However, a second airstrike conducted by Israel on 7 June 1981, codenamed Operation Opera, completely destroyed the Osirak nuclear reactor in a substantial setback for Iraq.

[4] A decade later, seven months after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Centre was struck by the United States as part of the Gulf War aerial bombardment campaign.

[16] In a 2003 speech, Richard Wilson, a professor of physics at Harvard University who visually inspected the partially damaged reactor in December 1982, said that "to collect enough plutonium [for a nuclear weapon] using Osirak would've taken decades, not years".

"[20] Contrary to Wilson's opinion, the American private intelligence agency Stratfor wrote in 2007 that the uranium-fueled reactor "was believed to be on the verge of producing plutonium for a weapons program".

[5] In October 1981, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published excerpts from the testimony of Roger Richter, a former IAEA inspector who described the weaknesses of the agency's nuclear safeguards to the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

[22] Anthony Fainberg, a physicist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, disputed Richter's claim that a fuel processing program for the manufacturing of nuclear weapons could have been conducted secretly.

[22] Fainberg wrote that there was barely enough fuel on the site to make one bomb, and that the presence of hundreds of foreign technicians would have made it impossible for the Iraqis to take the necessary steps without being discovered.

[23] Iran and Israel, for years prior to the Islamic Revolution, had been monitoring the Osirak nuclear reactor and other potential sites of concern in Iraq.

Despite official hostility between Khomeini and his allies with Israel and anti-Israeli rhetoric, certain elements of the Iranian and Israeli government sometimes continued to help each other clandestinely because they had a common enemy in the Arab countries.

Even as late as 1987, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin stated: "Iran is our best friend and we don't intend to change our position.

However, course of action was met with difficulties in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution, as Iran had lost the United States as a chief ally and therefore could not adequately maintain the world's fifth-largest military that it had at the time.

Furthermore, the Iranians no longer had the benefit of a surprise attack initiative due to the Iraqi invasion of Iran, nor did they have access to American spy satellite footage to assess the facility's layout.

Instead the Iranians had to fly low over the target, and move at high speed and get out quickly; due to this the mission was to be carried out by Iran's most skilled pilots.

[24] The major problem was the lack of intelligence- due to the break-down in relations with the US, the IRIAF had no new satellite photographs of the building site, nor were there any new pictures taken from the ground.

Then, the group parted ways, the leading pair continued in the same direction as before, towards a powerplant just south of Baghdad, while the other two Phantoms diverted for Tuwaitha, further west.

[27] The French intelligence services later on, falsely reported that the September 30 attack on Tuwaitha was carried out by "two unidentified Israeli Phantoms" or aircraft with Iranian markings flown by Israel.