Some of these gadgets sound like real Buck Rogers stuff.

Eli Lake:

For much of the last decade, as Iran methodically built its nuclear program, Israel has been assembling a multibillion-dollar array of high-tech weapons that would allow it to jam, blind, and deafen Tehran's defenses in the case of a pre-emptive aerial strike.

A U.S. intelligence assessment this summer, described to The Daily Beast by current and former U.S. intelligence officials, concluded that any Israeli attack on hardened nuclear sites in Iran would go far beyond airstrikes from F-15 and F-16 fighter planes and likely include electronic warfare against Iran's electric grid, Internet, cellphone network, and emergency frequencies for firemen and police officers.

For example, Israel has developed a weapon capable of mimicking a maintenance cellphone signal that commands a cell network to "sleep," effectively stopping transmissions, officials confirmed. The Israelis also have jammers capable of creating interference within Iran's emergency frequencies for first responders.

In a 2007 attack on a suspected nuclear site at al-Kibar, the Syrian military got a taste of this warfare when Israeli planes "spoofed" the country's air-defense radars, at first making it appear that no jets were in the sky and then in an instant making the radar believe the sky was filled with hundreds of planes.

Israel also likely would exploit a vulnerability that U.S. officials detected two years ago in Iran's big-city electric grids, which are not "air-gapped"-meaning they are connected to the Internet and therefore vulnerable to a Stuxnet-style cyberattack-officials say.

The gizmos would cause absolute chaos in Iran's air defenses and slow down their response time to a crawl. Israel might be able to spend a lot more time over target which increases the chances of success.

But someone still has to take out those primary air defenses that are supplied with Russian made anti-aircraft missiles that are quite advanced. For that, you might want to call on a friend who has stealth technology and has air bases very close to the Iranian border - say, in Iraq for instance.

But Israel doesn't have a friend like that anymore. Pity.