Hurrah for the IDF, but does Iran already have a nuke in Tel Aviv?

This war has been distinctly one-sided so far. It’s been all Israel and no Iran.

But we won’t know for days or weeks how successful the Israeli Defense Forces were in their main objective of disabling Iran’s nuclear weapon program.

Israel says it intends to pound Iran for two weeks. If that pounding entails anything like the strikes yesterday which involved about 200 aircraft, and if Iran’s air defenses don’t improve (in fact, they are apt to deteriorate even more from the bombings) then Iran could be crippled for decades.

I’m all for it. But here are some known unknowns and some unknown unknowns:

First, Iran might already have nukes. We think that’s not the case, but, as everyone now knows, that thought is only as good as our intel on the matter. When it comes to intel, remember Russiagate? Remember Hunter’s laptop? I’m betting that the Mossad has better intel operations than we do, but that bet is no sure thing.

Let’s assume the intel on Iran’s development of nukes is accurate – that they’re still weeks away from enriching uranium to bomb-level enrichment concentrations.

That doesn’t mean Iran doesn’t have a bomb. There are thousands of nukes in the world, held by bad guys that are friendly to Iran because Iran is hostile to the west. That includes North Korea, Russia, China, Pakistan and India on some days. Nothing would stop one or more of those bad guys from simply flying or trucking a nuke over to Tehran, especially if Iran paid them some real money to do so.

The explosion from a nuclear bomb is all out of proportion to its size. A bomb that fits in an ordinary truck – not even a semi – could easily take out Tel Aviv.

Ah, you say, but Iran lacks the hardware to mount this bomb-in-a-truck onto one of their thousands of ballistic missiles. So how would they deliver their bomb-in-a-truck to Tel Aviv?

In the truck.

The Ukrainians delivered truckloads of drones thousands of miles across Russia. Surely a single truck could be smuggled into Israel and parked in a storage unit in Tel Aviv.

Nukes are most destructive if they are detonated a few hundred feet above the ground. So, this bomb-in-a-truck detonated in a storage facility in Tel Aviv would be only, say, 30% as destructive as it could have been if detonated a few hundred feet in the air.

It could still easily take out Tel Aviv.

Ever since I was an aerospace engineer for Boeing, I’ve been puzzled by the inordinate interest in bomb delivery vehicles. Cruise missiles can deliver a warhead across a thousand miles of complicated terrain by flying a few feet off the ground – under radar detection. That’s marvelous, I thought, but why don’t we just rent a U-Haul?

I assume (though I was never privy to such information even when I had a security clearance from Boeing) that we did indeed rent U-Hauls, and so did the Soviets. I assume that we had nukes tucked into strategic locations across the Soviet Union, and they similarly had nukes tucked into strategic locations across the U.S. I assume that Russia took over control of those nukes when the Soviet Union fell, as they took over the rest of the Soviet Union’s nukes. I assume that China, similarly, has nukes residing in the U.S.

It would be military malpractice not to. I’m afraid that the answer to the question I asked myself at Boeing – why don’t we just rent a U-Haul? – is, “Because Boeing doesn’t make U-Hauls.”

The million-dollar question is, does Iran have a nuke – or access to the detonator of a nuke – in Tel Aviv? We’ll probably know one way or another within days.

In a life prior to law school, Glenn Beaton was an aerospace engineer for Boeing.