weinthal, a Berlin-based fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, reports on a Die Welt article (Google translation here) written in German by Hans Rühle, who directed the planning department of the German Defense Ministry from 1982 to 1988, and who expresses almost supreme confidence that Israel's air force could decimate Iran's principal nuclear installations.

Rühle argues that a comprehensive Israeli bombing campaign could set back Iran's nuclear program by a decade or more. "To do that, Israel would need to destroy only six of the 25 to 30 facilities the Iranians are thought to use for their nuclear program: the nuclear enrichment plant at Natanz, the uranium conversion facility in Isfahan, the heavy water reactor at Arak, the weapons and munitions sites in Parchin, the deep underground enrichment facility in Fordo, and the operational nuclear plant at Bushehr. Rühle argues that with only 25 of its 87 F-15 fighter planes and a smaller deployment of F-16s equipped with GBU-28 bunker busters and additional bombs, Israel could wipe out most of Iran's primary nuclear complexes."

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