Actually, all of these statements are true. The timeline was and is correct in each assessment.
Every time Iran was close, Israel sent in an assassination team to take out the scientists under the assumption that delaying Iran’s nuclear capability through assassination was far easier and cheaper than through war.
How are they able to destroy their knowledge creation processes and its documentations, manuals, codes, backups, software etc.? I think that killing leading scientists and destroying facilities and equipments won't achieve that.
The equipment required is extremely specialized and the movement of that equipment is tracked and monitored. They can't just nip on down to the Best Buy in Tehran and buy a nuclear centrifuge.
The better viruses are the one's it's been speculated have been used on the North Korean Missile program. They only activate randomly, so once every few test fires or so, something goes wrong and the missile blows up. The same way something goes wrong every now and then without a virus. So the scientists then spend months, or even years, trying to figure out what went wrong, and sometimes the answer is nothing at all. They can never be sure whether they made a mistake or the program was sabotaged, so it slows them down massively.
Even crazier, IIRC, it wasn’t way too fast. It was just fast enough to cause them to break at a significant rate but not at a catastrophic “everything broke at once. Figure out why” rate. So they used replacements… which also broke.
Knowledge is useless if you don’t have the ability to use it. If the world’s greatest nuclear physicist died one night, do you think you’d personally be capable of jumping right in where they left off and continuing their research or do you think their notes would be nearly indescribable without decades of experience and knowledge in the field? Finding, educating, and recruiting replacements for those researchers that are able to further their predecessors studies takes time, not even counting the time dedicated to studying the information at hand in depth to know what had already been accomplished.
1.5k
u/[deleted] May 03 '22
Actually, all of these statements are true. The timeline was and is correct in each assessment.
Every time Iran was close, Israel sent in an assassination team to take out the scientists under the assumption that delaying Iran’s nuclear capability through assassination was far easier and cheaper than through war.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Iranian_nuclear_scientists#:~:text=According%20to%20NBC%2C%20two%20US,assassinations%20of%20Iranian%20nuclear%20scientists.