Synopsis: Israel’s political leaders and military strategists should plan for an immediate end to “deliberate nuclear ambiguity.” This is because still non–nuclear Iran (1) is loudly broadcasting its willingness to re-start and enlarge active hostilities against Israel, and (2) is apt to miscalculate and overestimate its actual capacity for “escalation dominance.” Though Iran would surely suffer the greater harms if Israel were left no rational intra-war choice but to “go nuclear,” the more powerful Jewish State could still suffer the egregious consequences of Iranian “hubris.”
In full:
Listening to Iran’s repeated threats to initiate aggressive war with Israel, something seems to have been overlooked: Israel is a nuclear power; Iran is not.
It follows that Iran is hardly in a credible strategic position to make such threats. After all, any actual follow-through on these arguably incoherent threats could produce potentially unendurable Iranian losses.
What is going on here?
Why such an ironic disconnect between relative national power capacities and the country issuing existential threats? Prima facie, in any direct and protracted war with Iran, only Israel would be in a position of “escalation dominance.”
The factor that could substantially change such Israeli superiority would be direct North Korean military involvement. This is because Iran’s belligerent ally in Pyongyang is “already nuclear” and because Israel is a “fifty target state.” In short, Israel is a geographically small adversary with no meaningful strategic depth. Absent a recognizable nuclear advantage, this is anything but an enviable survival position for an imperiled nation.
The remedy, for Israel, should be an immediate policy shift from “deliberate nuclear ambiguity” (Amimut in Hebrew) to “selective nuclear disclosure.
For decision-makers in Jerusalem, a core commitment of national strategic policy has always been to keep last-resort nuclear assets (aka “The Bomb”) shrouded in the “basement.” Until now, at least, nuclear ambiguity (sometimes called “opacity”) has managed to work. Though this success has seemingly done little to deter ordinary conventional aggressions or criminal acts of terror, it has succeeded in keeping the country’s enemies from launching any conceivable existential aggressions.
How should Israel accurately assess pertinent state and sub-state perils? In all such critical security matters, Israel has no science-based methods to determine useful probabilities. In science, such judgments, by definition, must stem from the determinable frequency of relevant past events.
There are associated legal issues. Choosing the nuclear option as a last resort would not necessarily be a violation of international law. Among other things, this is because of an International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion issued on 8 July 1996. This landmark ICJ ruling concluded that while “the threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict….,” this finding might not obtain “in an extreme circumstance of self-defense, in which the very survival of a State would be at stake.”
Nonetheless, the most urgent considerations in any such impending narratives would be broadly operational, not narrowly jurisprudential. In more expressly military nuclear matters, any national security strategy based upon whispered or sotto voce threats would have conspicuous limits.
Israel’s longstanding policy of deliberate nuclear ambiguity may not remain persuasive. To be reliably deterred, an Iranian nuclear adversary would require readily verifiable assurances that Israel’s nuclear weapons were effectively (1) invulnerable and (2) “penetration-capable.” This second expectation means that Israel’s nuclear weapons would not only be well-protected from adversarial first-strikes, but would also be able to “get through” Iran’s active defenses.
And any adversary’s judgments concerning Israel’s willingness to retaliate with nuclear weapons would depend in good measure upon useable foreknowledge of these weapons as well as their presumptive operational capabilities.
There would also be some clarifying ironies. Looking ahead, Iranian perceptions of only mega-destructive, high-yield Israeli nuclear weapons could effectively undermine the credibility of Israel’s nuclear deterrence. Expressed formally, in making such calculations, Israel’s strategic deterrence could sometime vary inversely with the perceived destructiveness of its nuclear arms. While seemingly counter-intuitive, this argument suggests not only that Israel should have available a wide range of nuclear retaliatory options, but also that it should take properly refined steps to ensure that such an expansive range of options be instantly recognizable.
In the future, if Iran should decide to share some of its offensive nuclear assets with a surrogate jihadist terrorist group (e.g., Iran and Hezbollah or Iran and Hamas or Houthi), Jerusalem would need to have prepared for the nuclear deterrence of assorted non-state adversaries. In all such scenarios, what will first need to be calculated, among other things, is the precise extent of subtlety with which Israel should be communicating its nuclear positions, intentions and capabilities to Iran and various other categories of possible adversaries.
A refined doctrine is necessarily antecedent to any sound nuclear strategy.[6] The core rationale for Israeli nuclear disclosure would inhere in the basic and immutable understanding that nuclear weapons can serve Israel’s security in several specific ways. Once it is faced with a nuclear fait accompli in Tehran or elsewhere, Israel would need to convince its then-relevant enemy or enemies that it possessed both the will and the capacity to make any intended adversarial nuclear aggression more harmful than gainful. By definition, however, no Israeli move from ambiguity to disclosure could help in the unprecedented case of an irrational nuclear enemy.
To protect itself against enemy military strikes, particularly those attacks that could potentially carry authentic existential costs, Israel should quickly and correctly exploit every aspect and function of its still opaque nuclear arsenal. In this connection, the success of Israel’s efforts will depend not only upon its carefully selected configuration of “counterforce” and “counter value” operations, but also on the extent to which this critical choice was made known in advance to Iran and certain Iranian sub-state/terrorist surrogates.
Before such recalcitrant adversaries could be deterred from launching any escalatory strikes against Israel, it would not be sufficient for Iran to know the obvious. The point of any shift from deliberate nuclear ambiguity to selective nuclear disclosure would be to signal that Israel’s “bomb” (1) is safely beyond any preemptive enemy reach; and (2) is calibrated to variously credible levels of enemy aggression.
In essence, removing the bomb from Israel’s basement could enhance the imperiled nation’s strategic deterrence only to the extent that it would heighten enemy perceptions of secure and capable Israeli nuclear forces. Any calculated end to deliberate nuclear ambiguity could also underscore Israel’s presumptive willingness to use its nuclear forces in sudden or incremental reprisal for enemy first-strike and/or retaliatory attacks. In the final analysis, any Israeli shift from deliberate nuclear ambiguity to selective nuclear disclosure would need to convince Iran of Jerusalem’s ultimate willingness to use nuclear forces against a non –nuclear adversary with exterminatory intentions and capacities.
Though generally misunderstood and inexpertly discussed, a “Samson Option” could gainfully support this obligatory task of Israeli strategic dissuasion. For Israel, the reinforcing benefits of “Samson” would lie not in any supposed eagerness to “die with the Philistines” (the popular view from the Biblical Book of Judges), but in the residual option’s deterrent advantages at the highest-end of any inter-state competition for “escalation dominance.” More plainly, an explicitly-revealed Samson Option would multiply and magnify the survival benefits of selective nuclear disclosure not by threatening gratuitous Israeli spasms of revenge-based harms, but by reminding Iran that Israel’s nuclear force calibrations would be operational even at the eleventh-hour.
In assessing its optimal levels of deliberate nuclear disclosure, Israel should continuously bear in mind the country’s overriding strategic nuclear objective: This goal is deterrence.
If, however, nuclear weapons should somehow be introduced into an impending conflict with Iran (most plausibly, via military participation of North Korea), one form or other of nuclear war fighting could ensue. This conclusion would be unassailable so long as: (a) enemy state first strike attacks against Israel would not destroy the Jewish State’s second-strike nuclear capability; (b) enemy state retaliations for Israeli conventional preemption would not destroy Israel’s nuclear counter-retaliatory capability; (c) Israeli strikes would not destroy enemy state second-strike nuclear capabilities; and (d) Israeli retaliations for enemy state conventional first strikes would not destroy enemy state nuclear counter-retaliatory capacities.
This means that Israel should promptly take appropriately steps to ensure the likelihood of (a) and (b), above, and the reciprocal unlikelihood of (c) and (d).
If for any reason Iranian nuclear deployments were permitted to take place, Israel could forfeit any non-nuclear preemption options. At that stage, Jerusalem’s only remaining alternatives to exercising a nuclear preemption option would be: (1) a no-longer viable conventional preemption; or (2) a decision to do nothing preemptively, thereby choosing to existentially rely upon some form or other of nuclear deterrence and the corollary protections of ballistic missile defense. Ipso facto, any prior decisions having to do with tangible shifts to “selective nuclear disclosure” and also a “Samson Option” would be all important.
For Israel, the time to end its traditional policy of “deliberate nuclear ambiguity” is now. The intellectually lazy argument that it has worked thus far and would therefore work in the future is a classic example of logical fallacy at its worst. Left unrevised by a more carefully calculated and prudent Israeli nuclear policy, such fallacious reasoning could produce largely unimaginable levels of human harm. As all humans are ultimately creatures of biology, it could even bring millions into the predatory embrace of a “final epidemic.”
Louis René Beres (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) was Chair of Project Daniel (PM Sharon, 2003-2004). He is the author of many major books, articles and scholarly monographs on nuclear strategy and nuclear war, including publications in The New York Times; The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; Israel Defense; BESA (Israel); Herzliya Conference Papers (Israel); Israel National News; The Strategy Bridge; The National Interest; JURIST; World Politics (Princeton); Yale Global Online; Harvard National Security Journal (Harvard Law School); International Security (Harvard); The Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs; Parameters: The Professional Journal of the US Army War College; Special Warfare (Pentagon); and other venues. His twelfth and latest book is Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy, 2016 (2nd ed., 2018)
In 2016, Professor Beres authored a monograph on Israeli nuclear strategy and US national security at Tel Aviv University (Yuval Ne’eman Workshop)