Dear praying friends,
This war with Iran is existential. Looking back, we can easily see that the destruction of Hamas and Hezbollah, the situation in Syria, all play into God’s providence and lead to this moment in which Israel can attack (defend itself, really) Iran’s nuclear facilities without having to deal with thousands of rockets coming from Gaza and Lebanon.
God has seen this all along and has prepared the ground for it. The LORD Reigns! Please pray for Israel–100 UAVs are on the way to Israel–pray for its armed services. At this moment, although we are deeply divided on many issues, we are ONE.
Here is an article that appeared in the Hebrew papers this morning. I had ChatGPT translate it to English. (It did a good job.)
“The strike came at the last moment: Iran carried out the ‘nuclear breakout’ | Ben Caspit”
The word “historic” is an understatement for this morning. This is not the end. This is the beginning. Israel has been preparing for these days since the 1990s, when Iran’s nuclear intentions were first identified. Preparing, planning, warning, monitoring.
Iran was supposed to reach nuclear capability within a few short years. The Israeli effort delayed it by more than twenty years. But now, it has reached the threshold of its goal. We stood on the verge of a strike many times. We hesitated, we didn’t strike. Now, it’s real. As the late Meir Dagan defined it: “Israel will strike alone only when the knife is already at its throat.” The knife is at the throat.
We are still far from knowing if it succeeded, what success even means, whether—God forbid—it failed, and what the consequences of failure are. We are still far from absorbing the Iranian response. It will come. There is no reason to panic. Israel will withstand the Iranian strike.
We must hope that the United States will stand by us. The signs suggest it will. But this morning is a historic morning. On this morning, there is no politics, no right or left, no secular or religious. There is one nation fighting for its future. There is one people praying for the safety of the pilots and all the other male and female fighters who are now carrying out a mission of biblical proportions. Good luck.
IDF Spokesperson Brigadier General Efi Defrin confirms: Iran recently carried out a “nuclear breakout.” It secretly activated a “weapon group.” In other words: after achieving its goal in uranium enrichment, Iran launched an effort to gain the capability to build a bomb from the enriched material, compress it to the size of a basketball, and mount it on the warhead of a ballistic missile. At the same time, it worked to develop a “detonation chain” to trigger the bomb at the right moment upon nearing its target (at a certain altitude above it). The strike was a necessity. Iran is now a nuclear threshold state.
It is still unclear what damage we have caused to all of this and by how much time (hopefully as much as possible) we have rolled back Iran’s nuclear program. It is also unclear to what extent the world will understand that this was clearly an act of self-defense. At the moment, none of that matters much. We must pray for the success of the pilots and all the male and female fighters involved in this historic event—and prepare for the arrival of the drones Iran has already launched toward us (in the coming hours).
A few more words about the “weapon group.” In terms of detection, this poses a far greater intelligence challenge than uranium enrichment. Enrichment has a “radioactive signature.” It cannot be concealed; it’s very difficult to hide. An intelligence effort can uncover it, even retroactively. The “weapon group” is a silent event with no intelligence signature. All it takes is the right scientists in a small laboratory, somewhere under a certain mountain, and the work can be completed quietly.
At some point, a test must be conducted with heavy warheads on ballistic missiles (not nuclear), and such a test was recently carried out by Iran. The concern was that the Iranians would execute the “breakout,” meaning launch into the “weapon group” phase, and intelligence would struggle to detect it. Well, at least for now, it appears that Israeli intelligence—and possibly also American intelligence—did detect it. It’s still unclear how long it took to discover it.
Did we detect it in real time or too late? It’s still unknown what we managed to destroy and what else we will succeed in destroying. But Iran’s breakout into the “weapon group” phase finally exposes its true intentions to a previously skeptical world: Iran was striving for a military nuclear capability—and came very close to its goal.
Ben Caspit
