Hours before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was due to meet US President Donald Trump in Washington to discuss the aftermath of the war on Iran and a hostage deal and ceasefire in Gaza, Defense Minister Israel Katz outlined his assessment of developments in Iran following the 12-day bombardment of its nuclear program and missile sites.
Israel should be more concerned at this juncture about Iran rushing to restore its ability to threaten the Jewish state with ballistic missiles than about a comeback of the Iranian nuclear program anytime in the foreseeable future, Katz said on Monday.
He explained that the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program has been “mortally wounded” and generally battered on so many fronts that it is at least a couple of years away from recovering.
The defense minister also said it is not even clear that Tehran will decide to restore the nuclear program given the sheer number of fronts it would need to reconstitute, the immense financial loss it has taken by the program being bombed by Israel and America, and the equally large amount of funds it would need to invest to get back to a point where it is taken seriously.
In contrast, Katz said that the ballistic missile program was heavily damaged by Israel, but that large portions of it are still intact.
There is an ongoing debate as to whether Jerusalem damaged half or two-thirds of the 400-plus ballistic missile launchers that Iran had before the war, but the bottom line is that the Islamic Republic still has somewhere between 150-200 launchers, meaning it can still fire massive salvos of missiles at Israel or any other enemy it would be interested in striking.
It also still has at least 500-1,000 ballistic missiles (possibly more) of its pre-war 2,500-missile inventory.
Iran has enough missiles to fire multiple massive salvos daily
In short, it still has enough missiles to fire multiple massive salvos and then keep up a pace of 10-20 missiles per day for an extended period.
Also, while significant portions of its ballistic missile production were destroyed, they are easier to replace and not quite as multidimensional as a nuclear weapons program.
This means that Iran could potentially start resupplying new missiles much earlier than it can make a real dent in the numerous tasks needed to make progress toward a nuclear weapon.
Summarizing all of these trends, Katz said that while Israel must keep an eye on any potential attempts by Iran to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program – since in the long term, that is an even greater threat – he believes that in the coming months and years, Israeli military and intelligence resources must be even more concerned with the ballistic missile program.
Further, the defense minister thinks that getting the US to put pressure on Tehran about this issue is a top priority, though Trump has genuinely been much less focused on it than on the nuclear threat.