To read more, view or download the chapter THE MILITARY OPTION

• Our study has examined various military options and tactics, there is NO viable military option for dealing with Iran’s nuclear challenge. Iran has built its nuclear facilities in major urban centers making it impossible to carry out surgical strikes without killing large number of civilians.
• Our assessment of proposed military options lead to the conclusion that between 3,500 and 5,500 people at Iran’s four nuclear sites would be killed or injured as a result of the physical and thermal impact of the blasts. If one were to include and extrapolate casualties at other targets, the total number of people killed and injured could easily exceed 10,000.
• Our findings also make it clear that the economic costs of strikes on the facilities would be in the tens of billions of dollars, and that is assuming that there will be no war.
• It is a mistake to assume that the failure of diplomacy makes the military option the only real, effective or reliable default option. The military option, should be judged on its own merits, and virtually no one has explained how the humanitarian fiasco—the death of thousands of Iranian civilians from military strikes—will do anything other than unleash a war that will strengthen the Ayatollah and his allies at the expense of the United States, Israel and the Iranian people.
• According to several sources in the New York Times and the New Yorker, military planners have considered the use of tactical nuclear weapons against Iran’s nuclear facilities in Natanz. We have not evaluated this option as most experts consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons as highly unlikely.