Israel’s current war with a not-yet-nuclear Iran could represent the Jewish State’s last best chance to prevent nuclear war in the Middle East.
Prof. Louis René Beres | Oct 2, 2024
Louis René Beres PR
Ironically, Iran’s ballistic missile aggression of October 1 offers Israel an exceptional opportunity. Because the most significant security threat to the Jewish State is a nuclear Iran, Jerusalem’s overriding objective should be to keep that enemy non-nuclear. Until today, fulfilling that objective could have required a “bolt-from-the-blue” Israeli preemption (non-nuclear), but now it can be sought within an already-ongoing conventional war.
Among other potential gains for Jerusalem, Israel would no longer have to satisfy the legal requirements of a permissible preemption. Under binding international law, Israel’s only obligations would concern the long-standing criteria of “distinction,” “proportionality” and “military necessity.”
There are variously pertinent details. Until now, Iran’s threats against Israel have been contrived (pretended irrationality) or genuinely irrational. Prima facie, a nuclear Israel would display clear advantages during intra-war episodes of competitive risk-taking. More precisely, in any competitive crisis between a pre-nuclear Iran and an already-nuclear Israel, the latter would almost certainly achieve “escalation dominance.” Looking to the immediate future, it would not necessarily be in Israel’s security benefit to seek cease-fire or war-termination agreements.
With such details in mind, the question becomes: How should Israel proceed? The only reasonable answer would be to choose strategy and tactics that could offer Israel persistent bargaining advantages without incurring unacceptably high risks. In this connection, a nuclear war with a not-yet-nuclear Iran is still possible, though it would be an “asymmetrical nuclear war” favoring Israel.
The only way to ensure an escalation advantage for Israel in all conceivable conflict scenarios would be to engage Iran directly while it is still pre-nuclear. Even a pre-nuclear Iran could use chemical or biological or electromagnetic-pulse (EMP) weapons against Israel, but no such use could plausibly impair Israel’s inherent advantages regarding “escalation dominance.” Once Iran were able to join the “nuclear club,” Israel’s required capacities to dominate military escalations would become severely limited or decisively moot. At that point, the prospects for a cost-effective Israeli preemption would almost certainly have vanished.
There is more. Though not widely discussed, even a pre-nuclear Iran could make combat use of radiation dispersal weapons and/or launch conventional combat missiles against Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor.
In a conceivably worst case scenario, Iranian ally North Korea would place its own nuclear assets at Tehran’s operational disposal. North Korea has previously been involved in Middle Eastern military matters (e.g., North Korea built a nuclear reactor for Syria at Al Kibar that was preemptively destroyed by Israel’s Operation Orchard on September 6, 2007), and is currently forging ambitious mutual security ties to Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
There are further issues. What exactly should Israel do with regard to winning its war against a still pre-nuclear Iran? Most urgently, Jerusalem needs to commence a prompt process of “selective nuclear disclosure” (putting an end to its traditional posture of “deliberate nuclear ambiguity,” aka the “bomb in the basement”) and to selectively clarify its widely-assumed “Samson Option.” Whatever its tactical particulars, the overriding point of any last-resort Israeli military option would not be to “die with the Philistines” (per Samson in the biblical Book of Judges), but to enhance the credibility of its nuclear deterrent.
Israel’s two-fold obligation to “escalation dominance” and nuclear war avoidance could produce a nuclear conflict that is intentional or unintentional. Regarding an unintentional nuclear war, it could represent an irremediable error for Israeli planners to assume that war with Iran would necessarily involve a consistently rational adversary. But even a rational Iranian adversary could produce variously unwanted outcomes.
For Israel, the ultimate survival problem would not likely be Iranian irrationality or madness, but the cumulatively injurious outcome of fully rational enemy calculations. Even if assumptions of Iranian rationality were reasonable and well-founded, there would remain variously attendant dangers of an unintentional nuclear war. Such potentially existential perils could be produced by enemy hacking operation, computer malfunction (accidental nuclear war) or decision-making miscalculation.
In this last scenario, erroneous calculations could be committed by Iran, Israel or even both parties in “synergy.” In any synergism scenario, the “whole” outcome of military interaction would exceed the sum of its “parts.” These “force-multiplying” interactions could surface all at once, as “a bolt from the blue” or sequentially, in more-or-less fathomable increments.
Since 1945, the historic global “balance of power” has partially been transformed into a “balance of terror.” To an unforeseeable extent, the geo-strategic search for “escalation dominance” by Israel and Iran could enlarge the risks of an inadvertent nuclear war. This worrisome conclusion remains plausible even if Iran were to remain non–nuclear. At some point in this unprecedented or sui generis narrative, seemingly out-of-control escalations could prod Israel to cross the nuclear combat threshold.
There are still final particulars. Risks of any direct Israel-Iran war would include nuclear war by accident and a nuclear war by decisional miscalculation. In this perilous context, the “solution” for Israel could never be to “wish-away” the causal imperative (i.e., the mutual search for “escalation dominance”) but to manage all prospectively nuclear crises at their lowest possible levels of destructiveness.
The Iranian existential threat to Israel does not exist in vacuo. Israel faces other potential foes and enemy alliances. Pakistan is a nuclear Islamic state with pertinent ties to China. Pakistan, like Israel, is not a party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). North Korea is sharing advanced ballistic missile technologies with Russia and Iran.
Immediately, Israel should consider whether there could be a purposeful place for directing selective nuclear threats against its not-yet-nuclear Iranian adversary.
In large part, “correct answers” will depend on Israel’s prior transformations of “deliberate nuclear ambiguity” into “selective nuclear disclosure.” Though it may strain both conventional wisdom and credulity, Israel’s current war with a not-yet-nuclear Iran could represent the Jewish State’s last best chance to prevent nuclear war in the Middle East.
In essence, therefore, Iran’s October 1 missile aggressions could then represent an incomparable self-defense opportunity for Israel.
Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971) and is the author of many books, monographs, and scholarly articles dealing with military nuclear strategy. In Israel, he was Chair of Project Daniel (PM Sharon, 2003). He has published on nuclear warfare issues in Harvard National Security Journal (Harvard Law School); Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence; Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs; The Atlantic; Israel Defense; The New York Times; Israel National News among others.
His twelfth book, published in 2016 (2nd ed., 2018) by Rowman & Littlefield, is titled: Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy. https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442253254/Surviving-Amid-Chaos-Israel’s-Nuclear-Strategy A monograph on this subject was published with a special post-script by retired USA General Barry R. McCaffrey at Tel Aviv University in December 2016. https://sectech.tau.ac.il/sites/sectech.tau.ac.il/files/PalmBeachBook.pdf
Professor Louis René Beres was born in Zürich at the end of World War II,
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