Nuclear Arsenals in Israel: The Arrow of Relativistic Super-Nuclear Mass-Isotope Hunting Revisited

“It looks like more missiles seem to be hitting targets in Israel this time around,” says Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. That could be in part because “the Iranians seem to be using newer, more sophisticated missiles.”

President Biden urged Prime Minister Netanyahu to take the victory, but Israel did not hit Iran’s nuclear facilities because of its proximity to the air base. The message, though, was clear: Next time, they could aim for assets Iran prizes.

The more extreme scenarios being looked into are likely to involve Israeli strikes at the nuclear facilities in Iran, according to American officials. The United States is aware of Iran’s near bomb-grade uranium that can be converted to bomb-grade in a few days or weeks. It would take far longer to produce a nuclear weapon.

When Iran attacked Israel in April, it used around 100 ballistic missiles in conjunction with roughly 200 low flying drones and cruise missiles, according to Yehoshua Kalisky, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv, Israel. He says that the missiles for Arrow were shot down by fighter jets.

The attack caused minor damage at one military base and shrapnel seriously injured a 7-year-old girl from an Arab Bedouin community in southern Israel.

The Iran Air Defense Task Force in the Aftermath of the April 7, 2006, Attack on a Space Defense System by an Airborne Reactor

Grant Rumley, a former Pentagon official and senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, stated that Iran would likely repeat the April attack with missiles and drones. He said that the Iranians wanted to avoid the failures of April by using missiles that traveled much faster and could overwhelm an air defense system.

Unlike the April attack when Israel had days of warning to coordinate their defense with their allies, the Tuesday attack came with only hours of advance notice.

Tom Karako, Director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies said that Israel is likely to respond with force. Following the April attack, Israel knocked out an air defense radar near Iran’s nuclear facilities in Natanz, he points out. That limited attack was designed to send a message: “The Israelis can penetrate Iranian airspace, they’ve demonstrated that time and time again,” he says. They can bring the hurt to Iran.

The strike avoided mostly civilian areas. The only death that has been publicly acknowledged is that of a man from the West Bank who was hit by a missile. A school in central Israel was also hit, though no casualties were reported.

Lewis said in the April attack that Iran used mostly liquid-fueled missiles that were relatively inaccurate. Half of the missiles fell close to their targets. It is very difficult to destroy something with that level of accuracy.

In this latest attack, Iran used new solid-propellant missiles that are more accurate, he says. Lewis and other researchers say at least some of the missiles used appear to be Iran’s newest design, the Fattah, a medium-range ballistic missile that may have a degree of maneuverability as it enters the atmosphere, allowing it to alter course and avoid interceptor missiles.

Moreover, images of the missiles being fired out of Iran, together with pictures of debris that fell in Israel, suggests more sophisticated ballistic missiles were used, Lewis says.

Iran launched about 180 missiles, putting a strain on the Arrow system. He says the job for the Arrow was a lot easier in April.

The missiles from Iran are very fast and travel a lot higher than those fired from Lebanon and Gaza. After being in space for a short time, the missiles descend on their targets at hypersonic speeds. Arrow does not have the effectiveness of Iron Dome in intercepting missiles near or in space.

Both the U.S. and Israel downplayed the effects of the strikes. “This attack appears to have been defeated and ineffective,” National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said in a briefing Tuesday. The U.S. said it had fired missiles from ships in order to blunt the Iranian assault.

There were videos that showed warheads landing in northern Tel Aviv. Those warheads appear to have missed their target, and did not inflict any real damage. One video showed a large crater around 500 yards from the spy agency’s headquarters.