Israel’s strike has Iran facing a stark nuclear option

Excerpt

Israel’s long-awaited retaliation against Iran has highlighted the clerical regime’s conventional military weakness and sense of strategic vulnerability. Designed to make Iran “pay” for its Oct. 1 missile barrage — which marked the largest single-day ballistic missile operation in history — Israel struck more than 20 military targets in three essentially uncontested waves of attack. It remains unclear, however, if these strikes will be sufficient to elicit a change in the right direction from Tehran.

In the wee hours of Oct. 26, Iranian authorities watched as Israel gutted two of their traditional pillars of deterrence — the ability to “deny” an adversary the chance to land a blow, and their ability to “punish” an aggressor.

Iranian radars, as well as air and missile defenses such as Russian-provided S-300 platforms, were reportedly taken offline or destroyed. So too, were several ballistic missile facilities tied to solid-propellant missile production, such as those at Parchin, Khojir, and Shahroud, as well as other sites believed to support Iran’s domestic missile supply chain.