Overview
Sanctions. Cyberattacks. Airstrikes on critical infrastructure. Such international interventions to disrupt Iran’s nuclear ambitions have increased over the past two decades, and Iran’s dedication to pursuing a nuclear weapon remains a serious concern. One of the more hotly debated tactics to cripple Iran’s nuclear ambitions is the assassination of academic nuclear physicists. In the summer of 2025, Israel launched targeted airstrikes that killed 14 Iranian scientists and set off the Twelve-Day War. Afterward, Israel’s ambassador to France asserted these assassinations would set Iran’s nuclear program back “by quite a number of years.”
But how effective were these targeted assassinations in disrupting Iranian nuclear ambitions? Why might these decapitation strikes of academic professionals have different effects than with terrorists and other illicit actors? What strategic insights can we learn from analyzing the public research output from Iranian universities affected by these strikes?
NSDPI researchers explore these questions in this paper, which offers a novel approach to evaluating the effectiveness of scientist assassinations using open-source bibliographic data. Analyzing trends in Iranian physics publications directly associated with four assassinated scientists, our researchers use difference-in-differences modeling and meta-analytic techniques to estimate changes in scientific productivity following these assassinations.
As analysts and policymakers look for ways to supplement their intelligence assessments of strategic interventions, this new bibliometric approach offers a scalable, accessible, and low-risk resource for open-source intelligence (OSINT).
Key takeaways
- This method of bibliographic analysis has two key strengths: First, it evaluates academic activity, which is the domain most likely to be disrupted from the sudden death of scientists. Second, massive bibliometric datasets are openly available, unclassified, and easy to leverage with low risk.
- Using four case studies and a meta-analysis, this study found assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists only minimally disrupted scientific progress related to nuclear physics.
- This bibliometric analysis has broad applications to complement evaluations of sanctions, covert operations, and other strategic interventions on adversaries’ research ecosystems.