Israel at War: Inside the Nuclear Showdown With Iran Read Online Free

and deploying operational nuclear warheads?”
    This was the question I asked Benjamin Netanyahu as I interviewed him in March of 2007 at his office in Tel Aviv.
    “Not much,” he replied. “We are running out of time. I can’t tell you if it’s a period of months or a few years. Certainly no more than a few years.”
    At the time, I noted that India and Pakistan—two friends of the United States—had both tested nuclear weapons in the spring of 1998 within days of each other, stunning analysts in most Western intelligence agencies, including the CIA. Such analysts knew those countries were slowly developing their nuclear technology. But they had no idea that either country—much less both—had completed building nuclear warheads and was ready and able to successfully test them. Given that Netanyahu was prime minister of Israel during this period, I asked how he viewed such nuclear surprises and how they factored into his thinking about how to protect Israel.
    Netanyahu agreed that the Indian and Pakistani nuclear breakouts were sobering because they showed how even the best intelligence agencies can miss crucial developments—even when they are closely monitoring the situation. He noted that a full two years before the Indian and Pakistani surprises, he had begun to warn world leaders publicly and privately that a nuclear showdown with Iran was coming and that Iran must be prevented from building atomic weapons at all costs.
    “Among the first things I did, after I was elected prime minister [in 1996], was to speak before a joint session of the U.S. Congress,” he explained. “I said that the greatest danger the world faces is the arming of Iran with nuclear weapons. What was true ten years ago is doubly true today—not doubly, triply. But I couldn’t get the leading powers of the world—including the U.S. administration at the time—to focus on this danger and to stop the shipment of nuclear and ballistic technology to Iran from many countries, including Russia. I could not get the U.S. to focus on this. I think today people understand the danger. It’s much more advanced. It has moved forward. Could we be surprised tomorrow? Well, we were surprised by the extent of Libya’s advancement in its nuclear program. Happily, it was dismantled, probably as a result of the deterrent effect of [Libyan leader Muammar] Gaddafi seeing Saddam Hussein [captured] in a hole [and] realizing that he too could hang by the end of a rope. But no such deterrence necessarily works on the true believers in Tehran. Therefore, our focus should not be on deterrence but on prevention.”
    Netanyahu then explained to me why the stakes were so high. The Iranian leaders, he said, “want to concentrate on completing their nuclear program because once they have that, then they could threaten the West in ways that are unimaginable today. They could take over the Persian Gulf on all its sides and take control of the oil reserves of the world. They could topple Saudi Arabia and Jordan in short order and, of course, Iraq. All your internal debates in America on [the future of] Iraq would be irrelevant because nuclear-armed Iran would subordinate Iraq in two seconds. Then they would threaten to create a second Holocaust in Israel and proceed on their idea of building a global empire, producing twenty-five atomic bombs a year—250 bombs in a decade—with missiles that they are already working on [and that they want to develop] to reach the eastern seaboard of the United States. Everything else pales in comparison to this development. This has to be stopped, for the sake of the world, not only for the sake of Israel.”
    At the time of this particular interview, Netanyahu was not prime minister of Israel. His rival Ehud Olmert was. Netanyahu was not even a cabinet member. He had been shut out of the government since Olmert and Ariel Sharon left the Likud Party in 2005 to create their own centrist Kadima Party, splitting and essentially