Israel Bombed Osirak in 1981 and the World Later Thanked It in Private

There is a famous diplomatic habit of condemning an action in public and benefiting from it in private. The Israeli raid on Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981 is its purest case. The Security Council voted to condemn it without a single dissent. Ten years later, an American-led army drove into Kuwait and Iraq against a dictator who did not have a nuclear weapon, and many of the governments that had voted to condemn the raid enjoyed the result without having to mention it.

I want to examine the raid in the order a good lawyer would: facts, the rule, the objections, the verdict. My thesis is that the Osirak strike was a lawful and morally defensible act of preventive self-defense in an unusual case, and that the world's response shows how often governments judge an act by its politics and not its consequences.

Let me define terms first. Preventive military action strikes a threat before it matures into a capability, while preemptive action strikes an attack that is imminent. The difference is one of timing and certainty, and the moral argument about each is different. Safeguards are the inspection agreements under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Fissile material is the material, highly enriched uranium or plutonium, that can sustain a nuclear explosion.

The reactor

In the 1970s, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, who had become president in 1979, purchased a nuclear research reactor from France. The reactor, a type known as Osiris, was built at the Tuwaitha nuclear center near Baghdad, and the Iraqis called it Tammuz 1. The West called it Osirak, a blend of Osiris and Iraq. France also agreed to supply fuel for it, and the fuel was highly enriched uranium, which is what a bomb needs.

That fact is the heart of the matter. A research reactor does not need weapons-grade fuel. Many countries run such reactors on low-enriched uranium. A reactor loaded with highly enriched uranium, and a country with an openly hostile government that had fought Iran and declared its enmity toward Israel, was a different matter. Iraq was a party to the NPT, and its reactor was subject to inspection. Iraq's defenders said that was proof of peaceful intent.

Israel did not believe it. Its leaders argued that the reactor, together with Iraq's purchases of other equipment, would give Saddam the ability to build weapons within a few years, and that inspections would not stop a regime that could expel the inspectors or divert material in a crisis. The Israeli government under Prime Minister Menachem Begin concluded that waiting was a risk the country could not accept.

The raid

On June 7, 1981, a Sunday, Israeli aircraft took off from an air base in the Sinai. Eight F-16 fighters carried the bombs and six F-15 fighters flew escort. They flew low, across Jordanian and Saudi airspace, to avoid radar, a trip of several hundred miles each way. They arrived over Tuwaitha in the late afternoon, bombed the reactor dome with precision, and turned for home. The Iraqi air defenses got off little effective fire. All the Israeli aircraft returned. About ten Iraqi soldiers and one French civilian technician were killed. The reactor was destroyed.

The operation was called Operation Opera. Among the young pilots was Ilan Ramon, who would later fly on the space shuttle Columbia and die in its loss in 2003. That tidbit is only a reminder of how ordinary the men were, and how extraordinary the job was.

The doctrine

The Israeli government explained the decision in a statement soon after the raid, and Begin repeated it at a press conference a couple of days later, in terms that came to be called the Begin Doctrine. In substance: Israel would not allow its enemies to develop weapons of mass destruction that could be used against it. He added that Israel would act in defense of its citizens before such weapons became operational, since a country with a population as small as Israel's and a history as grave could not rely on a second chance.

You can dispute the policy, but note its logic. A defense that depends on absorbing the first blow is not a defense for a country whose first blow might be the last. That is the whole case for preventive action in this unusual category: the harm is of a kind that cannot be undone and cannot be survived.

The world's response

The reaction was fast and nearly universal. The United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 487 on June 19, 1981, and it passed unanimously. It strongly condemned the Israeli attack as a clear violation of the UN Charter and the norms of international conduct, and it called on Israel to place its own nuclear facilities under inspection. The United States voted for it. The American ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick, called the raid shocking. The administration also suspended the delivery of four F-16 aircraft to Israel, a signal of displeasure that was lifted about two months later.

It was a rebuke, and a real one, and I do not want to minimize it. The Reagan administration was uncomfortable. The raid happened in the middle of delicate diplomacy in the region. And there was a legitimate legal question on the table, which is the central one: does international law permit a country to strike another's facilities before it has attacked?

The legal rule and the objection

The standard test comes from an incident in 1837. During a rebellion in Canada, a British force crossed to the American side of the Niagara River and destroyed a steamer called the Caroline that was supplying the rebels, killing an American in the process. Years later, in 1841, Secretary of State Daniel Webster set out the American position in a letter. A claim of self-defense, he wrote, must show:

a necessity of self-defence, instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.

That is the traditional Caroline standard, and it is demanding. It is built for an attack that is already underway or about to start. Critics of the Israeli raid say it fails the test. Iraq had not attacked Israel with a nuclear weapon, did not yet have one, and the reactor was under international inspection. The threat was possible, not imminent. If a state can strike whenever it fears a future threat, the argument goes, it can strike whenever it wishes, and the rule against force loses its meaning.

That is the strongest objection, and it is a serious one. I think it deserves a serious answer, in four points.

One: the Caroline test was written for a world of muskets, not warheads. Webster's standard assumed that you can wait until the threat is visible and still respond. With weapons of mass destruction, the moment when the threat is visible may be the moment it can no longer be answered. A rule that requires a country to wait for the missile in the air has no answer to a regime that will not use a missile in the air.

Two: the evidence was not nothing. Iraq had purchased a reactor with weapons-grade fuel, plus equipment and facilities of the kind that a plutonium or uranium route would need. It was ruled by a government with a record of aggression. The Israeli claim was not a guess based on mood. It was a judgment about capability, intent and timing, and while it could be argued with, it was not baseless.

Three: inspection regimes are only as good as the inspected. The later record is the best evidence. After the 1991 Gulf War, inspectors found that Iraq had been running a large, covert nuclear program that it had hidden from the international agency, in facilities that no one had declared. Iraq was a party to the treaty that was supposed to prevent exactly that. If the safeguards system could not detect this scale of cheating in a country that was a party to the treaty, then the assurance it offered about Osirak was weaker than its defenders claimed.

Four: the consequences were good. This is the least legal argument and the most persuasive. In August 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait, and in early 1991 an American-led coalition expelled it. Imagine that war against a regime holding a nuclear weapon, or even credibly close to one. Every decision about whether to liberate Kuwait would have been shadowed by the threat of nuclear use against coalition forces and against Israel. Dick Cheney, then the American Secretary of Defense, sent the Israeli general David Ivry a photograph of the destroyed reactor in 1991 with a note thanking him for his work on the Iraqi nuclear program in 1981.

The caution

There is a counterpoint that an honest account should include. Some scholars argue that the raid did not end Iraq's nuclear ambitions but pushed them underground, and that Saddam responded by building a bigger and better-hidden program. The post-1991 discoveries support that reading. The raid delayed Iraq, and may have hardened its resolve. It bought time, not permanent safety.

I concede that, and I think it makes the case for the raid stronger, not weaker. Time is the thing a nonproliferation policy is trying to buy. A regime that builds its program in secret takes longer, pays more and risks discovery. The delay between 1981 and 1991 was exactly the margin that mattered. Had Iraq's program been allowed to finish openly in the early 1980s, the 1991 war would have been a different and probably much worse war.

The echo in 2007

Israel's policy was tested again on September 6, 2007, when its aircraft destroyed a facility in the Syrian desert near al-Kibar, in the Deir ez-Zor region. Israel said nothing for years, and acknowledged the operation in 2018. The International Atomic Energy Agency concluded in 2011 that the site had very likely been a nuclear reactor that Syria should have declared. Syria denied it. American and Israeli intelligence said North Korean technicians had helped build it.

Notice the pattern. In both cases, a secret facility was built by a regime hostile to Israel. In both cases, the facility was destroyed before it could produce fissile material. And in both cases, Israel struck by itself, with no public warning. This is the Begin Doctrine at work, and in the Syrian case it was applied before the reactor was reported to have started operating.

The Founding angle

Does the American tradition have anything to say? It does. The Preamble to the Constitution lists, among the purposes of the government, to "provide for the common defence". The American practice of anticipatory defense has deep roots, going back to episodes like the Caroline itself, where an American secretary of state laid down the test that Israel's critics now cite. The right of a people to protect itself is not something a treaty grants. It is something a treaty has to respect.

That helps explain why conservatives have historically sympathized with the Israeli position. A free country that is surrounded by regimes that call for its destruction does not have a luxury of patience that a distant great power does. The nature of the alliance, and what it does and does not cost America, is weighed in Is the Alliance with Israel a Burden or a Bargain, the Ledger Examined. The wider logic of preventing a weapon, and why diplomacy without leverage fails, runs through Deterrence Fails When an Enemy Thinks You Will Not Pay the Price and The INF Treaty Proved Arms Control Works Only When You Hold Cards. The question of what Iran has done with similar technology is laid out in Iran's Nuclear Program From Natanz in 2002 to the JCPOA's End, a Timeline, and the earlier crisis in which Israel's survival depended on American resupply is told in The 1973 Airlift That Saved Israel and Cost America an Oil Embargo. For the way the U.S. ambassador to the UN thought about allies and adversaries, see Jeane Kirkpatrick Taught the Right to Tell Allies from Enemies.

One wry observation to close the argument. The Security Council has passed many resolutions that nobody remembers and a few that everybody quotes. Resolution 487 is a rare third kind: one whose authors spent the following decade quietly profiting from the thing they had condemned. When the history of the world body is written, that is worth a footnote at least.

The case in brief

1. On June 7, 1981, Israel destroyed Iraq's French-built Osirak reactor in a single raid, with no Israeli losses, and the Begin Doctrine followed: no enemy will be allowed to acquire weapons of mass destruction.
2. The Security Council condemned the raid unanimously in Resolution 487, and the Reagan administration publicly rebuked Israel, though the strike raised a legitimate question about preventive force.
3. The Caroline standard was written for an age of muskets, and the post-1991 discovery of Iraq's covert program shows that safeguards alone could not be trusted.
4. The raid bought a decade, and the 1991 coalition fought a dictator without a bomb.
5. The 2007 strike on Syria's reactor followed the same logic, and both cases give a serious moral argument for preventive action in the narrow case of weapons of mass destruction.

What you can do: read the text of UN Security Council Resolution 487 and the Caroline correspondence, then decide for yourself where the line between prevention and aggression falls, and tell your representative.