Nuclear War or Nuclear Peace? Israel’s Post-Iran Pact Options

by Louis René Beres (March 2016)

For by wise counsel thou shalt make thy war.  (Proverbs 24:6 )

In forging adequate doctrine, special challenges of strategic prediction must be met by Israel. Looking at the current area situation systematically, including the formidable rise of ISIS, and at the corollary collapse of order in Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and elsewhere, a truly basic question must be raised: What should Jerusalem now expect to happen, here, in this increasingly chaotic region?

Significantly, such necessary queries, though critically important, are still encountered only rarely in the (unclassified) strategic literature.

Why? This is hardly a minor matter.

Going forward with its nuclear doctrine, therefore, Israeli planners will need to include closer considerations of the promise of power over death.

Israeli nuclear and non-nuclear preemptions of enemy unconventional aggressions could both lead to nuclear exchanges. This would depend, in part, upon the effectiveness and breadth of Israeli targeting, the surviving number of enemy nuclear weapons, and on the willingness of controlling enemy leaders to risk Israeli nuclear counter-retaliations. In any event, the likelihood of nuclear exchanges would be greatest where potential Arab and/or Iranian aggressors had been allowed to deploy ever-larger numbers of unconventional weapons without eliciting any appropriate Israeli and/or American preemptions. For the moment, following the July 2015 Vienna Pact, it would appear that such an allowance has already been made, at least in particular reference to Iran.

Should enemy nuclear deployments be allowed to take place, Israel could effectively forfeit the non-nuclear preemption option. Here, its only alternatives to a nuclear preemption could then be a no-longer viable conventional preemption, or, instead, to wait quietly to be attacked itself. It follows that the risks of an Israeli nuclear preemption, of nuclear exchanges with an enemy state, and of enemy nuclear first-strikes could all conceivably be reduced by still-timely Israeli and/or American non-nuclear preemptions. More than likely, these preemptions would be directed at presumptively critical military-industrial targets, and/or at hostile regimes. The latter very problematic option could include dedicated elimination of enemy leadership elites, and/or of certain enemy scientists.

Always, the objective of Israel’s nuclear forces and doctrine must be deterrence ex ante, not revenge ex post. In the final analysis, as everyone should finally understand, nuclear war resembles any other incurable disease. The only true remedies must lie in prevention.

[2] See Summary of the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons, Advisory Opinion, 1996, International Court of Justice (8 July 1996).

[3] For Israel, most likely using German-supplied Dolphin-class diesel boats, the optimal path to survivable nuclear retaliatory forces at sea will likely involve nuclear cruise missiles deployed on board SSGs. The core issue for nuclear weapons survivability at sea relates to the stealth of the platform, and also the resilience of the national command authority that must ultimately control its pertinent decisions. In principle, at least, Israeli nuclear cruise missiles could achieve levels of penetration reliability very similar to U.S.-deployed nuclear ballistic missiles. Of course, because precise future developments in anti-submarine warfare (ASW) are problematic to predict, enemy missile defenses, going forward, could sometime prove less effective against one particular form of retaliatory missile, than another. Any such development would depend, inter alia, upon the specific capabilities each relevant form would possess, concerning primarily stealth, speed, decoys, and maneuverability.

First published in INN.

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