Libya as a model: How to stop Iran - and Tehran's path to survival

In December 2003, Israeli intelligence was blindsided. Without warning, Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi announced he was abandoning his nuclear weapons program. It wasn’t just that Israel hadn’t known a deal was in the works – it didn’t even know there was a nuclear program to begin with.

For a nation built on the doctrine of “Never Again,” and where existential threats are measured not in years but in missile flight times, it was a chilling revelation. Mossad and Military Intelligence scrambled to assess how such a program had been missed. Special teams were set up to deconstruct the failure, and one of them would go on to uncover a similar project just four years later – a nuclear reactor being built in the deserts of northeast Syria.

Gaddafi’s about-face was, in theory, a success story for nuclear nonproliferation. But what ...
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