From Scott Ritter ...

“Lion’s Courage” versus “True Promise 3”

Israel attacked Iran, using disarmament of Iran’s nuclear program as an excuse. But this attack isn’t about enrichment. It’s about regime change. And there can only be one winner.

SCOTT RITTER

JUN 13, 2025

Tehran under Israeli attack, June 13, 2025

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced the commencement of Operation “Lion’s Courage”, the goal of which is to eliminate Iran’s nuclear enrichment and weaponization infrastructure. Netanyahu and his senior military commanders have indicated that this operation will take weeks to complete.

A key part of the strike appeared to be aimed at decapitating senior Iranian leadership in both the military and military industry who were linked to Iran’s nuclear program. Israel claimed that it had in its possession new intelligence which indicated Iran was preparing to bring to fruition a nuclear weapons capability. This intelligence, Israel claims, was behind the decision to strike now, even as the United States was engaged in ongoing negotiations with Iran about how to reduce concerns about the nuclear weapons potential of Iran while enabling uranium enrichment operations to continue.

More details about what exactly Israel struck in this initial wave of attacks will undoubtedly be forthcoming. Initial reports suggest that, in addition to the decapitation strikes, Israel struck air defense and communications facilities, nuclear enrichment facilities at Natanz and Firdos, ballistic missile production facilities at Parchin, a ballistic missile operations base at Piranshahr, and other facilities of a similar nature.

Iran is its own worst enemy

For the past few months, Iran has been posturing itself as a nuclear threshold state. While Iran has every right, as a signatory to the nuclear nonproliferation treaty (NPT), to possess the ability to enrich uranium as part of a peaceful nuclear program monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), it does not have any legal right to pursue a nuclear weapons capability so long as it remains a signatory to the NPT. Iran’s accumulation of uranium enriched to 60%, for which there was no legitimate purpose linked to Iran’s declared nuclear activities, was a deliberate act by Iran to position itself to be within one enrichment cycle of possessing uranium enriched to around 92%, which would be usable in a fission weapon.

Iranian IR-6 centrifuges

Iran likewise has been installing advanced IR-6 centrifuge cascades, which are orders of magnitude more efficient when it comes to the enrichment of uranium, at its underground enrichment facility at Firdos. These cascades would be able to convert Iran’s 60% enriched uranium to weapons grade uranium within a matter of days, providing Iran with fissile material sufficient for 3-5 nuclear weapons.

Iranian military industry has, over the course of the past decade, mastered all the technologies necessary to produce a warhead possessing advanced electronics and other heat-sensitive properties that can withstand the heat of hypersonic re-entry. These warhead design characteristics are an essential part of any viable nuclear weapons delivery capability—simply producing a fission device is not enough; one must be able to deliver it to the intended target.

The one thing which held Iran back was the official decision taken by the Iranian leadership that nuclear weapons were forbidden under existing Islamic jurisprudence, namely a fatwa, or edict, issued by Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, which deemed nuclear weapons incompatible with the principles of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

But Iran has made this principled stance meaningless in recent months as statements from senior Iraqi officials, advisors, and politicians have made it clear that this fatwa prohibiting nuclear weapons could be reversed if the Islamic Republic were to be faced with an existential threat from a nuclear-armed Israel.

In short, Iran has positioned itself to be a nuclear weapons threshold state.

And this would never be allowed to stand, a reality Israel’s ongoing strikes have emphatically punctuated.

What next?

The escalation genie, unfortunately, is out of the bottle.

Iran is now in a “use it or lose it” reality, where the nuclear weapons threshold capacity it has acquired will either need to be rapidly converted into a viable nuclear weapons capability, or else it will be diminished and/or eliminated through the ongoing attrition of Israeli strikes.

Having promised that it would withdraw from the NPT if its nuclear facilities were attacked, Iran has no choice but to now follow through on this threat.

Failure to do so would be seen as an act of surrender by the Iranian regime, something which could serve as the predicate for regime change.

The question then is whether Israel’s attacks have achieved the requisite level of destruction necessary to prevent Iran from rapidly acquiring nuclear weapons. The key for Israel at this juncture is to provoke Iran into withdrawing from the NPT and beginning the process of acquiring weapons capability. This act by Iran will trigger the United States, which has distanced itself from Israel’s initial airstrikes, and Europe, whose major nations (Great Britain, France, and Germany) have articulated that Iran will never be allowed to possess nuclear weapons, to become involved in the military strikes against Iran.

To do this, Israel must delay the Iranian move toward building a bomb. This is done not by destroying the deeply buried enrichment facilities—a task beyond the conventional capabilities of both Israel and the United States—but rather by killing senior leadership and management in Iran’s military and military industry upper ranks, and destroying critical infrastructure used by Iran to manufacture the various components essential to the manufacture of a nuclear weapon and its ballistic missile delivery systems.

The Natanz enrichment facility

The combination of such attacks would logically be designed to sow chaos and uncertainty in an Iranian nuclear weapons program that had, because of the political atmosphere that existed prior to the Israeli attacks, not yet come together as a viable, formal entity. Had Israel waited another week, the Iranians would likely have been able to pull the disparate parts of their threshold nuclear weapons program together into a formal structure possessing resilience, redundance, and reliability.

It seems that Israel has targeted and killed many of the senior Iranian officials who would have been at the center of the coalescing effort needed to bring a nuclear weapons program to manifestation. Iran will need to regroup from a technical standpoint, even as its leadership creates the political foundation for the existence of a nuclear weapons program to be formally instituted.

If Israel achieved the desired results from its strike on Iran, this regrouping will take time, and time is not on Iran’s side.

Iran has promised a massive retaliation against Israel and any nation which supported an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.

Iranian missile launches, True Promise 2, October 2, 2024

If Iran fails to launch such an attack, for whatever reason (lack of capacity, lack of political will, or both), then it creates a window of opportunity for diplomacy to rear its ugly head and impose a ceasefire which locks in Israeli gains while opening Iran up to international inspections of both its nuclear enrichment and ballistic missile production infrastructure—in short, a huge Israeli victory and devastating Iranian defeat.

If Iran does seek to finalize a nuclear weapons program, then it invites participation by both the United States and Europe.

And this may have been the Israeli objective all along.

Moreover, while President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have tried to distance themselves from this act of Israeli military aggression, there are elements within the Trump administration and the US Congress (Senator Lyndsey Graham for one) that are openly supportive of the Israeli actions against Iran.

The fact of the matter is that the United States has provided Israel with tacit permission to strike Iran, both in terms of helping shape the geopolitical reality necessary to deem the Israeli action reasonable (uniting the Gulf Arab nations in the face of perceived Iranian aggression, and getting the IAEA Board of Governors to pass a resolution accusing Iran of violating its safeguard obligations under the NPT), and buying Israel time to perfect its target deck by engaging Iran in nuclear negotiations. These negotiations were presented as legitimate, but were little more than a effort on the part of the United States to provoke Iranian behavior that would be monitored by US and EU/NATO intelligence assets to generate targets to be struck by Israel.

Regime change, not disarmament

Current reporting suggests Iran may declare war on Israel.

Such a declaration would transform this conflict into an existential struggle between a nation, Israel, which has been sold to the American public as a staunch ally of the United States, and another, Iran, which has from the very inception of the Islamic Republic been viewed as a mortal enemy.

There is no doubt as to which side the US will take.

This means that eventually—sooner rather than later—the United States will throw its military might in with Israel to achieve the strategic defeat of Iran.

“Strategic defeat” is a euphemism for regime change.

Iran had one opportunity to prevent this inevitable, and predictable, outcome—to negotiate a new nuclear deal with the United States that verifiably eliminated Iran’s status as a nuclear weapons threshold state.

Rather than locking the US into a deal, however, Iran allowed the process to be dragged out, thereby allowing itself to be trapped by a process that was never intended to produce a finalized deal, but always to buy time for Israel to be able to deliver its knockout blow.

Today Iran has only one chance at survival.

It must be understood that Iran will never be permitted to possess a nuclear weapon.

Should it now seek to do so, Iran will be physically destroyed.

The solution to Iran’s nuclear program, however, cannot be allowed to be provided through military intervention by Israel and/or the United States.

Instead, Iran must deliver extremely harsh blows against the state of Israel, strikes so utterly devastating that Israel has no choice but to plead for the United States to step in a broker a peace deal.

Iranian missiles inbound to Israel, October 2, 2024

And the foundation of this peace deal must be the normalization of Iran’s nuclear program within the framework of the NPT.

Is such an outcome possible?

Yes.

But it will require the near destruction of Israel by Iran.

True Promise 3, the long awaited Iranian ballistic missile assault against Israel, has been threatened by Iran for many months now.

Iran must now execute this operation with perfection and decisiveness if it wants to survive.

Anything less will spell the end of the Islamic Republic of Iran.