Israel says Iran was building warheads capable of hitting London

Times

2 days ago

Iran has been building the biggest ballistic missile arsenal on the planet, producing one-tonne warheads capable of reaching London, Israeli officials have warned.
The focus since last weekend's US strikes on Iran has been on the country's nuclear programme and controversy over whether or not it was 'completely obliterated', as President Trump has claimed. But Israeli officials say that was not the only objective when the attack on Iran was launched in the early hours of June 13.
'We actually acted because of two existential threats,' said Oren Marmorstein, spokesman for Israel's foreign ministry. 'One was nuclear, and we acted when we did because Iran was at the 11th hour of being able to build a bomb. But the other was the ballistic threat.'
Before the conflict, Tehran was estimated by the US to have about 3,000 ballistic missiles but the regime had been in the midst of an operation to increase production to 20,000, Marmorstein said, including some with payloads of one or two tonnes.
He said that on the morning of Tuesday last week, just before a ceasefire came into effect, a missile killed four people in their safe room in the southern Israeli town of Beersheba. 'Imagine if Tehran sent 10,000 of those,' he added. 'That threat was as existential to us as a nuclear bomb.
'They were moving into industrial scale and about to become the No 1 ballistic missile producer in the world. Some of these are intercontinental, which are not for us.' He said these had the range to reach European cities, including London.
On the nuclear programme, Israel has yet to release the intelligence that prompted it to launch Operation Rising Lion — what Trump calls the 12 Day War.
'They were getting closer and closer, almost to the point of no return,' Marmorstein said. He claimed Iran stepped up its programme after Israel's assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, in Beirut in September. It is a claim that has been echoed by Trump, though not by the US's director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, when she testified to Congress in March.
'On uranium enrichment, they had stockpiled enough for nine nuclear bombs and we saw extreme acceleration on weaponisation. This was all part and parcel of a bigger plan for the annihilation of Israel with three elements — nuclear, ballistic and physical invasion,' Marmorstein said.
Marmorstein described the Israeli operation as 'successful beyond our expectations', adding: 'Just imagine the first night we took out the entire senior command of Iranian regime — think of the Nazis being deprived of the entire Wehrmacht command in the first days of World War Two.
'And these were surgical operations, getting to the right window at the right time, almost like James Bond.'
The Israelis are still assessing the damage done by America's bunker-buster bomb strikes — a question that has seen heated exchanges of words in Washington — but are confident, according to Marmorstein, 'it has been taken back years. The nuclear race has received a huge blow.'
The ballistic programme had also been damaged severely, he said, with many missiles eliminated, as were more than half of Iran's 300 missile-launchers, and the production facility for Shahed drones — something he said 'the Ukrainians are pleased about', because hundreds had been used by Russia against Kyiv.
A strike was also launched on a military facility in Yazd that houses Iran's heaviest declared missile, the Khorramshahr — a copy of a North Korean missile carrying a two-ton warhead.
The line of used espresso cups behind Marmorstein's desk testify to late nights over the past fortnight. The first Israelis knew of the war was when they were woken at 3am on Friday June 13 by an air raid siren.
'I told my wife and mother, 'This is very serious',' he said. 'We had expected the Iranians to react very soon and on a bigger scale. But they were so blown away by the scale of the Israeli operation, it took them more time to react than expected.'
Although some Iranian missiles managed to evade Israel's Iron Dome air defences, taking down blocks of apartments and killing 25 Israelis, this was far fewer than the hundreds or even thousands feared.
On Thursday, in his first public appearance in more than a week, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, declared victory against Israel and America. The US had been forced to enter the war, he said, 'because it felt that if it did not, the Zionist regime would be completely destroyed.
Marmorstein smiles at this. 'The fact of the matter is the Iranian regime suffered huge blows not just to its nuclear and ballistic programme but to the IRGC [Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps], the Basij militia, and I think there is hope for something else …'
Although he says 'regime change was not part of this operation, that's for the Iranian people to decide', his office has been very busy with public diplomacy, putting out material in Persian on Instagram and other channels that has had more than 380 million views. He insists: 'This is not a fight with the Iranian people but with the regime.'
Since the ceasefire, Tehran has started a new crackdown and Marmorstein's office has noticed 200,000 Iranians have left the Instagram account.
He has a warning for the international community. 'This was a huge landmark, perhaps a turning point, but it's not over,' he said. 'We took Iran's nuclear programme years back but I'm not sure the nature of the regime's ambitions have changed. The international community needs to demand that the regime refrain from any foolish attempt to try and resume.'