Perspective: Nuclear WeaponsHow Israel and Iran Joined Forces to Kill a Nuclear Weapons Program

At dawn on 30 September 1980 four American-made F-4E Phantom jets screamed low over central Iraq, each laden with air-to-air missiles and three thousand pounds of bombs. 

The skimming Phantoms climbed briefly to higher altitude so as to appear on Iraqi radars, before ducking back down to hit the deck. But while two decoy Phantoms maintained their trajectory towards Baghdad, the other two veered southwards towards the real target: Iraq’s Osirak light-water nuclear reactor.

Sebastien Roblin writes in the National Interest that the jets were undertaking the first air-strike against a nuclear reactor, and the first preemptive air-strike attempting to prevent a country from developing nuclear weapons capability. In fact, the only preceding attack on nuclear facilities occurred during World War II when British commandoes successfully sabotaged Nazi heavy water research facilities in Norway.

Now, the famous Israeli Operation Opera that destroyed the Osirak reactor was still nine months away. The Phantoms soaring towards the reactor in 1980 belonged to the Iranian Air Force.

This obscure but portentous raid, and the context in which it occurred, was documented in-depth by Tom Cooper and Farzad Bishop in a fascinating article for Air Enthusiast magazine in 2004.

Ironically, having pioneered the preemptive strike targeting another state’s nuclear research facilities with Israel, today Iran’s extensive nuclear research program is threatened with preventative air attacks from Israel and the United States. However, Iran learned from the Osirak strikes: its own nuclear research program is dispersed in numerous underground facilities, not concentrated in a single above-ground facility that would prove susceptible to attack.