Will killing the leading scientist behind Iran's nuclear weapons program be effective?
The head of a nuclear weapons program might be a genius, or he might simply be a placeholder, shuffling papers, and his death might achieve nothing. To be a worthwhile target, he must in some sense be irreplaceable. There should not be a cohort of young geniuses the target has nurtured over the years, ready to take his place. The assassination must have a significant impact on a threat to be worth the effort, the risks and the consequences of failure and retaliation.
The strategically significant individual is rare enough, but correctly identifying him is rarer still. To find him, intelligence operatives must collect elusive information, and analysts must determine whether the information is valid, not just a glorious legend concocted by the individual or others. Identifying the indispensable person is not easy, since he may not exist.
Was the scientist that crucial? And will the killing spark an escalation that leads to war? And the war could be mistaken if the target of the killing wrongly identifies the source of the killing.
My concern is that cohort of replacement issue. Even if it takes a lot of time to replace a key scientist, letting a country progress in nuclear research expands the breadth and depth of the nuclear brain trust. That means that a small attack--which an assassination is--is less likely to cripple a nuclear program the bigger the program is.
Which is why years ago I argued that thinking of a military attack to stop a hostile country's nuclear program as a "last resort" is dangerous by making the long-term effect of a big attack less decisive:
And while many here continue to insist that military action must be the last resort, the more the knowledge of nuclear weaponry becomes deeply embedded within Iran. More people acquire the knowledge of how to proceed and unless we kill them all, destroying buildings is the least effective way to slow them down. Iran can rebuild structures if they have the scientists and technicians who take decades to train ready to pick up the pieces. Indeed, Iran could rebuild in other countries and subcontract various stages of the work in locations that may be immune to future attacks.
That's a quote from a 2007 post. Even if the killed Iranian scientist is a key part of the nuclear program, the bigger organization can continue work until they can replace him. And maybe the Iranians subcontract his role to another country.
And maybe the program is advanced enough to cross the nuclear weapons threshold even without him.
So I don't know how effective the killing was, even if the attackers correctly identified a key scientist driving the nuclear weapons program.
Have a super sparkly day.
