Michael Burleigh

OPINION

Roshan was not the first and nor will he be the last casualty of a covert war designed either to dissuade Iran from acquiring a bomb, or to prompt retaliatory missteps that will trigger an all-out onslaught by Israel or the US against Iranian nuclear facilities.

A similar logic, of degrading an enemy's scientific and technical capacity, was evident from the assassination campaign which Israel waged against key Hamas and Hezbollah figures. Victims included Hamas' Yehiya ''the Engineer'' Ayyash, whose head was blown off in 1996 by what he thought was his mobile phone, and Hezbollah's Imad Mugniyah, scraped from the street in 2008 after he was killed leaving a party at the Iranian embassy in Damascus. Both men had a lethal expertise which would be difficult to replace.
 

The Israelis believe that anyone who knowingly participates in developing weapons of mass destruction or terrorism should be aware that these are not risk-free activities. Iranian scientists know full well that electronic switches are used in nuclear triggers, and that enriching uranium beyond a certain percentage is not for the production of medical isotopes. And they accept the considerable financial rewards involved. If there are questions about the morality of killing such men, there are questions about the morality of their work in the first place.

Recent history has mixed lessons. In 1943 and 1944 the RAF and USAAF carried out repeat strikes on the German V-2 rocket launch site at Peenemunde, where the hydrogen peroxide fuel was also produced. They were not unduly concerned whether scientists and engineers were killed too, nor foreign slave labourers, provided the V-2s ceased raining down on London.
 

About the same time, Norwegian agents carried out a more morally fastidious operation to disable the Nazi heavy-water plant at Vemork, after the failure of raids and a glider-borne commando operation. Eventually, they not only got inside the plant to destroy its machinery, but sank a ferry containing railway wagonloads of the finished product in a fjord. While doing so, they scrupulously avoided causing any civilian casualties, by for instance attacking on a Sunday morning when children would not be taking the ferry to school.
 

Meanwhile, physicists and engineers are not subject to ethical codes in the way that biologists are with animal or human experimentation. Indeed, scientists routinely claim the quest for knowledge trumps everything, as those who worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos boastfully announced. Robert Oppenheimer said: ''If you are a scientist, you cannot stop such a thing … You believe that it is good to find out how the world works.'' He and his colleagues at least had the excuse that both the science and the weaponised atom bomb were untested, at least against a real city. Of course they could employ the compartmentalisation argument, rather like railway timetablers and dispatchers who sent trains to Auschwitz. What about the engine drivers and signalmen while we are about it? More plausibly, they can point to dual use, like Fritz Haber, who discovered how to synthesise ammonia into explosives, toxic gas and fertiliser that feeds half the world's population. But then firms that sold base chemicals to Saddam Hussein could make that claim too, and the Kurds got no fertilisers, but murderous clouds of gas.
 

Today's Iranian physicists can view a nuclear bomb detonating on the internet, and can read about Hiroshima in any number of books, starting with John Hersey's shocking 1945 account. They work for a regime that has explicitly threatened Israel (and by implication many ambient Palestinians) with such a weapon. I shall not shed any tears whenever one of these scientists encounters the unforgiving men on motorbikes, men who live in the real world rather than a laboratory or philosophy seminar. Except that if Israel ventures down this road, I cannot think of much of an argument to prevent Iran following them, and then anyone else who decides to follow.