Aitan then added an exclamation point. “Keep in mind that it takes a lot more work to enrich raw uranium to twenty percent than to enrich from twenty to ninety percent. That is a simple mathematical consequence of how much uranium you are dealing with at each step in the process. I can illustrate this best by working backwards. You need about twenty kilograms of ninety percent U-235 for a warhead. To get that, you need to start with about one hundred twenty kilograms or so of twenty percent U-235. To get those one hundred twenty kilograms, you need to start with about four thousand kilograms of three point five percent U-235. And to get those four thousand kilograms, you need to start with at least twenty thousand and as much as twenty-six thousand kilograms of natural uranium, depending on the efficiency of your facility.”
Aitan paused briefly, allowing time for everyone to run the math through their heads. Then he continued. “Once Iran starts to enrich to twenty percent, which I expect to occur in the near future, I become very worried about their ability to break-out from there. At twenty percent, they will have done the hardest part of the enrichment process.”
Zvi Avner suppressed a smile. This was going better than he planned. “Thank you, Yavi. As usual, you have summarized the situation perfectly. We are indeed counting on the GBU-28, which I think everyone here knows has not yet been delivered to us.” Avner had returned to the script that was running through his mind. “But even if we had it in our inventory, it’s not capable of destroying Fordow. So when the Persians bring Fordow online in eighteen months or less, they are immune. We cannot destroy Fordow.”
Avner paused for effect before continuing. “We have been working with the Americans and independently to enhance the penetrating power of the GBU-28 with the use of depleted uranium and an alloy in the head of the bomb. But it appears the best that we will do is add about five meters.
“However, there is a new weapon the Americans are working on. They call it the massive ordinance penetrator, or MOP. Officially it’s the GBU-57 and it’s a beast. It weighs almost fourteen thousand kilograms and will penetrate the Fordow facility without a problem. It was first tested two years ago. But there is a hitch. We don’t have a bomber that can carry it. This…”
Cohen spoke up. “This is why the president politely refused to sell us this bomb. He said that since we don’t have the airplane that can deliver it, he couldn’t approve the sale to us.” Cohen simply shook his head as he thought about it. “The only good news is that I did get him to agree to accelerate the delivery of GBU-28s to us. God willing, we will finally receive these bombs sometime this summer.”
Avner was thinking of his next sentence when Cohen added another thought. “But I should be fair to the president. We discussed Fordow and he did agree to publicly reveal the site later this year if the next round of Geneva negotiations fail.” There was brief laughter which Cohen couldn’t ignore. “Hey, maybe we will get lucky and the president will be able to call me a putz.”
Raibani could not restrain his sarcasm this time. “And maybe Ahmadinejad will convert to Judaism.”
“Better chance of that, I think,” replied Cohen.
“So let me summarize our situation,” Zvi Avner continued. The pen in his hand slashed through the stale haze of the prime minister’s Cohiba cigar. “We have four primary targets and another two dozen secondary targets. Three of the primary targets all have underground components. We are relying on a weapon we do not yet have for the underground targets and even if we had this weapon, it will only work for sure against one of the three targets on our list. We face an integrated air defense network that will need to be suppressed in the first wave. The combination of air defense suppression and the number of targets means we will need virtually all of our F-15 and F-16 aircraft for the first sortie. Even with this, as we sit here now, we do not have a way to destroy Fordow or the Isfahan tunnels. In fact, we cannot destroy Natanz today — not until we get the GBU-28s delivered from the United States.
“By the time our air force returns to its bases in Israel, there will be rockets landing all over the country, including Tel Aviv. The people will be screaming for action against Hezbollah and Hamas. The cry will be even louder than three years ago. And even if you assume that we can go back to Persia for another sortie, this impacts our planning considerably. We have the ability to shut down the Persian air defense network in a way that leaves me confident for the first sortie, especially if we achieve tactical surprise. But the turnaround time is at best five hours. In those five hours, the Persians will regroup. They will repair anything we have done to them that they can repair and they will have units on alert that were asleep during round one. This means that when we go back, I will have to dedicate more aircraft to air defense suppression than during the first wave. With the loss of tactical surprise, I will have a much wider set of targets to deal with that have nothing to do with their nuclear program. I am saying that in the second wave we will be focused on airfields and C-two nodes that we can ignore if we are only over Persia one time. This will be the entire effort. So two times means we have to go back more times. In fact, if the plan from the start is that we are going to Persia more than once, it changes what we will do on the first sortie. The first wave will have to overwhelmingly be geared to suppression and destruction of the defense network and C-two.
“As if that is not bad enough, I will point out the obvious if you are not already ahead of me. Every time we have to go back, we have to overfly at least two of our close Arab allies. How exactly do you think that will go over?” Avner answered his own question. “It is one thing for the Saudis to claim that they didn’t pick us up on radar as we send four hundred planes over Persia, but I am quite sure that they will not be able to make that claim the second time around.”
It was Raibani who finally jumped in. “Your point is well made, Zvi. I have to say that the last issue is absolutely right. Politically, the Jordanians and Saudis won’t be able to make excuses for inaction more than once. And that assumes that the U.S. Air Force will be conveniently quiet as we fly — something that never concerned me until hearing today about the attitude of the new president.”
Avner nodded his head. He knew from experience that if he had sold Benjamin Raibani, then the prime minister was sold. And if the prime minister was sold, then the rest of the Kitchen Cabinet would be on board. “The reality is that to obtain our strategic objective we need multiple sorties,” Avner continued. “But we are clearly constrained to just one initial sortie.”
“So what are you saying?” Eli Cohen asked.
“I am saying, Mister Prime Minister, that we cannot achieve our strategic objective without the United States Air Force.”
3 — The Nuclear Option
“I can’t accept this,” said Mordechai Yaguda to the rest of the Kitchen Cabinet. Yaguda was a career politician, the scion of a famous politician from the founding of the country. At six-foot-three-inches, he was the tallest man in the room and carried himself in a manner that reflected his education at Cambridge and then Yale. The 59-year-old minister without a portfolio was a fixture in Israeli cabinets. His wife was 20 years his junior and a former model. The pair formed a power couple who spent as much time in the U.S. and Europe lobbying for Israel as they did in their home in Tel Aviv. He was the type of man everyone wanted to be friends with and he made a nice income serving on the boards of numerous public companies in the U.S. and Israel. His friends called him Mort. “Why are we limiting the first strike planning to only the IAF?” Yaguda asked. He looked around the room, eager for support.