Does Israel’s assassination culture actually help fight terrorists and rogue states?
The recent killing of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakrizadeh is the latest in a series attributed to Israel’s intelligence service, the Mossad. However, Israel’s assassination programme could mean the country is more likely to face an existential threat from a nuclear-armed Teheran in coming years, not less.
December 13, 2020 / 06:58 PM IST
Members of Iranian forces carry the coffin of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh during a funeral ceremony in Teheran.
A square box, rods sticking out of it: The crude sketch drawn by the great physicist Werner Heisenberg outlined the device that would allow Nazi Germany to unleash the apocalypse against its enemies. Inside the gilded dinner-room of the Savoy hotel in London one autumn evening in 1943—its elegant windows covered in blackout curtains ever since a bomb blew apart Room 421—the Danish physicist and committed anti-Nazi Neils Bohr, just escaped from Nazi-ruled Europe, explained the sketch Heisenberg had drawn for him two years earlier to an élite group of scientists.