Israel Says It Killed at Least 14 of Iran's Nuclear Scientists

Israel's tally of the war damage it wrought on Iran includes the targeted killings of at least 14 scientists, an unprecedented attack on the brains behind Iran's nuclear program that outside experts say can only set it back, not stop it. In an interview with the Associated Press, Israel's ambassador to France said the killings will make it "almost" impossible for Iran to build weapons from whatever nuclear infrastructure and material may have survived nearly two weeks of Israeli airstrikes and massive bunker-busting bombs dropped by US stealth bombers. "The fact that the whole group disappeared is basically throwing back the program by a number of years, by quite a number of years," Ambassador Joshua Zarka said.

But nuclear analysts say Iran has other scientists who can take their place, and their take echoes the opinion of other analysts that the program was not "obliterated." European governments say that military force alone cannot eradicate Iran's nuclear know-how, which is why they want a negotiated solution to put concerns about the Iranian program to rest. "Strikes cannot destroy the knowledge Iran has acquired over several decades, nor any regime ambition to deploy that knowledge to build a nuclear weapon," UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy told lawmakers in the House of Commons. Iran has long maintained that its nuclear program was peaceful, and US intelligence agencies have assessed that Tehran is not actively pursuing a bomb. However, Israeli leaders have argued that Iran could quickly assemble a nuclear weapon.

Zarka told AP that Israeli strikes killed at least 14 physicists and nuclear engineers, top Iranian scientific leaders who "basically had everything in their mind." They were killed "not because of the fact that they knew physics, but because of the fight that they were personally involved in, the creation and the fabrication and the production of (a) nuclear weapon," he said. Nine of them were killed in Israel's opening wave of attacks on June 13, the Israeli military said. It said they "possessed decades of accumulated experience in the development of nuclear weapons" and included specialists in chemistry, materials and explosives as well as physicists. (The AP has more details.)