In a recent post I expressed dismay about Jeffrey Goldberg’s “Point of No Return” article: its implicit suggestion that the United States should attack Iran’s nuclear facilities so as to save Israel the trouble of doing something so senseless and self-defeating, and the decision by The Atlantic to publish a piece of work that is so poorly supported and argued.
Though Goldberg’s work seems to have had the unlikely fringe benefit of attracting Fidel Castro’s attention and prompting a real change of heart in the caudillo, it now seems that even here Goldberg did not ask all the right questions and get all the nuances right.
All that said and repeated, I owe readers an apology for not referring them to a much better article about the Israel-Iran dilemma, this one by Avner Cohen, the author of very well regarded books about Israel’s nuclear program. Excerpted from a forthcoming book (The Worst-Kept Secret: Israel’s Bargain with the Bomb), Cohen’s “Israel Ponders a Nuclear Iran” was posted by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on August 17.
Drawing on a wider and more representative group of Israeli political and opinion leaders, Cohen says that many have expressed serious reservations about describing Iran as an “existential threat,” including Ehud Barak, Tzipi Livni, former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy, and Shimon Peres. Cohen puts Iranian rhetoric in historical perspective, noting that Ahmadinejad’s return to the discourse of destroying the so-called Zionist entity “is hardly ever found any more in the Sunni Arab world.” He also casts a very useful historical perspective on Israel’s strategic situation, pointing out that when the country first faced the specter of a nuclear Iraq at the beginning of the 1980s, it stood essentially alone, as everybody else was oblivious to the danger (and the international safeguards system was ill-equipped to address it).
All that said, Goldberg does not dismiss the possibility of an overly alarmist reaction in Israel; he quotes former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as having warned, on the eve of his departure from office, “of our megalomania and our loss of proportion in the things that are said here about Iran.” Nor does Cohen minimize the consequences that would follow from Iran’s acquiring nuclear weapons: the social and psychological impact on Israeli society; possible military and political adventurism on the part of Iran; and a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.
Not least, says Cohen–and I think this is a very important point, seldom made otherwise–faced with a nuclear-armed Iran, Israel would have to come out of the closet and openly declare its nuclear arsenal.
That development, to my way of thinking, would be highly undesirable, both for Israel and for the world at large. Open declaration of its nuclear arsenal, by solidifying Israel’s status as a nuclear weapons state, would hasten the day when Iran crosses the threshold itself and increase pressures on other Middle Eastern states–starting with Egypt–to acquire nuclear weapons as well. It also would make creation of a Middle East nuclear free zone as part of a general peace settlement even more unlikely, not more likely.
Just as important, open declaration of Israel as a nuclear weapons state would undermine any ultimate effort to rid the world of weapons of mass destruction. The fundamental reason why it’s so desirable to stop nuclear proliferation, indeed, is that with every addition to the nuclear club, the diplomatic task of achieving comprehensive and total nuclear disarmament is made exponentially moe difficult. (The additional of India and Pakistan, already unfortunate enough, might have been prevented by aggressive, imaginative diplomacy in the 1990s, and almost was prevented by negotiations between Carter and Desai in the 1970s.)
But on these points, ironically, Cohen and I part ways. In the current issue of Foreign Affairs, Cohen and Marvin Miller argue that Israel should “legitimize” its bomb by openly declaring it, ending its long-standing policy of deep ambiguity. Readers may and should judge for themselves, but I find their arguments unpersuasive and to a great extent self-contradictory. Though benefits would indeed accrue from Israel’s joining the NPT regime, as Cohen and Miller suggest, all those benefits would be immeasurably greater if Israel joined as a non-nuclear-weapons state, not a weapons state.
Whatever one thinks of their arguments, they provide an authoritative concise account of how Israel’s nuclear posture has evolved. Their article is well worth reading if only for that.
