• Iran

July 7, 2025, 6:45 AM View Comments ()

Since the end of the Israeli and U.S. bombing campaign against Iran’s nuclear program in June, debate has raged over whether the time needed for Tehran to reconstitute the program should be measured in months or years. An even more important question, however, is how the bombing may reshape Iran’s domestic power dynamics and approach to national security.

Rather than erasing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the operation may have incentivized the regime to cut off all forms of international cooperation and intensify its program. By driving Iran to go it alone, the strikes have created dangerous uncertainty surrounding its next moves—a scenario that is strikingly reminiscent of the aftermath of Israel’s strike on Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981.

In the late 1970s, during a period of gushing oil revenues and strong economic growth, Iraq decided to launch its own nuclear program. In 1976, the government purchased a civilian nuclear research reactor—dubbed “Osirak”—from France as the first element of that program.

The Osirak reactor—coupled with the fact that France supplied Iraq with uranium enriched to 93 percent purity—sparked concerns that Iraq intended to divert the plutonium produced at the facility toward building a nuclear weapon. Yet the reactor’s design made it technically difficult to do so, and the reactor itself was too small and closely monitored to form the basis of a weapons program. Iraq’s program was instead largely exploratory, and its scientists did not have an explicit political mandate for the development of a weapon.

In a surprise airstrike on June 7, 1981, Israeli jets destroyed the Osirak reactor before it could be fueled. Israel touted the mission as a resounding success, and it quickly became enshrined in policy lore as a model for eliminating an emerging nuclear threat. In the lead-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, senior Bush administration officials publicly credited the Osirak attack with preventing Iraq from acquiring nuclear weapons before the 1991 Gulf War.

That narrative of success has obscured the real consequences of the strike: Intended to choke Iraq’s nuclear ambitions, the bombing instead jolted them into high gear. The Baathist regime, obsessed with its own security, concluded that it had to develop a nuclear deterrent—and that it must do so in secret if it hoped to succeed. The bombing also galvanized lower-level officials and engineers to succeed in what was now deemed an urgent matter of national defense.

Within months of the Israeli bombing, Iraqi President and undisputed dictator Saddam Hussein approved the launch of a clandestine nuclear weapons program, funded lavishly despite the ongoing war with Iran. What had been an underdeveloped and politically inconsistent effort suddenly became a national priority. From 1983 to 1991, staffing surged from 400 to 7,000 scientists while the program’s annual budget soared from $400 million to $10 billion.

Iraq’s newly empowered nuclear scientists shifted focus from plutonium production to uranium enrichment. Though more technically demanding, expensive, and time-consuming, uranium enrichment did not depend on foreign fuel supplies and was thus easier to conceal. To secure the necessary technology, Iraq’s industrial and intelligence agencies built a covert procurement network that used front companies and embassy personnel to acquire equipment from German, Austrian, and Japanese suppliers.

By the late 1980s, the program was approaching maturity. Iraqi officials anticipated beginning cold tests of a nuclear device by 1993 and aimed to produce enough highly enriched uranium for one bomb per year starting in 1994.

In the end, it was Saddam’s own recklessness, not Israel’s airstrike, that stopped him from getting the bomb. After Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, he launched a desperate crash program to build a weapon within six months—an effort that the nuclear establishment knew was doomed from the start. Following the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq was forced to allow weapons inspectors into the country as part of the armistice agreement. Shortly after they arrived, the inspectors found a program on the threshold of nuclear weapons capability.

Much like the aftermath of Israel’s Osirak strike, the bombing campaign against the Iranian program risks pushing a regional adversary to go underground and intensify its efforts. For hard-liners in Iran, the lesson may be clear: Only a nuclear deterrent can prevent future attacks. The strikes may alter how Iran goes about it, but they have likely strengthened the regime’s resolve to cross the threshold.

Iran today is obviously not the same as Iraq in 1981, but the parallels are hard to ignore. Just as the Osirak strike generated political consensus in Iraq and aligned the regime with ambitious nuclear entrepreneurs, recent statements by Iranian leaders suggest that the attacks have emboldened hard-liners.

Many analysts note that the war has accelerated a power shift in Tehran from clerics to generals. These new leaders may be more rational, but they are also more aggressive, suspicious of diplomacy, and likely to prioritize survival through deterrence instead of engagement. The strikes may also set off a renewed sense of urgency among Iran’s nuclear scientists and weapons engineers, just as many Iraqi engineers embraced Saddam’s nuclear strategy after the destruction of Osirak.

The regime will likely be far less willing now to pursue another nuclear deal, and it has little incentive to try. For authoritarian regimes across the region, nuclear diplomacy has often ended badly. After Libyan strongman Muammar al-Qaddafi dismantled his weapons of mass destruction program, he was later targeted in a NATO bombing campaign. In Iraq, Saddam no longer had an active nuclear effort before the U.S. invasion in 2003, when he was toppled, tried, and hanged.

These precedents loom large in Tehran. Even moderate figures will now feel misled: The scheduling of another round of talks with the United States for June 15 deliberately lulled Iranians into a false sense of security just before the strikes began. That will make it far harder to resume negotiations and embolden hard-liners who’ve long argued that the West was never acting in good faith.

Airstrikes have also once more traded known problems for unknown ones. Akin to how Iraq’s covert program flourished undetected after Osirak, Iran’s withdrawal from International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) oversight this week will severely hamper efforts to locate future clandestine facilities. The old Iran nuclear deal was abandoned out of concerns that Iran may have been covertly building secret facilities, but fears of secret facilities are only compounded after military strikes. The end of Iranian cooperation with the IAEA is a portent of things to come.

When considering the differences between Iraq then and Iran now, the decision to strike appears even riskier. The population of today’s Iran is six times larger and its economy 10 times larger than Iraq’s at the time. It is also more technologically advanced, much better organized, and better able to protect its nuclear program. Regardless of the amount of damage done to Iranian facilities, and notwithstanding the assassination of several nuclear scientists, Iran retains all the technical expertise that it needs to resume its nuclear program if it chooses to do so.

Iran does suffer from a number of weaknesses that may constrain its ability to rebuild its facilities. Israel’s campaign revealed how deeply state institutions have been infiltrated by foreign intelligence, which Iran is seeking to address through a purge-like wave of arrests and executions. Iran is also far more isolated today than it was even a few years ago, with traditional allies such as Russia and even proxies such as Hezbollah offering little more than rhetorical support.

But over the long term, even these disadvantages may reinforce the logic of nuclear deterrence, convincing Iran’s leaders that only an atomic weapon could secure the regime against attempts to bring it down. What’s more, the Iranian leadership will not have missed that North Korea’s regime continues to survive.

Military strikes may feel decisive in their immediate aftermath, but their second- and third-order effects often unfold in slow motion. Iran’s response may not come immediately, but it could manifest itself in quiet decisions to walk away from diplomacy, reconstitute facilities in the shadows, and build what it may now see as an essential means to survive.

Those outside Iran who want to avoid that outcome will need to abandon the allure of quick fixes in favor of a long-term strategy that is grounded in assessments of the Iranian leadership and the goals now driving it.