ANALYSIS – Among all the hand-wringing over the potential of a wider war between Israel and Iranian terror proxies such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shia militias in Iraq and Syria, Houthis in Yemen, in addition to Hamas in Gaza, few are considering the elephant in room – Iran.
They are also ignoring the 800-pound gorilla – Israeli nukes.
If Iran keeps enabling, prodding or simply allowing its puppets to attack Israel or Israeli targets, not to mention American ones, the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas could quickly escalate to involve Iran directly.
And that could get ugly fast.
Sadly, with the extreme weakness being exhibited by Joe Biden and his Iran sympathizing minions, the Mullahs in Tehran have been emboldened rather than deterred from escalating.
Israel is a tiny country. It is only 290 miles long, and 85 miles wide, at its widest. At its most narrow, Israel is only nine miles long. Its population is just a little over nine million.
Without any strategic depth, Israel depends on its “Sampson Option” of last resort. Its unacknowledged but widely known, nuclear arsenal, along with a policy of massive retaliation if its survival is ever threatened.
Estimates on the size of Israel's nuclear arsenal range from 90 warheads to more than 200, carried by land-based and submarine-based missiles as well as aircraft.
This capability has helped prevent major Arab-Israeli wars for 50 years. But Israel's enemies and strategic environment has changed. It has shifted from Sunni Arab states to Shia Iran and its many powerful proxies.
This is why some are questioning whether Israel's massive retaliation nuke strategy needs to be refined.
One well-respected expert, Louis Rene Beres, argues in Defense Opinion that: “Without an update, Iran and other potential state adversaries could have serious doubts about Israel's capacity to calibrate nuclear retaliations to different levels of attack.”
He adds:
For nuclear deterrence to work long-term, Israel must change its strategy — would-be aggressor states such as Iran would need to be told more rather than less about Israel's nuclear targeting doctrine and about the expected potency and invulnerability of Israel's nuclear forces. Without revealing more about its willingness and capacity to use nuclear weapons in retaliation, Israel might not have adequate nuclear credibility.
However counterintuitive, this means that to best prepare for all plausible attack scenarios, Israel should plan conscientiously for the incremental replacement of “deliberate nuclear ambiguity” with selective levels of “deliberate nuclear disclosure.”
In concert with such core policy changes, Jerusalem will need to refine its still undisclosed and opaque “Samson Option,” a last resort deterrence strategy of massive retaliation with nuclear weapons if Israel is under attack and threatened with imminent destruction.
Of course, this doesn't mean making stupid comments about dropping a nuke on Gaza, as one junior Israeli minister did in November, and I wrote about, but it does mean being less opaque about what an Israeli nuclear retaliation would look like.
As Beres notes: “Deterrence only works to the extent that potential aggressors are able to calculate that the expected costs of striking first will exceed expected gains.”
In other words, Israel needs drop some of its “deliberate nuclear ambiguity” and make it clear to Iran, and any others, that they will pay a heavy and specific price if the current war escalates to include strikes against Israel that threaten its survival or its ability to retaliate with its nukes.
Biden should also keep this in mind as he coddles Iran and emboldens it to take greater risks.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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