Following recent hostilities, Iran’s prospects for gaining military nuclear capacity have been degraded. Accordingly, the potential Iranian nuclear threat to Israel has been slowed. Still, these unprecedented prospects have not been removed. And Iran remains allied with state enemies of Israel that are “already nuclear.”
What should be Jerusalem’s next protective steps, whether sudden or sequential?
The correct answers are straightforward and readily decipherable. Above all, Israel should do whatever is needed to upgrade and enhance its nuclear deterrence posture. This posture, which includes both doctrine and strategy, will depend on Israel’s willingness to substitute “selective nuclear disclosure” for “deliberate nuclear ambiguity.”
Reason dictates that though Israel does have a “bomb in the basement,” its deliberately ambiguous nuclear deterrent will need core modifications. The strategic rationale of a more conspicuous nuclear deterrent would not be to acknowledge that Israel has nuclear weapons, but to emphasize that these weapons are usable at all levels of military engagement. Where a major state adversary did not perceive such “usability,” it would not be adequately deterred.
Even after Israel’s recent victories over Iran, it would be unreasonable to assume that “deliberate nuclear ambiguity” could work indefinitely. If Iran’s nuclear potentialities were massively set back by the “12-day war” bombardments, there would still be other enemy states to worry about. These states could be non-nuclear, pre-nuclear or already-nuclear.
After the just-halted Israel-Iran belligerency, Pakistan reaffirmed “complete solidarity” with Iran. This declaration included explicit threats of direct nuclear retaliation against Israel if Iran were to face nuclear attack. Nuclear North Korea has a history of belligerent interactions with Israel and could sometime serve Iran as its nuclear proxy.
How do matters stand right now? Using reason as the decisional standard, Israel will need to update its national strategic posture by shifting from deliberate nuclear ambiguity to selective nuclear disclosure. Though a resumed war with Iran could become nuclear even while Iran remained non-nuclear, that war would be “asymmetrical.” Ipso facto, it would favor Israel.
IF ISRAEL remained committed to its “bomb in the basement” nuclear posture, the country’s intra-war opportunities to achieve “escalation dominance” would be severely limited. Even if Tehran were to accept the reality of Israel’s nuclear options, it might not believe that Jerusalem would be willing to actually exercise them.
As a result, a tit-for-tat dynamic of conventional warfare could proceed unabated and Israel might need to face the exhausting prospect of interminable attrition warfare. Already, Iran is planning to buy Chinese Chengdu J-10C fighter jets compatible with PL-15 missiles, the same ordnance used by Pakistan’s air force.
Israel cannot rely forever on an implicit nuclear deterrence posture. Regarding any future or still-impending war with Iran, Jerusalem needs to consider once-speculative but no longer unrealistic scenarios. Among narrative possibilities, Pakistan and/or North Korea could sometime become nuclear proxies for a non-nuclear Iran. At that stage, any Israeli continuance of “deliberate nuclear ambiguity” would be irrational and self-destructive.
Israel must do whatever is necessary to keep Iran nuclear, missile threats stunted
Israel needs to ensure “escalation dominance” in all plausible conflict scenarios. Inter alia, this will mean keeping Iran non-nuclear. Though there will be many technical questions on desired levels and times of selective nuclear disclosure, this is not yet the moment for raising such details.
Even a pre-nuclear Iran could make combat use of radiation dispersal weapons and/or conventional missiles/drones launched against Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor. In a worst-case scenario, Iranian ally North Korea would place nuclear assets at Tehran’s operational disposal. Pyongyang, it should be recalled, built a nuclear reactor for Syria that was destroyed by Israel’s Operation Orchard on September 6, 2007.
While it is doubtful that selective nuclear disclosure would end Iran’s belligerent designs against Israel, a more selectively explicit Israeli deterrence posture represents Jerusalem’s only rational choice. At the same time, this enhanced doctrine and strategy might not be enough. It follows that Jerusalem, with or without its American ally, could still need to launch new rounds of measured preemptive strikes.
Iran is down (a trivial observation), but it is not out.
The writer is an emeritus professor of international law at Purdue University. He is the author of many books and scholarly articles on international law, nuclear strategy, nuclear war, and terrorism, including Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; second edition, 2018). lberes@purdue.edu