Source: INSS Strategic Assessment, Israel: Vol. 17, No. 3.
Abstract: This important paper by Professor Beres closely examines Israel's evolving nuclear strategy, with particular reference to origins, core assumptions (still mostly implicit), and probable outcomes. Key questions considered are the longer-term risks of continued nuclear ambiguity, prospects for further regional nuclear proliferation, expectations for rational and irrational behavior among pertinent regional decision-makers, and the effects of a new “Cold War” between Russia and the United States. Taken together, these questions point to the overarching complexity of strategic interactions in the Middle East, and, as corollary, to plausible synergies between Israel's strategic policies, and anticipated enemy reactions. Concluding with informed emphases on getting suitably beyond deliberate nuclear ambiguity, the argument coalesces with a plea for more broadly coherent and codified national strategic doctrine, a comprehensive “master plan” guided by analytic, rather than political, standards of judgment.
Regional Balance and “Deliberate Ambiguity”
In the midst of Operation Protective Edge, it would appear, yet again. that Israel's chief security issues have to do with controlling Palestinian terrorism. Although such a view is not necessarily shortsighted or mistaken, the genuinely existential issues of nuclear strategy and nuclear war must still be kept at the very forefront of IDF planning attention. To accomplish this objective, we will need to begin with some pertinent history.
From the beginning, Israel's leaders have understood the need for a recognizable “security equalizer.” Already, back in the late 1950s, then Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion had fixed his national survival and self-defense hopes on some apt form of Israeli nuclear weapons capability. More specifically, Ben-Gurion had calculated, just having “the bomb” would adequately assure the Jewish State's strategic deterrent, at least with regard to those considered enemy attacks employing weapons of mass destruction, and/or large-scale conventional arms.
Plainly, all of Ben-Gurion's successors have adhered, more-or-less openly, to this same line of strategic reasoning.
And why not? From the start, the Israeli policy of a “bomb in the basement” seemed to make eminently good sense. Everyone pretty well knew that Israel held nuclear weapons. Why, then, should Jerusalem be gratuitously more precise? Why, too, should an evidently fragile Israel reveal more, and needlessly alienate “the Americans?”
There is a meaningful and convincing answer here, one rooted in genuine conceptual understanding, and one that should be properly aired. It is that no automatic correlation can ever be correctly alleged between general enemy perceptions of Israel’s nuclear capacity, and credible Israeli nuclear deterrence. In certain circumstances, moreover, any such adversarial perceptions could undermine Israeli nuclear deterrence.
A pertinent case in point would concern those conditions in which Israel were believed to hold exclusively high-yield/strategic nuclear forces. This plausible belief could elicit reasonable doubts about any still undeclared Israeli willingness to activate such nuclear forces in retaliation for any enemy first-strike attack.
Nonetheless, “deliberate ambiguity” has managed to endure as the invariable and inviolable core of Israel’s nuclear doctrine. Somehow, ignoring the potentially-lethal deterrence shortcomings of “opacity,” Jerusalem seemingly remains convinced that removing the bomb from Israel's “basement” could prompt widespread and possibly insufferably corrosive global condemnation. Such Israeli political and public relations concerns are understandable. Still, they pale in existential significance beside the probable costs of any consequent security failure of the country's nuclear deterrent.
Rationale for New Policy Limitations on “Deliberate Ambiguity”
In the densely-arcane world of Israeli nuclear strategy, it can never be sufficient that enemy states merely acknowledge the Jewish State's nuclear status. To protect Israel, it is not enough that these states merely believe that Israel has nuclear weapons. They must also be prepared to believe that Israel has conspicuously usable nuclear weapons, and that Israel would be willing to employ these presumptively usable weapons in very specific and readily identifiable threat situations.
Israel needs its nuclear weapons. This bold statement is incontestable. It is not even remotely controversial.
U.S. President Barack Obama seeks a “world free of nuclear weapons.” Still, without these weapons, Israel could not survive. Understood also in terms of Carl von Clausewitz's famous adage in On War (1832), there can come a military tipping point when “mass counts.” For Israel, which is half the size of America's Lake Michigan, this tipping point is always nearby. For Israel, there is simply no formidable “mass.”
For Israel, the security risks of any sort of denuclearization or “nuclear weapons free-zone” are both specific and tangible. They are not merely general, or simply generic. In part, this is because the country's extant regional adversaries will sometime be joined by: (1) a new enemy Arab state of “Palestine;” and/or (2) a newly-nuclear enemy Iran. If this “joining” were to include both possibilities, there would then result an even more challenging outcome. Synergistically, this profoundly interactive development could then devolve into conditions considerably more harmful to Israel, than the simple sum of its two separate parts.
If deprived of its nuclear weapons, whether still-ambiguous or newly-disclosed, Israel would irremediably lose its residual capacity to deter major enemy aggressions. More exactly, without these weapons, Israel could no longer respond convincingly to existential hazards with any plausible threats of retaliation, and/or with any persuasive threats of counter-retaliation.
Just possessing nuclear weapons, even when they are unhesitatingly acknowledged by enemy states, can never ensure successful Israeli deterrence. An appropriately selective and nuanced end to deliberate ambiguity, however, could reliably improve and sustain Israel’s otherwise-imperiled nuclear deterrent. In this connection, the probability of assorted enemy attacks in the future could likely be reduced by making available certain additional and limited information concerning Israel’s nuclear weapons, and its associated strategic postures.
To achieve Israel’s relevant deterrent objectives, this crucial information would necessarily center upon decidedly major and intersecting issues of (1) nuclear capability, and (2) decisional willingness.
To at least some extent, skeptics will disagree. Thus far, they will argue, Israel’s nuclear ambiguity has succeeded in keeping the country’s enemies from mounting any sort of authentically existential aggressions. So, then, why rock the boat?
170,000 Rockets Pointed at Israel
Even if Israel's enemies were all to remain non-nuclear, they could, at least in principle, still carry out potentially lethal assaults against the Jewish State. If these entirely conventional enemies were ever able to fashion a determined collaboration, they could, perhaps in concert with certain insurgent proxies, inflict especially grievous harms. That such a prospect is altogether real was expressed by Major General Aviv Kochavi, Head of IDF Intelligence (Aman). Speaking in late January, 2014, MG Kochavi indicated that 170,000 rockets were already “pointing at Israel.”
These were sobering numbers. Israel's state and sub-state enemies, especially in any collaborative military undertakings, would have substantial and advantageous mass. In order to counter even certain non-nuclear threats, Israel could ultimately need to exploit the compensatory deterrence advantages of its indispensable nuclear forces.
Israel protects itself not only by implicit and explicit threats of reprisal, but also via critical and inter-penetrating elements of national defense. More precisely, as is obvious following Operation Protective Edge, an integral part of Israel's multi-layered security system lies in “active” or defenses – mainly, Iron Dome against shorter-range terror-rockets, and (for the future) the Arrow or “Hetz” against Iranian weapons. Yet, even the already well-regarded and successfully-tested Arrow could never achieve a sufficiently high probability of intercept to adequately protect “soft-targets;” that is, Israeli civilians.
No system of ballistic missile defense can ever be “leak proof,” and even a single incoming nuclear missile that had somehow managed to penetrate Arrow defenses could kill tens or hundreds of thousands of Israelis. Significantly, these inherent “leakage” limitations of Arrow would likely be less consequential if Israel's traditional reliance on deliberate ambiguity were suitably and subtly diminished.
The historic Israeli policy of depending upon an undeclared nuclear capacity will not work indefinitely. Left unrevised, this policy will sometime fail. The most probable and fatal locus of such failure could be Iran.
In the next several years, Iran will almost certainly become a full member of the nuclear weapons “club.” To be deterred, such a newly-nuclear Iran would need convincing assurance that Israel’s own nuclear weapons were invulnerable and penetration-capable. Any Iranian judgments about Israel’s capability and willingness to retaliate with nuclear weapons would depend largely upon some prior Iranian knowledge of these weapons, including their presumed degree of protection from Iranian surprise attack, and their presumed capacity to adequately “punch-through” any Iranian active and passive defenses.
Oddly, the uniform appearance of Israeli nuclear weapons as being “too large” and “too powerful” could weaken Israel’s nuclear posture. For example, Iranian perceptions of exclusively mega-destructive Israeli nuclear weapons could effectively undermine the credibility of Israel’s core nuclear deterrent. Here, Israel’s deterrent credibility could actually vary inversely with the perceived destructiveness of its nuclear arms.
Israel may learn, here, from another prominent adversarial dyad, this one in southwest Asia. It involves an already-nuclear India, and an already-nuclear Pakistan. Increasingly, in this ongoing and still-bitter polarity of conflict (three open wars since independence in 1947) Pakistan is now tilting toward smaller, or tactical, nuclear weapons in its arsenals. Moreover, since Pakistan first announced its test of the 60-kilometer Nasr ballistic missile back in 2011, that Islamic country's emphasis upon smaller nuclear weapons has been most conspicuously oriented toward the deterrence of a conventional war.
In this connection, by threatening to use relatively low-yield “battlefield” nuclear weapons in retaliation for an Indian aggression, Islamabad seeks to appear less provocative to Delhi, and therefore less apt to elicit any Indian nuclear reprisals. To be sure, the IDF has already rejected any policy of expanded reliance on tactical nuclear forces, but the underlying concept of nuclear deterrence based upon less than altogether “massive retaliation” would still be worth pursuing.
Conceptualizing an Incremental end to “Deliberate Ambiguity”
Once coexisting with an already-nuclear Iran, Israel would not benefit from any increase in nuclear secrecy, but rather from certain limited and residual forms of expanded nuclear disclosure. This would mean an intentionally incremental end to Israel’s bomb in the basement.
At some point, a newly-nuclear Iran might decide to share some of its nuclear components and materials with Hezbollah, or perhaps with another kindred terrorist group. To prevent this, Jerusalem would need to convince Iran, inter alia, that Israel possesses a viable range of distinctly usable nuclear options. Israeli nuclear ambiguity could be loosened by releasing certain general information regarding the availability of appropriately lower-yield weapons.
In Jerusalem (Prime Minister) and Tel-Aviv (Ministry of Defense), the following will need to be calculated vis-à-vis a soon-to-be nuclear Iran: The exact extent to which Israel should communicate key aspects and portions of its nuclear positions, intentions, and capabilities. To ensure that its nuclear forces appear sufficiently usable, invulnerable, and penetration-capable to all prospective attackers, and not just to Iran, Israel will benefit from selectively releasing certain broad outlines of strategic information. This disclosed information – released solely to enhance Israeli nuclear deterrence – would concern, among other things, the hardening, dispersion, multiplication, basing, and yields of selected Israeli nuclear forces.
Enemy Rationality or Irrationality?
Once it is faced with a recognizable nuclear adversary in Tehran, Israel will need to convince its recalcitrant Iranian enemy that it possesses both the will and the capacity to make any intended Iranian nuclear aggression more costly than gainful. No Israeli move from ambiguity to disclosure, however, would help in the case of an irrational nuclear enemy. For dealing with irrational enemies, those particular adversaries who would not value their own continued national survival more highly than any other preference, or combination of preferences, even preemption could be too late.
To the extent that an Iranian leadership might subscribe to certain end-times visions of a Shiite apocalypse, Iran could cast aside all rational behavior. Were this to happen, Iran could effectively become a nuclear suicide-bomber in macrocosm. Such a destabilizing prospect is highly improbable, but it is not inconceivable. Although rarely discussed, a similarly serious prospect may exist in already-nuclear and substantially coup-vulnerable, Pakistan.
Certain of Israel's enemies might be irrational in the technical sense, but not at all “crazy' or “mad.” For example, Iranian decision-makers could act in conformance with a preference ordering that values the destruction of the Jewish State more highly than any other preference, or combination of preferences. In such improbable but still-possible circumstances, Iran would be irrational, yet remain subject to alternate Israeli threats of deterrence.
To protect itself against military strikes from rational enemies, particularly those attacks that could eventually carry existential costs, Israel will need to better exploit every aspect and function of its nuclear arsenal and doctrine. The success of Israel's efforts here would depend not only upon its selected targeting doctrine (enemy cities, and/or military forces), but also upon the extent to which this choice were made known in advance. Before any rational enemies could be deterred from launching first strikes against Israel, and before they could be deterred from launching retaliatory attacks following any Israeli non-nuclear preemptions, it will not be enough for them merely to know that Israel has The Bomb.
These enemies would also need to detect that usable Israeli nuclear weapons were sufficiently invulnerable to first-strike attacks, and that at least a determinable number were fully capable of penetrating high-value population targets.
More than likely, Israel has adopted a counter-city or “counter-value” nuclear targeting policy. That policy, in some controlled measure, replicating US targeting doctrine during the Cold War, must soon be made known in advance to all of Israel's identifiable enemies. Without such deliberate advance disclosures, the Israeli nuclear deterrent policy could eventually fail.
Removing the bomb from Israel's basement could enhance Israel's strategic deterrence to the extent that it would heighten rational enemy perceptions of both secure and capable Israeli nuclear forces. Such a calculated end to deliberate ambiguity could also underscore Israel’s willingness to use these nuclear forces in reprisal for certain enemy first-strike and retaliatory attacks. This brings to mind the so-called Samson Option, which could allow various enemy decision-makers to note and underscore that Israel is prepared to do whatever is needed to survive.
The Samson Option
Only a selective end to its nuclear ambiguity could allow Israel to exploit the potentially considerable benefits of a Samson Option. Should Israel choose to keep its Bomb in the “basement,” therefore, it could never make any use of the residual Samson Option.
Irrespective of its preferred level of ambiguity, Israel’s nuclear strategy will remain oriented toward deterrence, not to war-fighting. The Samson Option refers to a policy that would be based in part upon a more-or-less implicit threat of massive nuclear retaliation for certain specific enemy aggressions. Such a policy could be invoked credibly only in cases where such aggressions would threaten Israel’s very existence, and could involve more destructive and high-yield nuclear weapons than would otherwise be thought “usable.”
A Samson Option could make strategic sense for Israel, but only in presumably “last-resort,” or “near last-resort,” circumstances.
Where Samson is involved, an end to deliberate ambiguity could help Israel by emphasizing that particular portion of its nuclear arsenal that is less usable. This is not a contradiction of our prior argument that Israel will need to take The Bomb out of the “basement” in order to enhance its deterrent credibility. Rather, it stipulates that the cumulative persuasiveness of Israel's nuclear deterrent will require prospective enemy perceptions of retaliatory destructiveness at both the low and high ends of the nuclear yield spectrum.
Ending nuclear ambiguity at the proper time would best permit Israel to foster such perceptions.
The main objective of any Samson Option would not be to communicate the availability of any graduated Israeli nuclear deterrent. Instead, it would intend to signal the more-or-less unstated promise of a counter-city reprisal. Made plausible by an end to absolute nuclear ambiguity, the Samson Option would be unlikely to deter any enemy aggressions short of “high end” nuclear and/or biological first strikes upon the Jewish State.
Samson would “say” the following to all potential nuclear attackers: “We (Israel) may have to “die,” but (this time) we won’t die alone.” The Samson Option, made possible only after a calculated end to Israeli nuclear ambiguity, could serve Israel as an adjunct to deterrence, and to certain preemption options, but not as a core national nuclear strategy.
The Samson Option should never be confused with Israel’s absolutely overriding security objective: that is, to seek stable nuclear deterrence at the lowest conceivable levels of possible military conflict.
In broad outline, “Samson” could support Israel’s nuclear deterrent by best demonstrating an Israeli willingness to take strategic risks, including even existential risks. Earlier, Moshe Dayan had understood and embraced this particular and potentially counterintuitive logic: “Israel must be like a mad dog,” asserted Dayan, “too dangerous to bother.”
The Rationality of Pretended Irrationality, and a New Cold War
In pertinent strategic calculations, it can be rational to pretend irrationality. Always, the nuclear deterrence benefits of pretended irrationality must depend, at least in part, upon an enemy state’s awareness of Israel’s disclosed counter-value targeting posture. There are specific and valuable security benefits that would likely accrue to Israel as the result of any intentionally selective and incremental end to deliberate nuclear ambiguity.
The time to begin such an “end” has not yet arrived. But, at the precisely verifiable moment that Iran crosses the nuclear threshold, Israel should remove The Bomb from its “basement.” By the time this urgent moment arrives, Israel should already have configured (1) its planned reallocation of nuclear weapons assets; and (2) the measurable extent to which this configuration should now be disclosed.
This form of advance planning could enhance the all-important credibility of its nuclear deterrence posture.
One last point warrants special mention. Israel, in the fashion of every other state in world politics, operates within a “system.” Today, there is increasing evidence that this system is rapidly “falling back” into an earlier era of bipolarity, and that this regression may even begin to evolve into a new U.S.-Russia “Cold War.” Should this evolution, in fact, come to pass, much of Israel's still-emergent nuclear forces and corollary nuclear doctrine would necessarily be affected.
Any forthcoming decision-making in Jerusalem concerning nuclear ambiguity vs. nuclear disclosure, therefore, should take careful account of newly-shifting “superpower” commitments and alignments. In the end, an anticipated era of hardening bipolarity could render the international system effectively less anarchic, but also more narrowly adversarial. It follows that Jerusalem and Washington may soon need to recalculate their overlapping nuclear options with a more intentionally conscious awareness of certain policy transformations already underway in Moscow.
In the final analysis, Israel's enemies should be made to understand that there are circumstances in which Israel could rationally decide to use its nuclear weapons. These circumstances would involve the prospect of suffering a total defeat, or, in more traditional Jewish-historical terms, a destruction of the “Third Temple Commonwealth.” To be sure, Israel's leaders would always do whatever is needed to survive as a state, including, if need be, nuclear preemption; nuclear retaliation; nuclear counter-retaliation; or nuclear war-fighting.
Although it is difficult to imagine any circumstances wherein Israel could ever decide to launch a preemptive nuclear strike, there are conditions in which such an option could still be entirely rational, to wit: (1) Israel's enemy had verifiably acquired nuclear, and/or other unconventional weapons authoritatively deemed capable of destroying the Jewish State; (2) Israel's enemy had already made explicit and clear that its destructive intentions fully paralleled its capabilities; (3) Israel's enemy was believed ready to begin an irremediable “countdown-to-launch,” and (4) Israel's leadership believed that non-nuclear preemptions were no longer able to achieve absolutely minimal levels of damage-limitation, that is, levels consistent with Israel's national survival.
Plainly, Israel's overriding obligation must be to never allow any such end-of-the-line circumstances to arise. In the best of all possible worlds, this existential obligation could be met through the “good offices” of imaginative diplomacy, and possibly even through more centralized world-authority processes. But this is not yet the best of all possible worlds, and Israel will quickly need to determine how best to coexist with one or more threatening “scorpions in a bottle,” the grotesque but effective metaphor originated by physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, back in the early days of the (first) Cold War. In Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv, this daunting obligation can be met only by fashioning and re-fashioning Israel's strategic doctrine in accordance with the highest standards of intellectual power.
Israeli Nuclear Strategy as an Intellectual Imperative
Israel can prevail only if it conceptualizes the struggle for national survival as a relentless battle of mind over mind, a fundamentally cerebral conflict, that takes measured account of growing world system anarchy, re-emergent superpower bipolarity, and the always-shifting correlation of regional military forces. Always, Israeli military planners must understand that their country should not attempt to face its perils as a set of wholly separate threats. Instead, they should begin to acknowledge a more general “threat environment” within which all of these discrete components have a precise and determinable “fit.”
Even today, when the specific synergistic hazards created by impending Palestinian statehood and Iranian nuclearization are overriding and even palpable, the core task for Israeli strategists must be to identify a broadly coherent and comprehensive framework, one which could accommodate the optimal understanding of all possible enemy threats. This means, inter alia, an obligation to fashion, in thoughtful increments, a strategic “master plan,” a body of generalized and interrelated propositions from which assorted and specific policy options could be suitably and reliably derived.
Israel's needed strategic master plan can never be constructed ex nihilo. Rather, it must become the determined outcome of an explicitly dialectical method of thinking. Plato, in the middle dialogues, describes the dialectician as the one who knows best how to ask, and then to answer, his own questions. This ancient method of seeking truth by correct reasoning remains best suited for the current and indispensable enhancement of Israeli strategic studies.
When Pericles delivered his Funeral Oration, it was to express confidence in ultimate victory for Athens. At the same time, as recalled by Thucydides, the authoritative Greek historian of the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE), Pericles had also expressed deep fears about self-imposed setbacks along the way. “What I fear more than the strategies of our enemies,” lamented Pericles, “is our own mistakes.”
There is an urgently important lesson here for Israel. In observing diverse enemy preparations for war and terror, do not forget that the efficacy of these preparations will always depend upon Israel's calculated responses.
Long after Pericles, Yehoshafat Harkabi, a former Chief of Israel's Military Intelligence section (Aman), drew this operational guidance from the Bar Kokhba Rebellion, a well-planned insurrection in ancient Judea (132 CE), which had pushed the Jewish people to the outer margins of history: “In choosing a style of fighting, be wary of warfare in which the reaction required of the enemy, from the enemy's point of view, may lead to an action detrimental for you….This is an important lesson in nuclear circumstances; refrain from a provocation for which the adversary may have only one response, nuclear war.”
Applying Harkabi's historically-informed insights to needed revisions in Israel's current strategic doctrine, two possible “lessons” present themselves: (1) do whatever is needed to prevent front-line enemies from becoming nuclear in the first-place; or (2) accept the inevitability of adversarial nuclear proliferation, together with its corollary limitations on preemption, and thereby focus instead on effectively ongoing mechanisms of national self-protection. Ideally, of course, Harkabi's wisdom would be better served by option 1, but by now the chances for operational success of any defensive first-strike are apt to be intolerably low.
So long as a fully nuclear Islamic Republic of Iran is not regarded in Jerusalem as being absolutely incapable of coexistence with a Jewish State, Israel's optimal doctrinal emphases should immediately be placed on implementing more suitable configurations of diplomacy, nuclear deterrence, and ballistic-missile defense. In this connection, it will be especially important to reevaluate the longstanding Israeli policy of deliberate nuclear ambiguity, or the “bomb in the basement.”
Louis René Beres (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) was Chair of Project Daniel (Israel, 2003). Professor of Political Science and International Law at Purdue, he is the author of many major books and articles on nuclear strategy and nuclear war. His tenth book, on Israel's nuclear strategy, will be published in 201
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