Lessons of the Syrian reactor.

• Author: Riedel, Bruce

The office of the assistant to the president for national-security affairs in the West Wing of the White House is a spacious, well-lit corner room in a building where space is at a premium. It contains not only the national-security adviser's large desk but also a table for lunch discussions and other small meetings as well as a couch and easy chairs for more relaxed discussions. In April 2007, this commodious setting was the scene of a remarkable meeting. Stephen Hadley, the national-security adviser at the time, welcomed Meir Dagan, head of Israel's Mossad intelligence service, who came with a special briefing for his American host. Dagan revealed a secret nuclear reactor in the final stages of construction in the Syrian desert, developed with the help of North Korea. Knowledge of this project constituted a stunning intelligence coup for Israel.

Later that year, on September 6, 2007, the Israeli Air Force destroyed Syria's nuclear facility at Al Kibar along the Euphrates River. The mission emerged from more than two decades of comprehensive intelligence collection and analysis by American and Israeli intelligence services targeting Syria's development of weapons of mass destruction. It was a dramatic demonstration of intelligence success--all the more so given the ongoing civil war that has devastated Syria since 2011. The world does not need to worry about a Syrian nuclear reactor under threat of capture by Islamic radicals. Israel took that concern off the table.

But the incident also demonstrated that once a policy-intelligence feedback loop becomes dysfunctional, as happened to the George W. Bush administration after it exaggerated and distorted intelligence estimates to justify the Iraq War, there are serious policy implications. Israel wanted America to take out the reactor, but Bush was constrained by an intelligence community unwilling to cooperate with another major military operation based primarily on intelligence data.

The story begins in the early 1980s, when the Syrian government began developing weapons of mass destruction. Despite achieving strategic surprise in the Yom Kippur War and foiling Israel's ambitions to remake Lebanon into an ally in the 1982 Lebanon war, Damascus recognized that it was no match for Israel in a conventional war. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) marched to the outskirts of Damascus in 1973 and nine years later evicted the Syrians from Beirut and southern Lebanon. Thus, President Hafez al-Assad sought to develop chemical weapons to create a balance of terror between Israel and Syria that would deter Israel from threatening Damascus or trying to oust his regime in any future conflict.

Assad turned to Syria's preeminent scientific-research establishment to begin developing weapons of mass destruction to threaten Israel's cities. By the mid-1980s the Centre d'Etude et de Recherche Scientifique (CERS) in Damascus was able to develop a reliable chemical weapon using the nerve agent sarin. Sarin, discovered by four German scientists just before World War II and named as an acronym of their last names, is estimated to be more than five hundred times as toxic as cyanide. CERS scientists were able to produce the nerve agent in significant quantities and achieve a high level of purity to make it lethal.

The Syrians then mated the chemical weapon with a reliable delivery system, the Soviet-built Scud missile, also a weapon of German design. The Russians essentially copied the German v-2 missile after the Second World War and in the 1970s began exporting the system to their Arab allies. Mating a chemical warhead to a missile is not a simple technical challenge, but the Syrians succeeded in doing so in the mid-1980s and successfully carried out tests with the system. Syria also developed chemical bombs that could be dropped by aircraft. Syria was not alone in developing sarin weapons; Iraq did so as well and actually used them extensively, along with other chemicals, on the battlefields of the Irano Iraq war.

In January 1988, the Sunday Times of London reported on its front page that Israeli officials had informed the paper that Syria had successfully developed the chemical warheads for its Scud missiles and that Israel was considering a preemptive attack to destroy the manufacturing plants. Syria denied that it was making chemical weapons. In the end, Israel chose not to initiate a preemptive strike, probably because the Syrians had developed a sufficient number of manufacturing plants, finished warheads and missiles that an attack likely would fail to eliminate the danger and might provoke a Syrian strike on Tel Aviv.

Syria continued to refine its chemical weapons during the 1990s even as it pursued peace negotiations with the Israelis. In addition to sarin warheads, it also developed the even more toxic nerve agent vx and...