45 Years Ago, Iran Launched Its Own Pre-emptive Strike On Nuclear Facilities
- 15.06.2025, 13:17
- 15,510
Israel was not the first country in the Middle East to employ such a strategy.
In ordering a pre-emptive strike aimed at significantly slowing Iran's nuclear program, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu followed in the footsteps of two of his predecessors. Menachem Begin ordered an attack in 1981 that destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor. And a quarter century later, Ehud Olmert gave the green light in 2007 to destroy a nuclear reactor in the final stages of construction in northeastern Syria.
But Israel was not actually the first country in the Middle East to target an adversary's nuclear facilities. Such a country was Iran, writes JTA.
On September 30, 1980, just eight days after Iraq invaded Iran, Tehran ordered a surprise airstrike against the same Iraqi nuclear facilities that Israel would destroy a little more than eight months later. The attack included four Iranian Phantom aircraft and delayed construction of the nuclear reactor by several months.
Iraq claimed that the French reactor was being built solely for civilian purposes. Although some experts before and after the strikes supported this view, both the Israelis and Iranians believed that Iraq was secretly seeking to develop nuclear weapons and was beginning to take steps in that direction.
The combination of Iraq's military aggression and intelligence about its nuclear activities convinced the new Iranian regime to act in 1980. Nearly 45 years later, Israeli leaders make essentially the same arguments for attacking Iran, insisting that Tehran is close to a "point of no return" in its pursuit of nuclear weapons.
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