While this is not the public position of the Israeli government, an Israeli source says, it is on the other hand the growing thinking in Tel Aviv.

The Israeli Ministry of Defense, and the headquarters of the Mossad, Israel's CIA, both are located in the country's largest city.

Though the European Union and the International Atomic Energy Agency appeared this week to have extracted a commitment from Tehran to halt its nuclear program, a Western diplomat in Tel Aviv said Israeli defense and intelligence officials believed that the Iranians, who were less than two years away from reaching their goal, would eventually resume their efforts.

Any deal with Brussels and the IAEA simply postpones the inevitable because the process was irreversible.

The Israeli source said military strategists argue that a repetition of the 1981 air raid that destroyed the Iraqi nuclear reactor in Osirak, near Baghdad, would be impossible in Iran.

For one thing, Iran has as many as three separate facilities, each working on a different approach to developing nuclear programs. Furthermore, the Iranians have buried their nuclear plants deep underground - and positioned them beneath urban areas with civilian populations.

Another reason why the Tehran ayatollahs are set to get their weapons, Israelis believe, is that the Bush administration (together with its British allies) appears to have no clear concept how to deal with the situation.

U.S. officials have hinted darkly that Washington would not tolerate the Islamic fundamentalist regime as a nuclear power, but at the same time the United States seems to have no clear strategy for preventing it.

Commentators have raised the possibility of U.S. military action against Iran, but other experts in Washington point out that (a) the military resources of men and equipment are just not there for the Americans to open a second front, in the Middle East, and (b) the overall U.S. performance to date on the first front - that is, in Iraq - has not been exactly conducive to repeating it elsewhere in the region.

The coalition has managed turn initial success into a debacle, and the obstacles would be bigger in Iran, observed the Western diplomat in Tel Aviv.

Iran's emergence as a regional nuclear power along with Israel, India and Pakistan will have implications for the Israelis' own nuclear policy.

Until about five years ago, Israel's nuclear capability was an open secret. Earlier this year, Mordecai Vanunu, a former nuclear technician from the nuclear plant in the Negev Desert, was released from prison after serving 18 years for revealing details of Israel's nuclear program to The Sunday Times of London in 1986.

Increasingly, however, Vanunu appears to have been ahead of his time. In 2000, Israel's long-standing posture of nuclear ambiguity changed significantly when its nuclear policy was debated for the first time in the Knesset. But the issue was discussed in general terms, and there has still been no official admission that Israel possesses nuclear weapons.

In part, the secrecy was the result of a 1969 Israeli-U.S. understanding ostensibly aimed at making it possible for Washington to press China and Pakistan not to help Iran and Iraq to fulfill their respective nuclear ambitions without being accused of an American double standard. With Iran on the verge of joining the nuclear club, the understanding has become moot.

For the Israelis, deterrence is now likely to become a larger priority than secrecy. Observers expect the doctrine of mutual assured destruction that served the West in good stead in the Cold War era will be a model for Israeli policy.

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