Although the "pressure is rising" domestically toward undertaking a unilateral attack, public sentiment is still in flux, Landau said. It could "move in the direction of more and more people in Israel concluding that a nuclear Iran is not something we can stop."
Tehran has consistently said that its nuclear program is for peaceful power generation. And former U.S. and U.N. weapons inspector David Kay recently said in a speech that he thought it would be two to five years before Iran could produce enough fissile material for a bomb. A U.S. National Intelligence Estimate last year said it would be possible but "highly unlikely" for Tehran to reach that goal by the end of 2009.
But some in Israel see a narrow window in which to act.
"Time is running very, very short right now," said Ephraim Asculai, a former top official at the Israel Atomic Energy Commission who is now a senior research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies.
U.S. officials fear that an attack would trigger violent repercussions, most notably a wider regional conflict that would inevitably force the entry of American troops. Navy Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said he does not intend to get involved in another war when he has his hands full with Iraq and Afghanistan.
The global economic crisis only strengthens opposition. The ambassador of one Arab country predicted this week that the major powers would be unwilling to take any step that might drive the price of Iranian oil back up again.
An August report by the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington think tank that studies nuclear proliferation, said the dispersed nature of Iran's nuclear facilities and the still-sketchy Western intelligence made it impossible for a single airstrike to succeed. "It would need multiple strikes against many sites," the report concluded. "After such strikes, the attacker might still have little confidence that it had denied Iran the ability to produce weapon-grade uranium."
Within Israel, there are rising voices against a unilateral attack.
"We can't afford to lose wars here," said Meir Javedanfar, an Iranian-born Israeli analyst and director of Middle East Economic and Political Analysis Co.
Israel's military establishment knows that an effective strike would be difficult, Javedanfar said, and could prompt a large and multi-pronged Iranian retaliation against Israel and against U.S. troops in Iraq.
