Ariel Center for
Policy Research

A JOURNAL OF POLITICS AND THE ARTS

 

NATIV   ■   Volume Fourteen   ■   Number 6 (83)  ■  November 2001   ■  Ariel Center for Policy Research

 

SYNOPSIS

 


Nuclear Deterrence Now
– To the Attention of a Busy
PM

Louis René Beres

During the past year, the ACPR has expertly examined problems of Israeli deterrence. Aharon Levran’s “The Decline of Israeli Deterrence” (ACPR policy paper no. 113) is an especially important and informed assessment. The article below by Professor Louis René Beres – cast in the form of a Memorandum to the Prime Minister – looks more specifically at the conditions and limitations of Israeli nuclear deterrence. Based upon the assumption that Israel’s survival depends entirely upon self reliance, this memorandum urges PM Sharon immediately to strengthen the country’s nuclear deterrence posture, and to take critical steps to ensure that a failure of Israeli nuclear deterrence will not bring about nuclear warfare. These steps will require: (1) a multifaceted nuclear strategy involving deterrence, preemption and warfighting capabilities; and (2) a corollary conventional strategy that can function in spite of serious security weaknesses created by the Oslo “peace process”.

Israel needs a strong nuclear deterrent – and the complex conditions of such a deterrent are identified and evaluated carefully in the Memorandum – but it cannot rely upon this one base of national security any more than it can rely only upon conventional deterrence. Israel’s survival now requires complementary nuclear and conventional forces, and the continuing and associated availability of certain preemption options. Taken together, these multiple bases of national security could endow Israel with at least tolerable measures of safety.

Specific issues addressed in the Beres Memorandum are: convincing prospective attackers that Israel maintains both the willingness and the capacity to retaliate in certain situations with nuclear weapons; the risks and benefits to Israel of intentionally detectable measures to reduce Israeli nuclear force vulnerabilities; the associated risks and benefits to Israel of active and passive defenses; the precise nature of Israeli nuclear weapons; the issue of disclosure vs. “deliberate ambiguity” (the “Bomb in the Basement”); the types and openness of nuclear targeting doctrine; the problem of enemy irrationality for Israeli nuclear deterrence; the interrelatedness of Israeli conventional and nuclear deterrence; and (should Israeli nuclear deterrence fail), the expected consequences of regional nuclear war. Finally, the Beres Memorandum imaginatively considers different scenarios of how a nuclear attack upon Israel might take place and the particular place for a “Samson Option”.

Professor Louis René Beres is the author of some of the earliest published writings on Israeli nuclear deterrence. This Memorandum looks soberly and in considerable detail at today’s urgent strategic challenges to Israel. Taken as a whole, the Memorandum points toward a comprehensive and coherent nuclear “master plan” from which specific policy options might be suitably extrapolated.

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