Intelligence Studies Review

The Israeli-Iran war remains in an extremely dangerous phase. Deterrence has collapsed. Although the Israelis have said they expect a two-week campaign, there is no obvious end in sight. Now, Iran’s leadership is openly signalling a formal break with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The situation is volatile and could still get worse. This is largely because of the uncertainties involved before and during Israel’s surprise attack.

Israeli officials have described their campaign of strikes as “pre-emptive”. This framing is as convenient for Israeli rhetoric as the timing was for Benjamin Netanyahu’s political survival. Pre-emption assumes both imminence and certainty—neither of which has been clearly established. Iran characterises the strikes as unprovoked aggression, although they have been locked in a very long “sub-threshold” war with Israel. The truth is probably somewhere in between, but we cannot be certain as our sources of information are so dubious.

The key problem is that we simply do not know what was happening inside Iran’s nuclear programme at the time of the Israeli attack, and the actors involved are not credible narrators. I do not believe anything that either Tulsi Gabbard or Benjamin Netanyahu say. Gabbard, an America-first isolationist, Putin apologist, but ardently pro-Israel, shared the US intelligence community assessment that Iran had no policy to build a bomb and was probably years away from being able to do So. Netanyahu, whose government appeared on the verge of collapse before the strikes, and who has been accused of using war as a political lifeline, said that Iran was “months” away from building a bomb.

The IAEA’s own work sheds some light on this problem. The day before the surprise attack, it passed a resolution accusing Iran of noncompliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty for failing to disclose all of its enriched uranium stockpile and for failing to declare three nuclear sites. This was a first for the IAEA, which operates one of the most sophisticated intelligence fusion enterprises in the world. The IAEA is generally cautious in its public statements. It followed other assessments in the US in march, shared by Gabbard to congress, that Iran’s stockpiles were reaching record highs. So, the IAEA resolution was serious. Tehran has long leveraged its nuclear production in negotiations with the US and the west, but maintained a lengthy breakout time so as not to provoke the kind of attacks which took place last week. So while I absolutely do not believe the Israeli assessment that Iran’s bomb programme was active and that it was months away from building one, there was clearly more going on in Iran’s nuclear programme than “nothing”. If Israel’s calculus was that this balancing act had tipped too far, they evidently judged that the risks of inaction outweighed those of escalation. Or perhaps this was just a good time for Bibi. Either way, Iran is now moving away from the NPT and toward weaponisation.

The Israeli campaign, however, has extended beyond strikes on physical infrastructure. The reported assassinations of senior Iranian commanders and nuclear personnel are the result of years—perhaps decades—of intelligence groundwork. These are not one-off operations but the visible culmination of a deep, embedded network: dissidents, coerced insiders, paid assets, ideological sympathisers, perhaps illegals, and the merely disgruntled. Recent reports from Israel suggest that the Iranian Air Force’s senior command was lured to its own destruction via a deception operation. If true, this was impressive feat which mitigated Iran’s immediate defence and retaliation. Electronic deception of this kind, when combined with HUMINT and kinetic capability, reflects an intelligence ecosystem that is highly competent and deeply committed. Although there are signs of greater caution in Israel’s defence intelligence, I am not sure they have remedied the problems which preceded 7 October 2023, in which warning intelligence took a backseat to operations.

Less strategic, however, is the cyberattack on Iran’s state bank and the bombing of other sites in Tehran. Israel insists its war is with the regime, not the people. Targeting public financial infrastructure complicates that message. It may form part of a broader campaign to destabilise the Iranian state. But if so, it risks playing into Tehran’s own propaganda, which already frames its domestic legitimacy in terms of resistance to external pressure. And while Israel is hardly the only actor deploying offensive cyber capabilities, its operational doctrine on this front remains both inconsistent and poorly explained.

My biggest concern is what these events mean for global nuclear norms. Two recent developments mark a turning point. The first is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Kyiv gave up its inherited nuclear arsenal in return for international guarantees. No other state will make that mistake again. The second is this present conflict. Iran has spent two decades building bargaining power through nuclear latency. It has deliberately maintained a significant breakout time to avoid triggering an attack, although that gap has been closing. The attack came anyway. The strategic lesson for others is straightforward: restraint is no longer a shield. If you are building a nuclear capability, build it quickly—or risk losing everything. Thus, I don’t expect the number of nuclear-armed states to shrink in my lifetime, despite the wishes of most Middle Eastern states. It will grow.