After more than four decades of menaces and threats to wipe Israel off the map, the shadow war finally exploded into open conflict when the Iranian regime launched an unprecedented barrage on April 13, with more than 300 drones and missiles fired at their arch enemy. Despite bombastic claims by the mullahs and fake videos of raging fires shown on state-run TV networks, the air strike was actually a spectacular failure. Around 99 percent of the missiles and drones fired at Israeli targets either blew up shortly after launching or were destroyed by the Israeli Iron Dome defense system, with air support from the US, UK, France and Jordan. Nevertheless, this calamitous attack triggered Israel’s retaliatory response on April 19, with airstrikes on military targets in the Iranian cities of Isfahan and Tabriz, and simultaneous drone and missile attacks on Islamic Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) compounds in Iraq and Syria. The tit-for-tat exchange has concentrated minds on how much worse things could become if the mullahs develop a nuclear weapon.

The IRGC controls the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. Although the mullahs claim that their Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a fatwa against the acquisition, development, or use of nuclear weapons way back in the 1990s, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), stockpiles of Iran’s enriched uranium now stand at 21 times the amounts permitted under UN Resolutions. The IAEA reported it had detected uranium particles enriched to 83.7 percent at Fordow, an underground uranium enrichment facility 20 miles northeast of the Holy City of Qom. IAEA inspectors say that there has been “frenzied activity” at Fordow recently as the mullahs’........

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