Should Israel attack Iran’s nuclear facilities? Biden, GOP disagree

The debate over whether Israel should attack Iran’s nuclear facilities is roiling Washington as the Biden administration seeks to temper its ally’s response to Tehran’s missile attack.

President Biden came out against an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear sites Wednesday, as his administration seeks to avoid a wider war in the Middle East. 

“They have a right to respond, but they should respond proportionally,” he told reporters. 

But there is an understanding in Washington that Israel will go further than its response to Tehran’s missile attack in April, and hawks in the Republican party say nuclear facilities are fair game.

GOP lawmakers including House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) have slammed the Biden administration for seeking to restrain Israel. 

“Let them defend themselves. Israel has a right to self-defense, whatever it is, including nuclear sites,” Scalise said Thursday on Fox News. 

Graham released a statement criticizing Biden for what he called a “miscalculation” of Iran and its intentions.

“Iran is not trying to build peaceful nuclear power plants. The regime is trying to build a nuclear bomb to achieve its religious objectives,” the senator posted to the social platform X on Thursday. “The idea of telling Israel what targets to strike ignores reality.”

Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-Neb.) said Wednesday that Biden “has no right to tell Israel how it’s going to defend itself,” blaming the president’s “weakness” with Iran for the recent escalation of tensions in the Middle East.

Other Republicans, such as House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Michael McCaul (R-Texas), urged Biden to “place maximum pressure on Iran and its proxies.”

Iran launched 180 missiles toward Israel on Tuesday in response to the country’s invasion of Lebanon and the killing of top leaders of the militant group Hezbollah, a prized proxy of Tehran.

Israel is expected to go further in its response to the attack than it did when it struck an air defense installation near Isfahan in April, after Tehran’s previous aerial barrage that same month. 

The Biden administration, however, fears that an Israeli response that targets Iran’s nuclear facilities could spark further escalation in the region, potentially pulling U.S. forces into the fight.

“I don’t think a kind of all-out regional war raging a month before a general election is the backdrop that the Biden administration wants to see,” said Michael Hanna, U.S. program director at the International Crisis Group. 

“It’s not surprising that [Biden is] trying to push away from the most serious potential response.”

Hanna also said it’s unlikely an Israeli strike would destroy Iran’s sprawling nuclear installations, and could ultimately make Tehran more determined to build nuclear weapons. Iran’s military nuclear program is primarily inside Parchin, with research reactors in Tehran, Bonab and Ramsar. There are several more major facilities in Bushehr, Ferdows, Isfahan and Natanz.

“The nuclear program is sophisticated, it’s broad in scope. You would have to have really excellent intelligence and not miss. Even then, I think you would — by virtue of how advanced the program is already — you would set the program back by months, maybe years, as opposed to taking it offline,” Hanna explained. 

“You might, in such an action, shift the Iranian calculus about going full out for weaponization, which they haven’t so far.”

Iran is known to be enriching uranium above the 20 percent needed to run a civil nuclear power plant, with the intention of reaching weapons-grade levels of 90 percent needed to produce a nuclear weapon, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’s nuclear watchdog.

In July, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said instead of Iran being at least a year away from having the capacity to make fissile material for a nuclear weapon, the country “is now probably one or two weeks away” from hitting its “breakout point.”

But the United States, while concerned over Iran’s activities, has never struck at its nuclear facilities, a signal of its unease with the ramifications of such a move, according to Alex Vatanka, director of the Iran program at the Middle East Institute. 

“There’s a reason why the U.S. hasn’t done this,” Vatanka told The Hill. “If there was this quick military solution to Iran’s nuclear program, it would have been done a long time ago. The fact that it hasn’t been done is because it’s not a single-strike or one-day operation type of an affair.”

He noted that the spread-out nature of Iran’s nuclear program means Israel probably couldn’t move forward on its own in attacking the facilities and would need Washington’s assistance.

“It needs the kind of munition that only the U.S. has,” Vatanka said.

An attack on Iran’s oil installations appears to be the preferred outcome for the Biden administration. 

Biden left the door open Thursday on supporting an Israeli strike on Iran’s oil reserves, telling reporters that the two allies are “in discussions of that” but “there’s nothing going to happen today; we’ll talk about that later.”

The U.S. is also considering its own economic measures on an already heavily sanctioned Iran, though Biden declined to discuss the matter Thursday.

Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh would only confirm Thursday that discussion with Israel over its response was ongoing. 

“And these are conversations that don’t just happen in 15 minutes, they happen over time,” Singh told reporters. 

She added that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has spoken with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant “pretty much for the last two weeks almost every day.”

Asked whether Austin supports a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities or its oil fields, Singh said she would not speculate on what a potential Israeli strike would look like.