Seconds to Midnight

The Joint Chiefs Chairman of the United States, America's highest ranking military officer, Martin Dempsey declared Israel could "delay but not destroy Iran's nuclear capabilities". General Dempsey does not appreciate the lengths to which the Jewish State could go to remove an existential threat. Defense experts are contemplating what the Israeli effort to preempt Iran will look like. Will Israel use her IAF to launch an Osirak-style one-off bombing run as the Jewish State did in 1981 to declaw Saddam Hussein, who at the time, was trying to take Iraq nuclear? No, Israel will not attempt this, because a strike fighter bombing will not sufficiently damage Iran's well diffused, concealed, and fortified nuclear program to thwart it in such a bombing. So, how about an Osirak-type bombing combined with a naval attack by conventionally-tipped cruise missiles? Unfortunately, this kind of campaign could not work either. So how about this combined assault with the insertion on the ground of commandos from the IDF? There is not a chance of the insertion of ground forces in sufficient numbers to succeed in thwarting Iran from making her nukes because the Islamic Republic is a highly militarized, heavily armed nation of more than eighty million people and even the whole mobilized Israel Defense Forces would be committing suicide by entering Iran. Unlike the United States which could massively damage Iran's nuclear facilities with conventional bunker buster type munitions delivered by a heavy B-52 Stratofortress or B-1 bomber, Israel has no aircraft designed to deliver a massive conventional bomb. Israel could rig up some sort of massive conventional explosive and mount it on an easily targeted, slow and bulky, C-130 Hercules aircraft that Israel possesses or even mount such a charge on a converted large civilian 747-type transport, but in all likelihood, these planes would be shot down by Iran before they could deliver their destructive payload. In the Bible, the Pharaoh condemns his own first-born males by ordering the murder of the first-born Jews. Iran wants her nuclear weapons and the only way I can foresee Israel stopping the Islamic Republic from killing millions of Jews will be to launch nuclear-tipped cruise missiles from Dolphin-class submarines that will, contrary to what General Martin Dempsey claims, actually stop Iran.