Israeli Nuclear Deterrence: The

Israeli Nuclear Deterrence: The Failure of a Concept "How did the Change in Israel's Strategic Context Affect the Usefulness of the Israeli Nuclear Deterrent?" By Amr Nasr El-Din ID # 900020584 Supervised by Dr. Bahgat Korany Introduction: This research will attempt to examine how the changes in Israel’s security environment have affected the strategic usefulness of its nuclear weapons. Those changes can be summed up as: the fall of state-centered security threats and the rise, instead, of security threats stemming from Non-State Actors (NSAs) using asymmetric forms of warfare. A complex set of often interrelated political and strategic factors that were not confined to Middle Eastern political setting alone but extended to the rest of the world initiated these two simultaneous processes. Historically, the Israeli nuclear deterrent was developed during the 1950s and 1960s when Israel’s strategic setting was mainly dominated by state-centered security threats. Consequently, Israel was mainly concerned, at the time, with the threat of possible symmetrical military confrontations with its Arab neighbors – something that created a strategic value for its nuclear deterrent. Yet, a closer examination of the evolution of the Israeli security environment since 1982 will reveal that Non-State Actors (NSAs) that use asymmetrical forms of warfare, slowly but surely, came to dominate the Israeli security setting. Since then, Israel’s major security threats originated from NSAs operating in neighboring states (as in the case of Hezbollah in Lebanon) or from the Arab territories occupied in 1967, mainly the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, or from Israel's proper. The new types of security threats facing Israel was clearly manifested in the successful campaign launched by Hezbollah, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, against the Israeli occupation of Southern Lebanon, which eventually led to the withdrawal of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in 2000. In this campaign Hezbollah depended on asymmetrical forms of warfare with the result that the IDF became entangled in a long and fruitless war of attrition. Asymmetrical forms of warfare were also effectively 2 used by the Palestinians in their first and second Intifadas, and particularly in the second, and proved hard to break using conventional military means. The choice of the year 1982 as the beginning of the evolution of Israel’s security environment was determined by the fact that it witnessed the Lebanon War, which marked the last major military confrontation between Israel and another state, namely Syria, in a symmetrical form of warfare 1. In this respect, the Iraqi missile campaign against Israel during the 1990-1991 Second Gulf War should, by no means, be counted as part of the Arab military effort against Israel for two reasons: First: this missile campaign was part of a larger bombing campaign launched by Iraq against Israel and the Arab Gulf States and was, therefore, not directed solely against Israel and/or aimed at countering any of its actions and, Second: this campaign was not countered by Israel. In fact, it could be claimed that it is the only case in which Israel was presented with a security threat and refrained from countering it. This was a direct result of the American political pressure and the deployment of American MIM-104 Patriot ABM missile batteries to counter the Iraqi Scud threat 2. The research will first discuss the theoretical background of the concept of deterrence. This in necessitated by the fact that deterrence has been the guiding concept in the development of Israel's military doctrine and, by default, the main factor in Israel's decision to develop its nuclear deterrent. The rest of the dissertation will be divided into two parts; the first will examine Israel's geo-strategic situation 1 In the 1982 Lebanon War the Israeli and Syrian forces clashed heavily as both sides tried to achieve different political and strategic targets. The air war between the two states (and especially Israel's successful campaign against the Syrian SAM network in the Beka'a Valley) received great deal of publicity that, often, overshadowed other parts of the war that included heavy tank and infantry battles between the IDF and the Syrian army in which both parties suffered heavy losses. 2 The United States pressured Israel not to intervene militarily, fearing that such an intervention could lead to the disintegration of the international coalition against Iraq. 3 and how it influenced the formulation of its military doctrine and necessitated, from the Israeli point of view, the development of nuclear weapons. This part will also describe the history of Israel's nuclear efforts, the way it deploys its nuclear arsenal, and the operational concepts that guides its use. The second part will tackle the various political and strategic factors that led to the decline of the state-centered security threats and the simultaneous rise of NSAs instead - as Israel’s main security threat. Finally, the effect of these changes in Israel's threat map on the usefulness of its nuclear deterrent will be examined. It should be mentioned that the 2006 War between Israel and Hezbollah and current security standoff between Israel and the Islamic Resistance Movement (better known for its acronym Hamas) in Gaza will be the two main case studies tackled in this research. In this way, the research will be able to cover following issues: I. The Israeli security environment and the various threats present in it. II. The development trajectory of the security threats faced by Israel, tracing, in the process, how NSAs rose to prominence while state- centered threats declined. III. The operational doctrine for the Israeli nuclear arsenal, highlighting, in the process, the operational concepts that guide the deployment and possible courses of usage for Israeli nuclear weapons. This research gains special importance in light of several factors. The first of them is the very special nature of the Israeli nuclear program and its history of development. In fact, Israel was, and still remains, a special case in the history of international nuclear proliferation. This is due to the fact that Israel, either through 4 deception, or cooperating with other states, or due to faulty intelligence estimates and/or pure negligence, was able to pursue its nuclear program almost unhindered. Secondly, though much has been written on Israel's nuclear weapons and their mission as a deterrent against Arab states, little attention has been devoted to the effect of the changes in Israel's security environment on the usefulness of such weapons. 5 Chapter 1 Deterrence: The Evolution and Characteristics of a Theory 6 Introduction: The realist school in international system tends to describe the international system as anarchic. In this respect, the different units of the international system, (states, according to realists) are often willing to use every possible means at their disposal to defend their national interests and achieve their political-strategic objectives. This, of course, includes resorting to force. Although the use of violence is generally viewed as morally indefensible by many historians, academics and philosophers 3, their calls were seldom translated into effective means to prevent/constraint states from resorting to force when conducting their foreign policy. Consequently, the international system does not impose any tangible restrictions or constraints on the use of force – which has led states to resort to the use of force whenever necessary 4. In short, the use of force is an instrument of national policy. Its main purpose is to achieve and/or defend the goals of a state by influencing the orientations, roles, objectives, and actions of other states - and even Non-State Actors (NSAs) - in the international system 5. In fact, it could be claimed that resorting to the use of force as a means to settle disputes and advance foreign policy goals was, historically, the rule rather than the exception in international politics; and the Middle East was never the exception to that rule. The region witnessed (and in fact still witnessing) several armed conflicts (whether inter- or intra- states, the latter taking the form of civil war, separatist movements, etc…) – not to mention the various hotspots that could easily turn into armed conflicts. 3 K.J. Holsti, International Politics: A Framework for Analysis (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, INC., 1977), 307. 4 Ibid., 308. 5 Ibid. 7 Historically, major conflicts in the Middle East took place within two distinct, yet only tenuously related political contexts: that of the Gulf and that of the Arab- Israeli conflict. As a result, the Middle East was a scene of numerous conflicts, often gaining international attention and, sometimes, intervention, over the past half- century. In this conflict-laden environment, no state (in the Middle East) has used force to further its foreign policy goals more than Israel. The Israeli use of force (both overtly and covertly) was often Israel’s main technique to achieve its foreign policy goals in the Middle East. History is full of examples that support this assumption. For example, in the early 1950s Israel was worried about the imminent British withdrawal from its Suez Canal base, in accordance with the Anglo-Egyptian treaty singed in 1954, and the possibility of an Egyptian-American rapprochement: consequently, it did not hesitate to conduct a covert operation (Operation Susannah) in an effort to sabotage these worrying developments 6. Further

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