Stark warning on Iran attack threat

By Jonathan Marcus
Diplomatic correspondent, BBC News

An attack could embolden Iran to pursue nuclear weapons at all costs

"Far from setting back Iran's nuclear programme, a military attack might create the political conditions in which Iran could accelerate its nuclear weapons programme."

This is the stark conclusion of a new report from the Oxford Research Group - an independent British think tank that is often highly critical of US and British government policy.

With two US navy aircraft carrier strike groups in the Gulf region and US spokesmen insisting that the military option against Iran cannot be ruled out, this study is timely.

It highlights what most air power experts have been saying for some time - an operation to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities would be neither brief nor limited in scope.

Multiple targets would have to be hit, and the outcome would be far from clear especially if Iran has hidden facilities unknown to US intelligence.

But this is not a military study. Written by the noted atomic scientist and peace campaigner, Frank Barnaby, it looks more at the aftermath of a potential US attack.

'Emboldened Iran'

It questions the central rationale for any military operation; that it would in some way set Iran's nuclear programme back years.

On the contrary, the study argues that in the aftermath of an attack Iran could be emboldened to pursue a crash military programme to get a nuclear weapon at all costs; perhaps within months rather than years.

This it says would be a very different enterprise from the industrial-scale nuclear programme that Iran is developing at present.

Quite where Iran would get the fissile material for such a programme is not clearly spelt out; it really depends upon a whole range of assumptions as to how far its current programme might have progressed by the time of any attack.

As the former head of the UN's nuclear watchdog, Hans Blix, writes in the foreword, this study argues that "it would be several years before the present Iranian programme could result in weapons and that there is time for diplomacy" to work.