Israel's Complex Nuclear Imperatives, Part III
Israel's Complex Nuclear Imperatives, Part III

Last section of a 3 part article. For part I, click here; for part II, click here.

What, then, might be most important to Israel's prospectively irrational enemies, potentially even more important than their own physical survival as a state? One possible answer is the avoidance of certain forms of shame and humiliation. Another would be avoidance of the potentially unendurable charge, that they had somehow defiled their most sacred religious obligations. Still another would be leaders' preferred avoidance of their own violent deaths at the hand of Israel, deaths that could be attributable to Israeli strategies of "targeted killing," and/or "regime-targeting.”

Oddly enough, this last suggestion may be problematic to the extent that, theologically, being killed by Jews for the sake of Allah could be regarded as a distinct positive. In this connection, Israel (and America) must recall that there is no greater form of power in world politics than power over death. Never. In this connection, dying for the sake of Allah could be regarded in certain aggression-oriented contexts as a clerically-blessed passport to immortality.

What could be better?

These tentative answers are only a beginning. Always, strategic problems are fundamentally intellectual problems. What is needed, now, is a sustained and conspicuously competent intellectual effort to answer such questions in much greater depth and breadth.

In the future, Israel will need to deal with both rational and irrational adversaries. These enemies, in turn, will be both state and sub-state actors. On occasion, Israel’s leaders will also have to deal with various complex and subtle combinations of rational and irrational enemies, sometimes perhaps even simultaneously.

Ultimately, Israel must also prepare to deal with “nuclear madmen,” both as terrorists, and as national leaders, but, first, it must fashion a suitable plan for dealing with nuclear adversaries who are neither mad, nor irrational. With such an imperative, Israel must now do everything possible to enhance its deterrence, preemption, defense, and war-fighting capabilities. This means, inter alia, enhanced and explicit preparations for certain “last resort” or “Samson” operations.

Concerning any prospective contributions to Israeli nuclear deterrence, recognizable preparations for a Samson Option could serve to convince certain would-be attackers that their anticipated aggression would not be gainful. This is especially true if such Israeli preparations were combined with certain levels of disclosure, that is, if Israel’s “Samson” weapons were made to appear sufficiently invulnerable to enemy first-strikes, and if these weapons were identifiably “countervalue” (counter-city) in mission function.

The Samson Option, by definition, would be executed with countervalue-targeted nuclear weapons. It is likely that any such last-resort operations would come into play only after all Israeli counterforce options had been fully exhausted.

Concerning the previously mentioned “rationality of pretended irrationality,” Samson could enhance Israeli nuclear deterrence by demonstrating a national willingness to take existential risks, but this would hold true only if Israeli last-resort options were directed toward rational adversaries.

Concerning prospective contributions to preemption options, preparations for a Samson Option could convince Israeli leaders that their own defensive first-strikes would be undertaken with diminished expectations of unacceptably destructive enemy retaliations. This sort of convincing would depend, at least in part, upon antecedent Israeli government decisions on disclosure (that is, an end to “nuclear ambiguity”); on Israeli perceptions of the effects of disclosure on enemy retaliatory prospects; on Israeli judgments about enemy perceptions of Samson weapons’ vulnerability; and on a suitable enemy awareness of Samson’s countervalue force posture.

In almost any event, the optimal time to end Israel’s bomb in the basement policy, and thereby replace “deliberate ambiguity” with appropriate forms of disclosure, will soon be at hand. I have written about this needed replacement most recently in a detailed Working Paper prepared and published for the March 2013 Herzliya Conference (on strategy) in Israel: Looking Ahead: Revising Israel's Nuclear Ambiguity in the Middle East.

Similar to Samson’s plausible impact upon Israeli nuclear deterrence, recognizable last-resort preparations could enhance Israeli preemption options by displaying a clear and verifiable willingness to accept certain existential risks. In this scenario, however, Israeli leaders must always bear in mind that pretended irrationality could become a double-edged sword. Brandished too flagrantly, and without sufficient subtlety, any Israeli preparations for a Samson Option could actually impair rather than reinforce Israel’s nuclear war-fighting options.

Concerning prospective contributions to Israel’s nuclear war fighting options, preparations for a Samson Option could convince enemy states that any clear victory over Israel would be impossible. With such reasoning, it would be important for Israel to communicate to potential aggressors the following very precise understanding: Israel’s counter value-targeted Samson weapons are additional to its counterforce-targeted war fighting weapons. Without such a communication, any preparations for a Samson Option could impair rather than reinforce Israel’s nuclear warfighting options.

Undoubtedly, as was already concluded by Project Danielmore than ten years ago, nuclear war fighting should, wherever possible, be scrupulously avoided by Israel. But, just as undeniably, there are some readily identifiable circumstances in which such exchanges could prove to be unavoidable. Here, some form of nuclear warfighting could ensue, so long as: (a) enemy state first-strikes launched against Israel would not destroy Israel’s second-strike nuclear capability; (b) enemy state retaliations for an Israeli conventional preemption would not destroy Israel’s nuclear counter-retaliatory capability; (c) conventional Israeli preemptive strikes would not destroy enemy state second-strike nuclear capability; and (d) Israeli retaliations for enemy state conventional first strikes would not destroy enemy state nuclear counter-retaliatory capability.

From the standpoint of protecting its overall existential security, this means that Israel must take appropriate steps to ensure the plausibility of (a) and (b), above, and also the implausibility of (c) and (d).

Do you know what it means to find yourself face to face with a madman?” Repeating this pertinent question from Luigi Pirandello’s Henry IV does have immediate relevance to Israel’s existential dilemma. At the same time, the mounting strategic challenge to Israel will come primarily from enemy decision-makers who are not-at-all mad, and who are more-or-less rational.

Israel will need to promptly fashion a comprehensive and suitably-calibrated strategic doctrine from which various specific policies and operations could readily be extrapolated. This focused framework would identify and correlate all available strategic options (deterrence, preemption, active defense, strategic targeting, nuclear war fighting) with indisputable survival goals. It would also take close account of the possible interactions between these strategic options, and of the determinable synergies between all conceivable enemy actions directed against Israel. Calculating these particular interactions and synergies will be a computational task on the very highest order of intellectual difficulty.

Nuclear strategy is a “game” that certain sane and rational people can and must play, but to compete effectively and purposefully, a would-be winner must always first assess (1) the expected rationality of each critical opponent; and (2) the probable costs and benefits of pretending irrationality oneself. These are undoubtedly complex, interactive, and glaringly imprecise forms of assessment. Still, doubtlessly, they also constitute an indispensable foundation for Israel’s long-term national security.

LOUIS RENÉ BERES is Professor of Political Science and International Law at Purdue University. Educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971), he is the author of ten books and several hundred published articles dealing with Israeli security matters, including APOCALYPSE: NUCLEAR CATASTROPHE IN WORLD POLITICS (University of Chicago Press, 1980), and SECURITY OR ARMAGEDDON:ISRAEL'S NUCLEAR STRATEGY (Heath/Lexington Books, 1986). Professor Beres served as Chair of Project Daniel, a private effort (2003) to counsel former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on existential nuclear threats to Israel. In March 2013, Dr. Beres presented another major Working Paper to the annual Herzliya Conference on Israeli strategy. Professor Beres was born in Zürich, Switzerland, on August 31, 1945.