Iranian Vulnerability

The Obama White House is enlisting all its allies to make its case for the bad nuclear deal with Iran that, say administration allies, is better than no deal. The alternative, they claim, is war. And to what purpose? Many nuclear experts, Middle East analysts, and journalists argue, after all, that an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would set the program back only two to three years. Indeed, Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, asserted last week that setting Iran back “only a couple of years” is “the best-case scenario.”
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The larger point, say advocates of the White House’s proposed agreement and opponents of a military strike, is that once a nuclear program reaches a certain stage, you can’t undo the know-how that has already been acquired. That is, you can’t bomb knowledge.

Even proponents of a military strike concede there’s something to that argument. “The longer we go without doing something, the bigger Iran’s edge becomes,” says Reuel Marc Gerecht, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “For instance, the closer they get to perfecting advanced centrifuges, the efficacy of any military strike goes down. More people will have the necessary knowledge to continue.”
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