Air Strikes Could Backfire

Not that you or I hadn't already thought of this, but still (via NPR):

Military strikes to destroy Iran’s nuclear ambitions could backfire, increasing Tehran’s determination to obtain atomic weapons and bolstering hostility towards the West, a report said on Sunday.

The report “Would air strikes work?”, written by a leading British weapons scientist, said strikes would probably be unable to hit enough targets to cause serious damage to Iran’s nuclear facilities.

“With inadequate intelligence, it is unlikely it would be possible to identify and subsequently destroy the number of targets needed to set back Iran’s nuclear programme for a significant period,” said the report.

“In the aftermath of a military strike, if Iran devoted maximum effort and resources to building one nuclear bomb, it could achieve this in a relatively short amount of time.”

Such a weapon would then be wielded in “an environment of incalculably greater hostility,” said the report, which was published by the Oxford Research Group and written by Dr Frank Barnaby, a nuclear physicist and weapons expert.

One more voice in the wilderness.