Operation Opera - Assessment

Assessment

Israel claims that the attack impeded Iraq's nuclear ambitions by at least ten years. In an interview in 2005, Bill Clinton expressed support for the attack: "everybody talks about what the Israelis did at Osiraq, in 1981, which, I think, in retrospect, was a really good thing. You know, it kept Saddam from developing nuclear power." Louis René Beres wrote in 1995 that "ad it not been for the brilliant raid at Osiraq, Saddam’s forces might have been equipped with atomic warheads in 1991."

In 2010, squad leader Ze'ev Raz said of the operation: "There was no doubt in the mind of the decision makers that we couldn't take a chance. We knew that the Iraqis could do exactly what we did in Dimona."

As early as the autumn of 1981, Kenneth Waltz discussed the fallout from the strike:

In striking Iraq, Israel showed that a preventive strike can be made, something that was not in doubt. Israel's act and its consequences however, make clear that the likelihood of useful accomplishment is low. Israel's strike increased the determination of Arabs to produce nuclear weapons. Arab states that may attempt to do so will now be all the more secretive and circumspect. Israel’s strike, far from foreclosing Iraq's nuclear future, gained her the support of some other Arab states in pursuing it. And despite Prime Minister Begin's vow to strike as often as need be, the risks in doing so would rise with each occasion.

Charles R. H. Tripp, in an interview for the 25th anniversary of the attack, described the bombing of Osirak as a variation of Israeli military doctrine beginning with the premiership of David Ben-Gurion, "advocating devastating pre-emptive strikes on Arab enemies." Tripp asserted, "the Osirak attack is an illegal way to behave—Resolution 487 established that—but it is an understandable way to behave if you are the Israeli military-security establishment."

Following the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, American forces captured a number of documents detailing conversations that Saddam Hussein had with his inner sanctum. In a 1982 conversation Hussein stated that, "Once Iraq walks out victorious, there will not be any Israel." Of Israel’s anti-Iraqi endeavors he noted, "Technically, they are right in all of their attempts to harm Iraq."

Tom Moriarty, a military intelligence analyst for the United States Air Force, wrote in 2004 that Israel had "gambled that the strike would be within Iraq's threshold of tolerance." Moriarty argues that Iraq, already in the midst of a war with Iran, would not start a war with Israel at the same time and that its "threshold of tolerance was higher than normal."

Joseph Cirincione, then director of non-proliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote in 2006:

Israel had pulled off a remarkable military raid, striking targets with great precision over long distances. But the bombing set back Israel more than Iraq. It further harmed Israel's international reputation, later worsened by the ill-fated 1982 invasion of Lebanon, while making Iraq appear a victim of Israeli aggression.

By contrast, Iraqi researchers have stated that the Iraqi nuclear program simply went underground, diversified, and expanded. Khidir Hamza, an Iraqi nuclear scientist, made the following statement in an interview on CNN's Crossfire in 2003:

Israel—actually, what Israel is that it got out the immediate danger out of the way. But it created a much larger danger in the longer range. What happened is that Saddam ordered us—we were 400 . . . scientists and technologists running the program. And when they bombed that reactor out, we had also invested $400 million. And the French reactor and the associated plans were from Italy. When they bombed it out we became 7,000 with a $10 billion investment for a secret, much larger underground program to make bomb material by enriching uranium. We dropped the reactor out totally, which was the plutonium for making nuclear weapons, and went directly into enriching uranium... They estimated we'd make 7 kg of plutonium a year, which is enough for one bomb. And they get scared and bombed it out. Actually it was much less than this, and it would have taken a much longer time. But the program we built later in secret would make six bombs a year.

Similarly, the Iraqi nuclear scientist Imad Khadduri wrote in 2003 that the bombing of Osirak convinced the Iraqi leadership to initiate a full-fledged nuclear weapons program. United States Secretary of Defense William Perry stated in 1997 that Iraq refocused its nuclear weapons effort on producing highly enriched uranium after the raid. Its interest in acquiring plutonium as fissile material for weapons continued, but at a lower priority.

In the Duelfer Report, released by the Iraq Survey Group in 2004, it is stated that the Iraqi nuclear program "expanded considerably" with the purchase of the French reactor in 1976, and that "Israel’s bombing of Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor spurred Saddam to build up Iraq's military to confront Israel in the early 1980s."

Bob Woodward, in the book State of Denial, writes:

Israeli intelligence were convinced that their strike in 1981 on the Osirak nuclear reactor about 10 miles outside Baghdad had ended Saddam's program. Instead covert funding for a nuclear program code-named 'PC3' involving 5.000 people testing and building ingredients for a nuclear bomb.

Richard K. Betts has noted that "there is no evidence that Israel's destruction of Osirak delayed Iraq's nuclear weapons program. The attack may actually have accelerated it." Dan Reiter has repeatedly pointed out that the attack was a dangerous failure: the bombed reactor had nothing to do with weapons research, while "the attack may have actually increased Saddam's commitment to acquiring weapons." In 2011, and basing herself on new Iraqi sources, Malfrid Braut-Hegghammer confirmed these conclusions about the attack: "it triggered a covert nuclear weapons program that did not previously exist, . . . a decade later Iraq stood on the threshold of a nuclear weapons capability. This case suggests that preventive attacks can increase the long-term proliferation risk posed by the targeted state." Elsewhere, she has observed:

The destruction of the Osiraq reactor did not delay the development of a nuclear weapons option because it was never intended to be part of such an effort. The French-supplied facility was subject to rigorous safeguards and designed to ensure that Iraq would not be able to produce weapons-grade plutonium. An examination of the reactor by Harvard physicist Richard Wilson after the attack concluded that the facility was not suited for production of weapons-grade plutonium. As a result, the attack did not reduce the risk that Iraq would develop nuclear weapons. On the contrary, it brought about a far more determined and focused effort to acquire nuclear weapons.

In 2012, it was similarly argued by scholars at the RAND Corporation that an "Israeli or American attack on Iranian nuclear facilities would make it more, not less, likely that the Iranian regime would decide to produce and deploy nuclear weapons. Such an attack would also make it more, not less, difficult to contain Iranian influence."