Israel Did, In Fact, Strike a Syrian Nuclear Reactor, Analysts Find

[Frodo]

Analysts Find Israel Struck a Nuclear Project Inside Syria

By DAVID E. SANGER and MARK MAZZETTI
Published: October 14, 2007

WASHINGTON, Oct. 13 — Israel’s air attack on Syria last month was directed against a site that Israeli and American intelligence analysts judged was a partly constructed nuclear reactor, apparently modeled on one North Korea has used to create its stockpile of nuclear weapons fuel, according to American and foreign officials with access to the intelligence reports.

The description of the target addresses one of the central mysteries surrounding the Sept. 6 attack, and suggests that Israel carried out the raid to demonstrate its determination to snuff out even a nascent nuclear project in a neighboring state. The Bush administration was divided at the time about the wisdom of Israel’s strike, American officials said, and some senior policymakers still regard the attack as premature.

The attack on the reactor project has echoes of an Israeli raid more than a quarter century ago, in 1981, when Israel destroyed the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq shortly before it was to have begun operating. That attack was officially condemned by the Reagan administration, though Israelis consider it among their military’s finest moments, and, in the weeks before the Iraq war, Bush administration officials said they believed that attack set back Iraq’s nuclear ambitions by many years.

By contrast, the facility that the Israelis struck in Syria appears to have been much further from completion, the American and foreign officials said. They said it would have been years before the Syrians could have used the reactor to produce the spent nuclear fuel that could, through a series of additional steps, be reprocessed into bomb-grade plutonium.

[Padfoot]

The Bush administration was divided at the time about the wisdom of Israel’s strike, American officials said, and some senior policymakers still regard the attack as premature.

LOL, you've got to be kidding me.  So only the US has license to go stomping around the Middle East preemptively attacking potential threats?  These people never cease to amaze me.

[Erc]

To be fair, there's a difference in effectiveness between invading a country and just bombing it.

If you blow up their facilities now, there's the risk that they might just move them to a more secure (and unknown) location elsewhere, and, if the nuclear program is really in its infancy, blowing up the primary research site won't do that much damage.
If you wait a few years (and the Syrians repeat the same mistake that the Iraqis did and put all of their eggs in one basket), you can take it out at a more advanced stage, setting them back even further than an earlier strike would have done.


But, if you're invading and taking over a country, they aren't going to ever have a nuclear program again (until after you leave), end of story.  If their government no longer exists, they can't very well have a nuclear program.