On Iran's revolution, if there is one

Doing regime change in Iran isn't all sunshine and roses when nuclear weapons are at stake

A single 15kt atomic warhead, detonated within a 50% radius of equal risk (RER), set for airburst at 1,500 feet above mean sea level over Tel Aviv would create a fireball instantly incinerating anything within 200 meters, destroying and deforming all structures within 1,000 meters, causing moderate damage to structures up to 1,600 meters. The immediate casualty count would begin around about 200,000, with 80-120,000 killed within the first 24 hours. One warhead would devastate Israel’s economy and infrastructure. Iran has enough enriched uranium to potentially build and assemble 9 to 10 of these weapons within a 2-week sprint.

Khamenei.ir, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

We have already seen that Iran possesses ballistic missile systems capable of hitting anywhere in Israel, and in quantity to overwhelm the IDF’s multilayered missile shield defense systems. Creating the “package” to deliver the warheads is challenging, but not impossible for a state like Iran, that has had access to missile and drone technology for decades.

Regardless of the massive and surely devastating response from Israel that would render Tehran into a smoking, radioactive ruin, Iran would survive any counterstrike from Israel. In fact, the mass evacuation of Tehran we’ve been seeing with our own eyes robs Israel of one of its primary levers: mutual assured destruction. If Iran had a nuclear weapon, and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei decided to use it versus finding himself facing the kind of end Libya’s Muammar Gaddifi or Iraq’s Saddam Hussein received, Israel would be destroyed, and Iran would survive. It’s simply a matter of land and population.

Israel struck Iran because Israel’s leaders, in a united opinion, believe that Iran is close enough to creating a nuclear arsenal to commit to military action and risk. Based on IAEA analysis, Iran possesses 408.6kg U-235 enriched to 60%, which can be further enriched to 90% (bomb-grade) within 3 weeks at its Fordo FFEP facility, which remains intact. Since a week has gone by already, and assuming Iran has already begun its sprint, it might be about two weeks from having 233kg of weapon-grade U-235, enough to make 9 to 10 Hiroshima-sized bombs. Even one of those bombs spells the end of Israel if it gets to target, and it’s likely at least one would get to target. If that’s not an existential threat, nothing is.

This may be the reason President Donald Trump set a two week decision window on taking out Fordo using U.S. bunker-buster munitions. The time frame specifically speaks to the terms of “unconditional surrender” Trump posted on social media. It means Iran must stop its bomb-making effort, and allow the U.S. and other nations to determine how to dismantle its nuclear program, safely.

For this price, Ali Khamenei would retain his position as Supreme Leader, and Iran could go back to more-or-less normal. But Ali Khamenei is not necessarily interested in a status-quo-ante normal, without the capacity to actually destroy Israel. He believes, as many radical “Twelver” Shiite leaders do, that the Twelfth Imam, Mahammad al-Mahdi, will return to judge the faithful. He believes that the destruction of Israel, while not theologically necessary for the return of the Mahdi, but the liberation of Jerusalem is a necessary justice in their apocalyptic struggle. Therefore, bending to Israel, and its benefactor, America, in order to maintain a geopolitical power structure would be a divine injustice against Shia Islam in his worldview.

This is proven out by the latest efforts by European diplomats to negotiate some kind of “deal” or offramp for Iran. These negotiations have yielded no breakthroughs or progress, and it’s likely they will not in the future.

Israel has always had in mind an end goal of regime change in Iran, because that is the only real way to remove the threat of a religious state bent on Israel’s extermination. In a video speech delivered directly to the Iranian people, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said as much. However, the how and who of regime change is not for the faint of heart, nor is it to be done without care.

I believe the latest news reports that the U.S. (meaning Israel) knew the exact location of Ali Khamenei, and could have arranged his death, are true. I believe Israel has had multiple opportunities to kill Khamenei, and has not acted on them. One of the main reasons I believe this is that Khamenei still lives. In order to not accidentally kill him, while taking out the entire military echelon under him, is either trusting to blind luck, or proof that indeed Israel knows his whereabouts. The policy of keeping Khamenei alive may be due to the fact that regime change is a tricky thing and cannot simply be thrust upon Iran without risking the very thing Israel is trying to prevent: its own destruction.

Let’s look at some of the reasons it’s not necessarily in Israel’s interest to immediately pursue regime change in Tehran, and what the conditions for pulling that trigger might be.

First: Why kill Khamenei?

As long as Iran’s nuclear program is effectively destroyed, Israel has no reason to get rid of Khamenei. They can buy themselves a decade or more to do it when it suits them, if Iran’s capacity to sprint toward a bomb and delivery system is ruined and made impossible to restart without international help. That would mean the U.S. taking out the Fordo site using bunker-busters, but not only that.

Second: Iran’s bomb.

Assuming the Fordo site is damaged, that itself is insufficient to assure Israel that Iran won’t be able to get a bomb. There may already be enough bomb-grade U-235 at 90% enrichment to make one or more warheads at the Fordo site. Simply blowing up the infrastructure would not change the physics or geology of 30 to 50kg of bomb-grade U-235 sitting around for the first takers to find. The Fordo site is extremely well-protected from the ground and other sites with quick-reaction forces. Someone has to get boots on the ground, meaning defeating those troops, to take actual possession of the nuclear material.

Let’s say that Israel or the U.S. went ahead and took out Khamenei, and simultaneously, B-2 Spirit bombers dropped bunker-busters on Fordo. That would leave a power vacuum in Iran, and someone would fill the vacuum. There’s no reason to believe that a Velvet Revolution would bloom in Tehran, or there would be some peaceful power transfer to a western-oriented, democratic group to bring Iran to the table of civilized nations. If that were the case, Khamenei would be dead, and the new group would be toasting to Israel’s success right now.

It’s far more likely there would be some kind of power struggle, and maybe even civil war, like the one that ripped Syria apart for a decade before Bashar al-Assad fled into Moscow’s loving arms. How would southwest Asia and the Middle East like 20 or 30 million fleeing Iranian refugees? How would Iraq respond to that possibility? How would already strained Russia deal with it, or the Western European powers that already have absorbed millions of Muslims into their own homelands? Literally nobody wants that outcome, least of all Israel, which craves stability, even if it means dealing with entrenched enemies.

Look at what Israel’s security services accomplished by letting Hezbollah entrench in Lebanon. Over a number of years, the Mossad and Shabak planted thousands of booby-trapped pagers and handheld radios, mapped and located weapons caches, missile launch locations, leadership bunkers, and other key military and logistics activities. These operations, when activated, provided a devastating punch to declaw Israel’s greatest northern foe, and the IRGC’s biggest proxy.

While Israel was lulling Hezbollah and Iran into a fait accompli mentality in Lebanon, Hamas was doing the same thing to Israel in Gaza. But in Tehran, Israel possesses an immense network and intelligence assets they’ve built and maintained over many decades, predating the Islamic revolution that deposed the Shah in 1979. In the wake of the damaging Rockefeller Commission findings of CIA abuses, the U.S. began to rely less on human intelligence (spies) and more on technical means of intelligence gathering. In Iran, our lack of eyes and ears “on the ground” led to catastrophe, with our embassy staff held hostage for 444 days, with the “Desert One” rescue effort ending in failure and humiliation.

Since those days, Israel pushed its deep agents and built an impressive operation that has yielded (intelligence) coups time and time again. In 2012, the STUXNET virus was revealed as the cause of previously unexplained failures of Iran’s centrifuges. The virus was so sophisticated and tightly targeted that just about all experts agree it had to be the product of a nation-state, though neither the United States nor Israel have taken official credit. NSA leaker and traitor Edward Snowden claimed at the time that Israel “co-wrote” STUXNET, which to me seems somewhat reasonable. Someone had to tell the developers what to look for, and Israel’s intelligence knew the specific models, even down to the serial numbers and firmware revisions, of the Siemens equipment Iran was using. Also, the computers on Iran’s SCADA system controlling those centrifuges was not connected to the Internet, so someone had to plant the virus, or cause it to be installed using some media that was more or less guaranteed to be loaded into those computers. The beauty of STUXNET is that it could run on practically any Windows PC on earth and do nothing, unless that PC happened to be on the SCADA system with specific equipment it was hunting for.

Subsequent Wikileaks-published caches based on Snowden’s data, like Vault 7 (which I will not link here), show that NIST-approved cypher systems had known weaknesses that allowed STUXNET developers to use authentic Microsoft code signatures and certificates, thereby appearing to the operating system to be genuine. Given that the toolkit NSA used was related to the known NIST weaknesses, to exploit its vulnerabilities, it’s no conspiratorial leap to conclude that the U.S. government had a large hand in the development of STUXNET. It’s also not far-fetched to believe that Israel had a large hand in providing the target data and also infiltrating the virus into Iran.

My point here is that unless Iran was operating under a stable regime, with, you know, scientists and engineers who had real educations and credentials, whose paychecks didn’t bounce, things like STUXNET would not work, because there would be no gleaming industrial facility filled with desks, cubicles, computers and LANs to infect. Case in point: the reason it was so hard for the U.S. to find and eliminate Osama bin Laden is not for the lack of bunker-buster ordnance or boots on the ground. We had plenty of both. It was that bin Laden was so hard to locate because he refused to use any technology. He communicated using cut-outs and messengers, and didn’t use email or smartphones. Videos of him were meticulously produced using old-school equipment because he was aware that everything in frame would be analyzed to death by U.S. intelligence.

If Iran was run by a bunch of bin Ladens, or was akin to North Korea, where everything is completely hidden from view and the rest of the country starves, literally and technology-wise, they’d have had nuclear weapons by now. A stable Iran, run by a class of technocrats and qualified managers, is a plus to tech-heavy intelligence states like the U.S. and Israel. Taking out Khamenei without properly planning for who gets the keys to the nuclear secrets and materials is like playing roulette against the house—a bad bet. (That last sentence was written by me, though you’d be forgiven if you attributed it to ChatGPT, because it’s just the short of tripe an LLM would write for me, but it was the flesh and blood me. I don’t use AI to write anything. All my tripe is my own.)

Third, Iran’s nuclear material.

Iran’s nuclear material must be completely accounted for if regime change is to be initiated by either the U.S. or Israel. Having hundreds of kilograms of U-235 enriched to bomb levels sitting around anywhere that is not under the positive control of an existing nuclear power is simply foolish beyond words. A properly assembled and packaged atomic warhead would be catastrophic for Israel, but an improperly assembled jumble of bomb-grade materials packed into a warhead by the Houthis, or carried into the heart of Tel Aviv by suicide bomber from the West Bank would be nearly as bad.

A properly optimized “gun type” atomic bomb detonated at ground level in Tel Aviv would destroy everything in a half-mile radius. It would also cause more fallout, and immediately kill up to 90,000 Israelis. A “fizzle” or partial detonation would shower the city and its environs with lethal radioactive fallout, while still creating a 0.5 to 2.0 kiloton atomic explosion—a small fireball that would still murder tens of thousands of citizens. A truck bomb loaded with bomb-grade nuclear material, a “dirty bomb” would be a mass casualty event, the worst kind of terror, because it could take years or decades before it claims thousands of lives from cancer and other sicknesses.

Leaving thousands of kilograms of partially-enriched U-235 unsecured, and hundreds of kilograms of bomb-grade fully-enriched U-235 for terrorists or other bad actors to find and use would not fulfill Israel’s goal of removing its existential threat. If one “fizzle” or dirty bomb would devastate Israel’s economy, imagine 10 or 20 of them. Just because Hezbollah and the IRGC are mostly defanged as a conventional military threat against Israel in Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza, doesn’t mean that they are completely harmless or without resources. And Syria, though its current leader says he wants no part of attacking Israel, is no friend either. Ahmed al-Shaara, whose terrorist name was Abu Mohammad al-Julani, used to be Al-Qaeda before he overthrew Baath Party dictator Bashar al-Assad. His organization, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, is jihadist. And though al-Shaara rules with the blessing of NATO-member Turkey, I don’t see him acting on Israel’s behalf to stop the flow of nuclear materials out of sites like Fordo.

There are two land routes out of Iran that lead to Israel. One is through Turkey; another through Iraq. And of course, there’s neighbors to the north and east, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan; and the gulf states lie to the south. Any number of these routes are friendly to terrorists who are dedicated to Israel’s destruction. It’s unlikely that terrorists would be able to smuggle dirty bomb parts or nuclear material through Saudi Arabia or Jordan, but it’s not hard to imagine getting them to Yemen, into the hands of the Houthis, or worse, to Afghanistan, into the hands of the Taliban.

The best way to ensure none of Iran’s nuclear materials don’t make it out of Iran in the hands of terrorists or IRGC proxies is to secure the materials in Iran. That means whatever regime comes in has to have positive control of the sites and their contents. Or it means a foreign power has to seize and hold those sites. Israel likely doesn’t have the resources to do that so far from its own borders. The U.S. could do it, but there we are in another “forever war,” this time in Iran. Perhaps Turkey, Russia, or even Pakistan would want to do this really bad duty. I wouldn’t trust Turkey because they don’t possess their own nuclear weapons, but Turkey does have the best access and a modern military.

Honestly, it’s a big problem. The best people to secure Iranian nuclear materials are really Iranians, but that means leaving the Fordo site intact, and negotiating something. It’s clear that Supreme Leader Khamenei is not interested in negotiating an end to Iran’s nuclear program, which means regime change is really the most viable end game for regional stability.

Fourth: Regional stability.

Regional stability in itself doesn’t guarantee anything for Israel. The new regime could just as easily swear vengeance on Israel for destroying Iranian infrastructure, assassinating its scientists and engineers, and running roughshod over its airspace, military and national pride. Many Iranians hate the current regime, because they are not believers in “Twelver” Shia eschatology, or because they aren’t interested in Shia theology in the first place, or perhaps because they are persecuted religious minorities like Christians, B’hai, Sikh, or others. As much as those groups hate the ayatollahs and their theocracy, they could also hate Israel and the U.S. for not doing enough to support their cause for decades, allowing atrocities and brutal suppressions after offering fig leaf green-lights to their leaders. There is absolutely no guarantee that whoever takes over Khamenei and his crew would be friendly for us to deal with, or would keep their word regarding nuclear aspirations.

So if there is to be regime change, it needs to be worked out in excruciating detail, step by step. This raises the question on how regime change will happen, if it will happen, and the steps and actors involved in each phase.

Fifth: The regional players.

The regional players that matter are Saudi Arabia and the gulf states, and Israel greatly wants normalized relations with all of them, and cooperation in at least some way toward solving the intractable Palestinian “problem” plaguing Jerusalem. But once Israel and the U.S. finish the job in Iran, why would the oil-rich sheiks have any incentive to deal with Israel, when the U.S. can offer so much more?

This, honestly, seems to be to be the biggest fly in the ointment, that President Donald Trump wants all the credit, but to do none of the hard work. In that, I mean Trump could easily throw all kinds of wrenches in to Israel’s security situation by demanding that he alone negotiate the “deals” and partnerships necessary for securing Iranian nuclear sites, materials, and the next governing group in Tehran. I don’t see it playing any other way. And if Israel has any issues with what Trump wants, then Israel will become another target for mean social media posts, denial of promised aid, cancellation of weapons transfers, etc.

I do believe that Netanyahu is smart enough to avoid an appearance in the “Zelensky chair” at the White House, but he might not have the horsepower to fight Trump’s ever-changing coalition, especially when it encompasses some very unfriendly, even rabidly anti-Semitic, people in its ranks.

I don’t have the horsepower or inside sources to know what Steve Witkoff, the Iranian negotiators (whatever parties he’s working with), the gulf sheiks, Iraqi officials, Turkey, Russia and Israel are cooking up as the plan toward a regime change in Iran. But I do know that all of those parties are going to be involved in some way. I do think that Russia will have a greater role than most give credit for, perhaps as the guarantor of Iranian non-proliferation. This may happen in spite of Russia’s own nuclear threats if it loses in Ukraine. Or Russia may demand some deal that ties Iran, Israel and Ukraine together in a macabre menage-a-trois. Grotesque, yes. Unthinkable? No.

Sixth: The Chaos option.

And of course, there’s always the possibility that things start nicely and then go completely off the rails, with a few million fleeing Iranians flooding the west, Iraqis looting Iranian oil, and street battles raging in Tehran. I could see this leading to some kind of “security” force that Trump orders into Iran, becoming another forever war. I could also see this as Trump shrugging and saying “they should have taken the deal” as we bomb from above and let Europe deal with the mess.

Since events nearly never turn out the way people carefully plan, the Chaos Option seems more likely to occur than any other scenario for regime change. But you know, that won’t stop the planner and negotiators and deal-makers from pretending it won’t happen.

All the players have something to gain, and some have more to lose than others. In the end, sometimes the devil you know is better than the sixteen devils you don’t know and the five you think you know but really don’t know. Israel’s domination of Iran is based on many decades of careful work, tradecraft, intelligence networks, military planning, and knowledge of how Iran itself works. Throwing all that away for a few seconds of ecstasy to announce the end of the ayatollah’s regime seems to be a very risky trade that could turn out as bad or worse than keeping the guy alive.

I know that might not be a very satisfying answer, but it does seem to fit in explaining what’s going on here.

Seventh: The unpulled lever.

It’s not smart to think that Israel has pulled all its levers in Iran. We cannot assume that after 40 years of cultivating intelligence and covert assets in Iran, the Mossad has used its last trick and there are no more up its sleeve. In fact, the thought that Israel has yet more tricks like the exploding pagers, or drone bases inside Iranian territory, is likely saving lives, as it makes the Iranians think twice before they order large scale responses that seem to trigger catastrophes for Iran.

I do think that Iran is sprinting as quickly as possible toward a working bomb. I do think they will do a verifiable nuclear test as soon as they assemble a warhead. I believe that will trigger a seismic signature that will be unmistakable around the world, that a new member of the nuclear club is born. They won’t detonate their only warhead, as only the United States did that, and it didn’t matter because in 1945 nobody else possessed any. That means if the Iranians test a warhead, they likely have several made and even ready to launch at Israel. That means “game over” for Israel unless they know where the warheads are and are willing to play dice with death.

Israel would not face such a situation without having more options than just prayer and the capricious fits of the U.S. president. There is, I believe, at least one more unpulled lever. In 2018, the Mossad sent a crew into Iran’s own vaults and hauled out thousands of pages, including 163 CDs with blueprints, technical drawings, warhead designs, and the lot, which they trucked to Israel, and Netanyahu presented to a mocking United Nations.

More recently, Israel has damaged Iranian nuclear sites by causing explosions in electrical systems, or through assassinations of key operations and engineering personnel. The current blunt force trauma of F-35I jets is much more pedestrian than the 007-style spycraft Israel has relied upon in the past. I do think there’s more tricks in that bag and more levers to pull that we have not seen.

This means Israel has more options than to simply kill Khamenei, or to wait for President Trump to drop a bunker-buster on Fordo. I don’t know what those options are, or how risky they might be, but I do believe they exist.

Perhaps some combination of negotiation, regional players, regime change, and the unpulled levers could be the answer to a very complex and risk-drenched situation. Or perhaps none of that matters, as long as Israel doesn’t find itself out of levers, options, and waking up one day to the tell-tale seismic signature of a successful nuclear test in Iran.

Until then, the revolution in Tehran may have to wait.

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