Israel must not forget the price of nuclear war

[bemildred]

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The indispensability of Dimona for Israel's security. In the accepted narrative, Israel's nuclear image has convinced the Arab states not to pose existential threats. But from what is known of the Arabs' concepts about Israel's strength, it turns out that this image has played a marginal role, if any, in shaping their hesitation to threaten Israel's existence. What deterred them, including during the Yom Kippur War, was Israel's conventional military superiority and its strategic alliance with the United States.

On that basis, one can ask a basic but skeptical question: Did Israel even need the bomb that foreign reports attribute to it? Because Israel's image as having nuclear weapons makes it easier for countries like Iran (and Iraq in the past) to make progress in that respect - with the excuse that if Israel is allowed, why aren't they? - one can also ask whether the means designed to prevent an existential threat against Israel (as foreign reports say) makes it possible to create such a threat. Under these circumstances, the theoretical question arises - what is preferable, a regional balance of fear, or removing the nonconventional capability of all countries in the region (including Israel)?

The bombing of the Iraqi nuclear facility was a story of success and salvation. This statement is based on the assumption that the bombing in 1981 did indeed destroy the Iraqi nuclear project. But today, from the testimony of the Iraqi scientists who conducted the project, we know that the opposite was true. The bombing blocked the cautious and slow processing of plutonium, which may or may not have led Iraq to a bomb, and rerouted it to the faster track of enrichment, which was less public but more efficient. It was only Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent war that quelled the effort that could have turned Iraq into a nuclear state within a year or a little more.

It is worth asking what one can learn from this. Did the Begin Doctrine prove itself? Is the best way to deal with the Iranian initiative something similar to that doctrine? What might be the ramifications of an Israeli attempt to destroy the Iranian project with regard to Iran's ability to achieve nuclear weapons and its readiness to use them when it gets them?

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1135976.html

[theoldman]

1. If Israel did not claim to have nuclear weapons there would be no

need for their neighbors to have nuclear weapons. It's called a balance of power.

[RaleighNCDUer]

2. It is also noteable that recent Israeli military disasters - the invasion/

occupation of Lebanon, the more recent Lebanon war, the Gaza war, showed Israel to have degenerated to a second-rate military power. What Israel's neighbors feared and respected was their conventional military which, while a fraction of the size of the neighbors' militaries, consistently kicked their asses. But a strong, well-trained, disciplined military is expensive in both cost and manpower, and needs constant oversight to maintain. Having nukes to deter the threat of mass attacks from their neighbors has allowed Israel to lose focus, relax its training and standards, to the result that they can't even carry out operations like Gaza without resorting to outrageous brutality and STILL not accomplishing their goal.