Was Top Gun – Maverick a Docudrama?

The Tom Cruise-starring movie last year was about training for and then implementing an almost impossible carrier launched airstrike against an undisclosed nuclear weapons site somewhere in the Middle East. The best young “Top Gun” pilots are gathered to learn under an older master pilot (Cruise) how to fire a pinpoint missile into a small air vent at an underground facility wedged between two steep mountains, requiring unfathomable agility. Cruise, of course, winds up leading the mission and successfully delivering a mortal blow to the entire facility. Pictured above.

The Middle Eastern power was a thinly disguised Iran. When the UN-sponsored, six nation Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was signed in the summer of 2015, Iran agreed to significantly delay its nuclear enrichment program, thus preventing the imminent creation of a weapons-grade bomb or missile warhead. It was an imperfect treaty that did not deal with Iran’s use of surrogates (like Hezbollah) throughout the region to destabilize and effect control of other Middle Eastern nations. JCPOA was narrow focused on nuclear enrichment but did provide for on-site inspection. By all accounts from each of our relevant government intelligence agencies, the treaty was in fact successful in implementing its narrow purpose.

Well before the JCPOA was signed, efforts to decimate Iran’s enrichment process employed stealth computer virus attacks against thousands of that nation’s enrichment centrifuges. The most notorious such attack took place in 2010 against large facility in Natanz, Iran. It was mounted purportedly by a joint US-Israeli effort, who used the Stuxnet virus (actually a worm) to cause those centrifuges to spin out of control and self-destruct. Israel has opposed the JCPOA as being insufficient to counter Iran’s overall regional aggression, one which repeatedly pledges to destroy Israel.

Succumbing to pressure from Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and as part of his crusade to pull the United States out of a panoply of international treaties, in October of 2018, then President Trump unilaterally pulled the US out of the PCPOA, which almost immediately unraveled. Iran began refusing UN nuclear inspection teams and soon resumed, even accelerated, its nuclear enrichment program. Reports that Iran was about to have or already did have a nuclear weapon began to circulate earlier this year. Netanyahu pledged that Iran would never have a nuclear weapon. Meanwhile, Iran was increasing its ties to our enemies, going so far as to supply drones and perhaps other military supplies to Russia to aid in its war against Ukraine. The prospects of a renewed treaty comparable to the JCPOA faded fast.

But what is becoming clear, implanting computer viruses in Iran’s nuclear plants obviously is not working, if they are even being used. To make matters so much worse, Iran’s facilities seem to mirror the challenge that Maverick posed: locating a nuclear facility in a very difficult locale in a very, very deep underground facility that apparently cannot be destroyed by a traditional (read: non-nuclear tactical) bunker-buster bomb or missile warhead. In the Zagros Mountains in central Iran, near Natanz, Iran has tunneled deep underground to build this almost impregnable nuclear enrichment (weapons-making?) site.

According to the Associated Press (May 23rd): “Completion of such a facility ‘would be a nightmare scenario that risks igniting a new escalatory spiral,’ warned Kelsey Davenport, the director of nonproliferation policy at the Washington-based Arms Control Assn. ‘Given how close Iran is to a bomb, it has very little room to ratchet up its program without tripping U.S. and Israeli red lines. So, at this point, any further escalation increases the risk of conflict.’

“The construction at the Natanz site comes five years after then-President Trump unilaterally withdrew the U.S. from the nuclear accord. Trump argued that the deal did not address Tehran’s ballistic missile program, nor its support of militias across the wider Middle East… But what it did do was strictly limit Iran’s enrichment of uranium to 3.67% purity, strong enough to run only civilian power stations, and keep its stockpile to about 660 pounds.

“Since the demise of the nuclear accord, Iran has said it is enriching uranium up to 60%, though inspectors recently discovered that the country had produced uranium particles that were 83.7% pure. That is just a short step from reaching the 90% threshold of weapons-grade uranium.

“As of February, international inspectors estimated that Iran’s stockpile was more than 10 times what it was under the Obama-era deal, with enough enriched uranium to allow Tehran to make ‘several’ nuclear bombs, according to the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency.” Does that push Israel to strike, perhaps with a tactical nuclear weapon? To most of the world, Israel would never mount such an attack without US support, whether such support is given or not. We would be blamed.

Is this a lesson for the United States as to the exceptionally high risk of withdrawing from treaty efforts to contain malign state actors, particularly those nations that have declared the United States as one their greatest enemies? Did we shove Iran into the Russian camp? Do politicians from both sides of the aisle who proselytize pulling the United States out of its leadership position as part of an “America First” policy understand the ideological zeal of angry autocratic nations focused on blunting US power everywhere at all costs? With nuclear weapons?

I’m Peter Dekom, having lived in the Middle East as the stepson of a career US Foreign Service diplomat, and I believe we are begging for enemy attacks that would make the 9/11/01 al Qaeda attacks on NYC and the Pentagon seem minor by comparison.