It is often said that while we don’t know which nuclear weapons state will disarm first, we do know which will disarm last. That country is Israel.
Israel’s nuclear past hints at that direction. Israel’s father-founder, David Ben Gurion, dreamt about the bomb almost since Israel was born. By the end of its first decade Israel had initiated its nuclear weapons project. Less than a decade later, on the eve of the 1967 war, Israel assembled its first nuclear devices.1
Israel’s determined drive to the bomb stems from its historical consciousness and geopolitical situation. Today it reflects the avowal “Never Again” in reaction to the Holocaust, the most formative event in modern Jewish history. A few years ago Israeli columnist Ari Shavit suggested thinking of the bomb as “a glass greenhouse” that shields Israel in the Middle East. It has been Dimona—the site of Israel’s prime nuclear facility—that allowed Israel to grow and prosper despite the hostile environment.2 This metaphor highlights how most Israelis view the bomb, as the nation’s sacred insurance policy.
Israel is a major stakeholder in the global nuclear order. Not only is Israel the world’s sixth nuclear weapons state, but it signed (with the United States as a cosigner) an “exceptionalist bargain” with the bomb.3 Since its birth the Israeli bomb has remained opaque, unacknowledged. The policy, known as “nuclear opacity,” has been at the core of Israel’s exceptionalist bargain: Israel has neither confirmed nor denied its possession of nuclear weapons, but rather committed “not to be the first to introduce nuclear weapons.” Opacity (in Hebrew, amimut) is Israel’s distinct and unique contribution to the nuclear age.
Not surprisingly, Israelis are skeptical about the old-new vision of a world without nuclear weapons. Israeli leaders have remained publicly mute on the matter—Israeli leaders ignored President Obama’s Prague speech as if it had no relevance to their country—but privately they dismiss the vision as unrealistic, in fact, naive and dangerous. Israelis do not believe in either the feasibility or desirability of the vision.
At the bottom, Israelis cannot conceive of themselves dismantling their nation’s sacred national insurance. Israel’s policy of nuclear opacity is designed to safeguard this view. One of its functions it to keep Israel exceptional and to ensure that Israel would not be engaged in any practical talk about nuclear disarmament.
For the last decade Israel’s focus in nuclear matters has been Iran. From an Israeli perspective, any conversation on the nation’s nuclear future starts and ends with one subject only, Iran. Israelis will have a hard time elevating themselves above the horizon of Iran, and their own policy of opacity, even to consider the vision of a world without nuclear weapons.
Israel’s intense response to Iran reveals much about Israel’s own predicament. The consensus within Israel is that the advent of a nuclear Iran—and a great deal depends on how exactly one defines this phrase—would pose a threat Israel has never yet faced, a hostile state in the region in possession of nuclear weapons. The phrase Israeli leaders often use to characterize the gravity of that eventuality is “existential threat.”4 Until his election to become Israel’s prime minister in early 2009, Benjamin Netanyahu often used this phrase, implying that Israel must be committed to preventing a nuclear Iran, preferably with cooperation with others, but if necessary, on its own.5 Since his election, however, Netanyahu hardly ever uses this phrase in his public speeches, but Uzi Arad, his national security advisor, recently defined the goal of preventing an Iranian bomb as an “existential imperative.”6 Mossad chief General Meir Dagan—whose organization has the overall responsibility to prevent a nuclear Iran—maintained that if and when Iran were to develop nuclear weapons, “this [would be] a significant existential threat to the state of Israel.”7
The reference to “existential threat” is based on the linkage Israelis make between two key elements: first, the Iranian regime and its pursuit of a nuclear-weapons capability, and second, its extreme ideological hostility toward Israel, in particular its rejection of Israel’s legitimacy as a state. On the first, despite some uncertainty, Israeli assessments depict Iranian strategic intentions and capabilities as aiming at full nuclear weapons capability, even if those assessments are occasionally amorphous and hesitant on matters of political tactics.8 Israeli assessments of Iran tend to be more alarmist than assessments by others.9 For example, the November 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran, which concluded that Iran halted its overt nuclear weaponization work in 2003, was strongly disputed by Israel’s national assessment.10 Recent revelations on the Iranian nuclear program, especially the “white paper” report prepared by the IAEA-International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), as well as the discovery of the new enrichment facility near Kum, have given more credence to the Israeli assessment.11
There is an abundance of evidence of the Iranian government’s extreme hostility toward Israel. This has been true since the Islamic revolution, but it became more pronounced and explicit after the 2005 election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran. Ahmadinejad’s statements mean, for Israelis, a return to the old pan-Arab discourse about the destruction of the Zionist entity, a discourse that hardly exists anymore in the Sunni Arab world (some would argue due, in part, to the existence of the Israeli bomb). The difference between the anti-Israeli rhetoric in Ben-Gurion’s era and today is that now, for the first time, such threats are voiced by a president of a state that is seriously pursuing a nuclear weapons capability. Moreover, Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric is combined with increasing Iranian involvement in other parts of the Middle East, most visibly though Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza strip.
In Israeli eyes the Iranian nuclear threat does not lie in the risk that Iran may be utterly irrational and might one day drop the bomb over Israel. Most Israeli strategists agree that it is nearly inconceivable that Iran would attack Israel out of the blue with nuclear weapons because Iranians must be aware of the catastrophic consequences of such a suicidal act.12 The risk of a nuclear confrontation between Israel and Iran might arise, instead, from misperceptions and miscalculations during a conventional crisis. Israel would also need to face the possibility (however low) of an accidental or unauthorized nuclear launch by Iran and the risk that nuclear weapons might leak or be transferred by Iran to nonstate actors. In the Israeli view, an Iranian bomb could profoundly change the entire political dynamics in the Middle East. As Uzi Arad put it, “[We] cannot live with a nuclear Iran because a nuclear Middle East would not be the same as the Cold War nuclear stalemate. A nuclear Middle East would become a multi-nuclear Middle East, with all that entails.”13
Specifically, Israelis perceive three areas of great concern. The first is that nuclear weapons could exacerbate concerns about other aspects of Iran’s foreign and defense policies by inducing more risk-prone and aggressive strategies. Nuclear Iran would pressure the Palestinians and possibly other Arab states (for example, Syria) to take hard-line positions, and would encourage Palestinian society to adopt more extreme positions that would stimulate terrorism and make peace negotiations with Israel even more difficult than in the present situation. Furthermore, a mutual assured destruction (MAD) deterrent situation between Israel and Iran could be exceptionally unstable due to the asymmetry in size and population between Iran and Israel. Mutual hostility and the lack of communication between the two states further increase the danger.14
The second concern is that a nuclear Iran, especially if Iran is a declared nuclear state, could ignite a cascade proliferation effect in the entire Middle East.15 A dangerous nuclear Iran would defy the global nuclear order that is based on the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) regime, and be a direct threat to the subtle nuclear order that currently exists in the Middle East under the veneer of Israeli nuclear opacity. One thing is sure: a nuclear Iran would be the end of Israel’s benign nuclear monopoly in the region.
The third is the social and psychological impact that a MAD-like balance of terror with Iran might have on the Israeli public and its psyche. Some Israeli public figures who push the politics of the Iranian scare (such as former deputy minister of defense Ephraim Sneh, columnist Ari Shavit, and academic historian Benny Morris) argue that Iran might be able to “wipe the Zionist state off the map” without actually dropping the bomb. The mere existence of the Iranian bomb, or the fear that Iran has the bomb, they declare, might lead Israelis to leave Israel for a friendlier place where their very existence would not be threatened. After the Holocaust, Sneh argues, Jews would have no stomach to live in the shadow of an Iranian bomb, another Holocaust. Those who had the means to leave would leave.16 Benjamin Netanyahu has pushed this line of reasoning to its ultimate limit by explicitly introducing the Holocaust into the discussion about Iran, and drawing an analogy between President Ahmadinejad and Hitler.17
The closer Iran is perceived to the bomb, the more Israel will have to redefine its own bargain with the bomb, including opacity. Israel would be forced—in a sense, it already has been forced—to decide whether and how to respond to this eventuality. As Iran crosses one technological barrier after another, and as its enrichment program is increasingly a fait accompli, those policy dilemmas for Israel are more acute. Stripped to their conceptual essentials, they are as follows.18 The first dilemma stems from the Israeli decision-making process itself and the politics surrounding it, domestically and internationally. The Israeli government would have to decide whether and when it should articulate its red lines about a nuclear Iran, or leave them loose and not fully defined, as they are now. In parallel, Israeli leaders would have to decide how much they are willing to discuss the threshold with others, especially with the United States. Specifically, since any deal with Iran would entail some “compromise”—a word former prime minister Olmert used in this context—Israel would have to find a way to convey to its close allies, especially the United States, what kind of compromise it would accept.19 How to define those red lines and how to communicate them to others are extremely sensitive matters.20
Israeli assessments have determined that Iran has been and is involved with various aspects of nuclear weaponization, but Israeli concern over the Iranian nuclear program focuses on its fissile material (currently uranium enrichment) capability. In the past, when Israeli intelligence officials used the phrase “point of no return,” it generally meant the point at which Iran would have mastered centrifuge technology. In the wake of criticisms from inside and outside the Israeli intelligence community that the phrase “point of no return” is conceptually flawed and makes little political sense, it was dropped.21 Israel now uses the phrase “technological threshold.” In his July 2009 interview, Arad referred specifically to this terminological/definitional issue:
The point of nuclear no-return was defined as the point at which Iran has the ability to complete the cycle of nuclear fuel production on its own; the point at which it has all the elements to produce fissionable material without depending on outsiders. Iran is now there. I don’t know if it has mastered all the technologies, but it is more or less there. However, the term “no-return” is misleading. Even if Iran has fissionable material for one bomb, it is still at a low grade of enrichment. And if it wants to conduct a test, it will not have even one bomb. It follows that Iran is not yet nuclear and not yet operational. Serious obstacles still lie in the way. The international community still has enough time to make it stop of its own volition.22
Once the “technological threshold” was achieved, it would be very difficult for intelligence agencies to nuance the exact status of the Iranian nuclear program. The Israeli intelligence community strongly rejected the implicit defini tion in the U.S. NIE of November 2007 that weaponization activity is the defining feature of a nuclear-weapons program.23 Israeli red lines relate rather to the enrichment program, not to weaponization. One wonders to what extent Israel assesses Iran’s nuclear program by doing a reverse mirroring of its own nuclear history.
The second dilemma Israel may face is whether and how to act—and non-action is also a kind of action—if Iran crosses those red lines. So far Iran has continued to defy the will of the Security Council on the matter of enrichment, mastering the enrichment technology to the industrial level. If the international community either proves itself powerless to enforce those Security Council resolutions, or reaches a deal with Iran that places it too close to attaining the bomb, Israel would face a difficult decision: either follow that lead, and ultimately have to accept a situation of a de facto nuclear Iran (by Israeli definition); or take independent action and forestall the Iran nuclear program. This would amount to a fundamental strategic choice between prevention and deterrence. It would test Israel’s commitment to the 1981 Begin Doctrine: the commitment to take preventive action, including military action, against any hostile neighbor in proximity to the bomb.24
Israeli leaders consider this challenge highly sensitive, and little has been leaked from the behind-the-scene deliberations. After Minister Shaul Mofaz warned in June 2008 that Israel could not accept a nuclear Iran—implying military action would be necessary—he was criticized.25 Against this official mute policy, it was shocking that former prime minister Ehud Olmert, in his final interview before departing from office in late September 2008, dismissed openly as “megalomania” any thought that Israel should or would attack Iran on its own to halt its nuclear program: “Part of our megalomania and our loss of proportions is the things that are said here about Iran. We are a country that has lost a sense of proportion about itself.”26 It is the international community, and not Israel, which should deal with the Iranian nuclear issue.
Of course, if Iran overtly acquired nuclear weapons and clearly signaled its intent by withdrawing from the NPT, it would simplify Israel’s choices and create more international support for preemption. In addition to a decision about taking military action, Israel would have to decide whether to change its own nuclear policy; that is, whether to adopt an overt deterrence policy and to bring opacity to an end. There were indications Prime Minister Netanyahu entertained this case seriously at one time. Notwithstanding the common wisdom in Israel that, if Iran tested a weapon, Israel would have to follow suit in some fashion, there are reasons to believe that Israeli policy- makers would still see more benefit in not testing and letting Iran bear the brunt of international opprobrium. In any case, Israeli reaction to Iran’s possibly leaving the NPT or even testing a device is not automatic.
Apart from the need to overcome a domestic impulse to trade an eye for an eye, an overt weapons posture by Iran would simplify Israel’s options for deterrence and containment. At a minimum, Israel would make sure that the Iranians had no doubt about its ability to devastate Iran in retaliation, including with its sea-based assets. Israel would also seek to strengthen its missile defense and pursue civil defense measures as a means of deterrence by denial. On the diplomatic front, it would amplify efforts to sanction Iran and to deny it all trade that could assist its weapons capabilities.
Another longer-term dilemma involves deterrence, arms control, and containment. If prevention ultimately fails and a new kind of nuclear regime is inevitable in the Middle East, how should Israel respond to the making of such a regime? During the height of the Cold War, as the world learned to live under the balance of nuclear terror, as in mutual assured destruction, the theory and practice of arms control were developed to provide measures of stability and robustness. But those dialogues took place against the explicit and declared presence of nuclear weapons. Would it be possible to have such an arms-control dialogue in a context of opacity on both sides? How would it be possible to maintain conversations about nuclear weapons when neither side had introduced nuclear weapons?
There are the political costs of diplomatically engaging Iran, for which there is almost no current domestic constituency in Israel. But there are other difficulties, as well—for example, such a dialogue would be perceived as accepting, and thereby legitimizing, Iran’s nuclear capability. On the surface, as long as President Ahmadinejad remains in power in Tehran, the issue of engagement is moot, since anti-Zionism is so central to the Iranian hardliners’ worldview.
If prevention fails, it is unlikely that Israelis at present would look to arms control as a solution. In the face of a nuclear-capable and hostile Iran, the feasibility of changes in opacity would be unlikely. In theory, Israelis may prefer having zero nuclear-armed countries in the Middle East compared to there being two. But given Iran’s record and its anti-Israel posture, Israelis would not trust Iran to comply with disarmament measures. Part of the difficulty would stem from the traditional view of nuclear disarmament in the Middle East, which is based solely on the vision of a nuclear weapons–free zone (NWFZ). But the NWFZ vision is really only a vision, and thus is not anchored in the current political reality of the Middle East. For Israel, a NWFZ is conditioned on peaceful relations among all the members of the zone, something that does not appear possible under the current regime in Tehran.
Still, under different political circumstances in Iran, with a different governing group, this might be an opening for a new regional grand deal. If and when leaders are willing to think “outside the box,” there are other ideas, discussed below, about measures of arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation which are compatible with the region as it is.
In February 2007 Ali Larijani, then the secretary general of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and the head of its nuclear negotiating team, declared that Iran’s nuclear program is at present for peaceful purposes, but as far as the future is concerned, he continued, nobody knows what is in store. If Iran is threatened, everything is open. It was difficult not to see an intriguing historical resemblance between his statement in 2007 and what Prime Minister Ben Gurion told President Kennedy in their meeting in May 1961.27 Israel then, like Iran now, was in the midst of an ambitious national nuclear initiative designed to create a nuclear-weapons option, but not yet with a good idea of how far it could push the envelope. Like Israel in the early- to mid-1960s, Iran today seems to be committed to obtaining nuclear-weapons capability, but in spite of their determination, they probably have no idea how far they will be able to push.28
At a minimum, Iran seems to want to position itself very close to the weapon threshold by maintaining a large-scale enrichment capability (albeit keeping enrichment at a low level) while creating a certain ambiguity as to its weaponization activities. The Iranian political leadership may look at nuclear Israel today and hope that they could do likewise. But in reality, even apart from the 1969 Nixon-Meir political deal that relieved Israel from any inhibition about going nuclear, it will be more difficult for Iran to achieve a “bomb in the basement” posture. Only by massive deception—say, by building large-scale undeclared enrichment facilities (the recent discovery of the facility near Kum may be a case in point)—can Iran achieve a bomb in the basement while still within the NPT.
The worry over Iranian enrichment at industrial-scale capacity, what Israeli intelligence refers to as the “technological threshold,” is not that it can lead to an ambiguous bomb in the basement, but that large-scale, low-enriched uranium (LEU) enrichment capabilities can create dangerous “breakout” scenarios: they quickly could be reconfigured into a highly enriched uranium (HEU) mode of production, thereby giving little warning time to the international community. And, of course, if Iran were to withdraw from the NPT, that would also be a clear sign of nonpeaceful intent. Under safeguards, it is a so-called breakout, not a bomb in the basement, which is the main worry. In contrast, Israel has never been under safeguards, so nuclear weapons under opacity have been an option.
Nevertheless, Iran may reconstruct its own posture of nuclear opacity through modalities different from but functionally similar to those used in Israel. The political differences between an actual “bomb in the basement” and Iranian “industrial production” are not that significant for a country that chooses the strategy of opacity. It would be opacity, even though not an Israeli-like opacity. In any case, the opacity can be intensified, as it is difficult to locate activity related to weaponization or even undeclared enrichment facilities.
This brings us back to the following question: how should Israel react to the emergence of an opaquely nuclear Iran? I noted earlier that much depends on what we really mean by “nuclear Iran,” and it is time to explicate that. Based on this analysis, as long as Iran remains within the boundaries of the NPT there will probably never be a “nuclear Iran,” insofar as that means an Iran with actual nuclear weapons, even undeclared à la Israel. In this respect, a great deal of the Israeli discourse on nuclear Iran is rooted in scare politics. It says more about the Israeli psyche than about Iran.
It is likely that we will face a different sense of nuclear Iran, in which Iran develops a full latent nuclear-weapons capability opaquely, under the guise of its peaceful program within the NPT, and this ultimately would blur the difference between possession and nonpossession. In fact, all signs are that Iran has already adopted that modality. This type of opacity—call it “latent opacity”— would be politically convenient for Iran, precisely because Iran is a signatory to the NPT. It is also an extremely flexible modality, politically and technologically, because it rests on true ambiguity about intentions and capabilities. Any explicit weaponization activities may remain concealed, opaquely disguised, or even put on hold.
It would allow Iran to gain a great deal of political advantage by having an advanced nuclear-weapons capability, extracting elements of deterrence and prestige out of it. At the same time, it would allow Iran to maintain friction with the world within the parameters of its legal claims under the NPT. Iran would continue to claim that its nuclear program is merely peaceful and that it has a right under the NPT to have access to the entire nuclear fuel cycle; at the same time, Iran would spread rumors that it is on the verge of possessing weapons (or maybe even has a bomb in the basement), and therefore it should be considered a de facto nuclear state, just as Israel is an undeclared nuclear state.
Iran’s choice of opacity would be a political challenge for the international nuclear system, but a far greater challenge to Israel, which was the first and only country to use opacity as a nuclear posture. There is an important difference between Israel and Iran: Israel’s opacity succeeded as an international phenomenon because the world—in particular the United States—decided to accept its maintaining such a policy in preference to all other options. Israel received an implicit exemption from the international community, which closed its eyes to the nuclear issue for political, legal, and even ethical reasons unique to Israel. Iran’s choice of latent opacity, in contrast, would come under radically different circumstances. The world has explicitly expressed its opposition to anything resembling a nuclear program in Iran.
Herein lies the real challenge for all: at what point in time should Israel and the international community remove the mask of opacity and insist on calling a spade a spade? When should the world start to call the Iranian capability a virtual bomb? Is it preferable to remove the mask from Iranian ambiguity and to call it by name, or is an opaque Iran preferable to an openly nuclear Iran? At what point in time should we insist on international nuclear accountability? And what will be the future of Israeli ambiguity in such a world? These are questions that until now have hardly been asked, but they demand a great deal of thinking, both worldwide and in Israel.
Israelis tend to see the conflict with Iran in dichotomous terms: either take a sharp action against Iran—preferably some sort of military action or naval blockade—or accept living with a nuclear Iran. This is a bad dilemma, but Israelis see no way out of it. Given Israel’s own opacity, it appears that Israel would be cautious to “out” nuclear Iran prematurely. While one must presume that Israel is preparing itself for the eventuality that Iran one day may be openly nuclear, Israelis agree that these preparations should be done under the veil of opacity. There is a strategic consensus in Israel that Israel should stick to opacity as long as it can; that is, as long as Iran itself clings to its own declaratory “peaceful” mode. The Iranian situation commands caution and makes any change in opacity—even minor change—more resistible. Opacity is not only the safest public posture, especially during times of strategic uncertainty, but it is also in itself a firewall against change.
I noted earlier that Israeli nuclear thinking focuses now almost entirely on the Iran issue. Everything else about the future of Israel’s nuclear policy awaits the resolution of the Iranian nuclear issue. Israelis now have little interest in or patience for discussing other issues related to the global nuclear order. One could make this point even stronger. The Iranian nuclear situation adds another incentive for Israel to remain conservative in its nuclear policy, to stick to its opacity policy without changing an iota. Israelis believe that their country has little to gain and much to lose in ending opacity, including possibly sparking regional nuclearization and unraveling of the NPT regime.29 Most important, Israelis believe that the world wants them to continue with their opacity.
There are three fundamental issues that Israel must consider: opacity’s strategic value, alternatives to it, and the role of opacity within the international system. The conventional wisdom in Israel (but also in the United States) strongly favors opacity based on all three counts. On the first issue, Israelis believe that opacity is still beneficial to Israeli security for the same reasons that existed forty years ago: opacity provides the country existential deterrence and allows the international community to live with a nuclear Israel. Moreover, it allows the international community to treat Israel as an exceptional case without saying so explicitly. On the second issue, there is even stronger consensus that opacity has no feasible alternative. On the third issue, the United States, and along with it much of the international community, supports the practice of opacity because they agree with the Israelis that there is no realistic alternative to it. Indeed, at the present time, there is no pressure on Israel to consider changing the bargain. Underlying these three judgments is the most important conceptual presumption: the equivocation between opacity as a declaratory posture and Israel’s ability to possess the bomb.
At present, the delicate battle of wills between Iran and the international community over the nuclear issue is a work in progress, and it is impossible to tell how this impasse will be sorted out—by way of sticks, carrots, or anything in between. For now, Israel (with tacit support from many within the international community) is anxious to contain the Iranian problem without allowing any outside links, regional or global. This means that as long as the Iranian nuclear issue remains unresolved, Israel will be reluctant to change its own posture, especially on the issue of opacity.
The Fissile Materials Cutoff Treaty (FMCT) is a prominent element on the Obama administration’s nuclear roadmap. Israelis see the FMCT issue as incompatible with their national interest, and from more than one angle. For Israel, there is a unique dimension: whether (and how far) the FMCT is compatible with Israel’s long-standing commitment to opacity.
The FMCT idea, first proposed in the early nuclear age, resurfaced after the end of the Cold War. In September 1993, in a speech before the United Nations, President Bill Clinton proposed a “multilateral convention banning the production of fissile materials for nuclear explosives or material outside international safeguards.”31 Two months later the UN General Assembly adopted resolution 48/75L calling for the negotiation of a “non-discriminatory, multilateral and international effectively verifiable treaty banning the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.”32 In March 1995, the Geneva-based Conference on Disarmament (CD) established an ad hoc committee to carry out this mandate.
Despite its reservations, Israel joined the General Assembly consensus resolution and participated in the negotiations in the CD. Israel, however, kept a low profile, calculating that it would be wiser to let others impede the negotiating process. The strategy proved correct until the summer of 1998 when, due to the consensus rule, Israel’s joining the consensus became essential. By early August 1998, after China, India, and Pakistan joined the consensus, Israel was the last holdout in the CD. It was in those days of mid-August 1998 that the otherwise friendly Clinton administration exerted the harshest pressure it had ever used against any Israeli government.
Even though no draft treaty was on the horizon, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu recognized that an FMCT, any FMCT, might have profound long-term implications for the future of Israel’s opacity issue. Under intense pressure from Washington, however, Israel joined the consensus, but it also let it be known that Israel would oppose the treaty. In two letters and several conversations with the president, Netanyahu wrote Clinton, “We will never sign the treaty, and do not delude yourselves—no pressure will help. We will not sign the treaty because we will not commit suicide.”33 Netanyahu’s concerns were premature. During the (second) Bush administration, disagreements over the scope and purpose of the FMCT, and over linkages to other arms control issues, stalled the negotiations for nearly a decade.34
Throughout the 1990s Israel was vague, even secretive, about its reservations and concerns about the FMCT. It appears that its underlying but unstated reasons for opposition to the FMCT involve both political and technical considerations. Central to both was a perceived conflict between the FMCT and opacity.
Politically, the main Israeli concern is that an FMCT would be the first stage in a slippery slope pushing Israel toward premature nuclear disarmament. The Arab states would argue that an FMCT should not be a substitute for the establishment of a NWFZ in the Middle East, and should not legitimize Israel’s nuclear monopoly, something the Arab states could never accept. Hence, the Israeli fear is that the Arab states would “pocket” Israel’s agreement to an FMCT as the first practical step toward the establishment of a nuclear weapons–free zone in the Middle East and use it as a platform to exert further pressure on Israel to disarm.
Technically, it would also be difficult for Israel to maintain opacity under an FMCT, especially if the FMCT contained provisions for credible verification. Although the shutdown of Israel’s Dimona reactor, which presumably was used to produce plutonium for its weapons program, could be verified remotely, it is known that the reactor is also used to produce tritium via neutron irradiation of lithium-6 targets.35 Because tritium has a relatively short half-life—12.3 years—shutting down the reactor would eventually lead to a degradation of the tritium-boosted weapons in Israel’s arsenal. While Israel could continue to produce tritium as a party to the FMCT, it would have to agree to verification to ensure that the reactor was not also being used to produce plutonium. It is not clear that this could be accomplished without intrusive on-site inspections that would compromise opacity.36
During the second Bush administration Israel made its objections to the FMCT explicit and linked them to the Iranian nuclear issue. These objections reflect Israel’s old guiding principles on matters of arms control and disarmament: first, the nuclear issue has to be negotiated in a regional framework and in close linkage to the political situation; and second, the FMCT does not address Israel’s grave concerns about the deficiencies of the NPT.
Out of these general principles, one can articulate the two specific Israeli objections to the FMCT:
1. The global objection: an FMCT allows the operation of both uranium enrichment and reprocessing facilities as long as the products are used for os tensibly peaceful purposes, not weapons. However, even if the safeguards to detect possible diversion of these fissile materials to weapons are credible, they cannot prevent breakout, and they would provide a convenient rationale for the acquisition of expertise and technology that would facilitate the construction and operation of clandestine enrichment and reprocessing plants.
2. The regional objection: the only avenue for nuclear disarmament in the Middle East is via the regional NWFZ route, not the FMCT. Such a route could be initiated only in the context of a comprehensive peace process, where the peace issue is the primary driver, not the nuclear issue.
Israel sees an FMCT as a net loss, requiring constraints on its nuclear activities which could erode the benefits of opacity, while giving virtually no gain to Israel—especially in constraining Iran—in return. The FMCT has no direct application to an Iran that claims that its enrichment activities are legitimate under the NPT, directed to peaceful purposes. Furthermore, Israel views any international attention to its own nuclear program as a dangerous distraction from the urgent need to focus on the threat of Iranian nuclearization.
But this Israeli position may become more problematic in the coming years. The Obama administration is committed to reversing the Bush administration’s nuclear status quo. The FMCT is now a real item in President Obama’s nuclear disarmament vision. In his historic speech in Prague in April 2009, he declared the need for a treaty that “verifiably ends the production of fissile materials intended for use in state nuclear weapons.”37
An FMCT in the Middle East is not likely to be a viable near-term prospect. But one can still ask whether there is anything else that Israel could do, apart from military action against Iran, to lessen the dangers of nuclearization in the region and possibly to contribute ultimately to a satisfactory diplomatic deal with Iran (but surely not under the regime that we have today in Iran). Israel’s answer is in the negative. At present Israel vehemently resists any linkage—legal or otherwise—between the two nations’ nuclear programs; there is no connection between Natanz and Dimona.
Israel is legally right. In reality, however, for many people such a linkage is not only commonsensical, but also desirable. Some analysts argue that the dichotomy that Israel seems to advance, “either accept nuclear Iran or bomb Iran before” is a deceptive one.38 Bombing Iran would most likely guarantee that Iran would depart from the NPT and turn openly toward the bomb. The only way to prevent a nuclear Iran is for Iran itself to make the strategic decision that its own interest is not to have the bomb. At this point Israel would have to decide about its own strategic preference: does Israel prefer an open nuclear deterrence with Iran over a situation in which Israel accepts the linkage in order to establish a regional arms control scheme? The answer to this dilemma is not a simple one, but it is worth debating.
It is time to consider the Israeli nuclear case against the broader nuclear global context, both the vision of a world without nuclear weapons and the renewed interest in nuclear power. This historical junction could pose long-term challenges for Israeli nuclear policies, in particular to its commitment to the policy of opacity.
It is plain that there is major tension, indeed conflict, between the logic of nuclear abolition and Israel’s concept and practice of opacity. First, the movement to global nuclear zero must apply to all nuclear weapons states, those under the NPT and those outside the NPT. There can be no exceptions. But at present Israel has no interest whatsoever in nuclear disarmament. Second, the logic of global zero assumes at least minimum transparency about nuclear status: all nuclear weapons states must self-declare. Nuclear acknowledgment must be a norm; acknowledgment and declaration precede verification and global zero. For the short and mid term, the global buzz about a world without nuclear weapons—a talk that Israelis view as naive and unfeasible—will only strengthen the Israeli consensus behind opacity. While Israelis may understand “theoretically” the long-term linkage between horizontal and vertical proliferation, they hardly see the issue as applying to Israel, surely not now, before the Iranian nuclear issue is resolved. Israel would adopt a long “wait and see” attitude, reluctant to make any visible commitment that would go beyond its own past verbal commitment to a NWFZ. It is likely that Israel would even tighten the practice of its opacity policy as a firewall to ensure that no external political pressure could force Israel to support the disarmament vision prematurely.
Israelis believe that the policy of opacity, and the U.S. support behind it, will ensure Israel’s exceptional status, at least for the short and mid term. In general, Israelis view the vision of a world without nuclear weapons in a very similar fashion to the way they view their own official vision of a NWFZ in the Middle East. Both are essentially just verbal diplomacy, a vision for a far-into-the-future world that cannot be achieved in our lifetime.
For the longer run, however, a great deal depends on how the Iranian nuclear issue is finally resolved, and the state of the Arab-Israeli conflict. As long as Israel sees itself facing existential threats, or even the possibility of existential threats, it is unthinkable that it would be willing to disarm from its national insurance policy, its nuclear deterrent. It is unrealistic to expect that Israel could move toward a vision of nuclear disarmament unless a just and durable peace is achieved and established. A just and durable peace in the region is a necessary condition for a nuclear-free Middle East.
But one could also conceive of another long-term scenario. If a nuclear renaissance in electric power production were to become a reality in the Middle East, and if there were to be significant progress on the Arab-Israeli peace process front, it is also conceivable that, under certain political conditions, Israel would be interested in cooperating in the establishment of a regional framework of nuclear control. After all, as I pointed out earlier, probably only under a larger regional arrangement is there a chance to persuade Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions. Given the Israeli interest in preventing diversion of nuclear material and expertise that could be used for weapons, one could conceive of an Israeli interest in cooperating with others on creating a new structure of mechanisms for nuclear control, in particular, banning “sensitive technologies.” Such cooperation could be seen as part of a roadmap toward a NWFZ in the region. A new system of nuclear control might also apply to Israel’s own facilities, and in this case it would surely have an impact on opacity. This could be a true first step toward the establishment of a NWFZ in the Middle East.
If there is a real lesson that the Israeli nuclear case generates for the vision of a world without nuclear weapons, it is about the close linkage of nuclear weapons to major regional conflicts. Until these conflicts can be resolved, it is unlikely that regional nuclear weapons states will be willing to disarm.
This chapter is adapted from The Worst-Kept Secret by Avner Cohen. Copyright 2010 by the author. Reprinted with permission of Columbia University Press.
1. For a detailed account of Israel’s nuclear history, see Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
2. Ari Shavit, “Dimona,” Ha’aretz Friday Magazine, December 12, 1999.
3. I elaborate on the notion of “nuclear bargain” in my book The Worst Kept Secret: Israel’s Bargain with the Bomb (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
4. International Institute for Strategic Studies, Nuclear Programmes in the Middle East: In the Shadow of Iran (London: IISS, 2008), 136–38.
5. On Netanyahu’s views on the gravity of the “Iranian threat,” see Ronen Bergman, The Secret War with Iran (New York: Free Press, 2008), pp. 343–44.
6. Ari Shavit, “There Is No Palestinian Sadat, No Palestinian Mandela,” interview with Uzi Arad, Ha’aretz, July 11, 2009, at http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1099064. html.
7. “Mossad: Iran Will Have Nuclear Bomb by 2014,” Ha’aretz, June 16, 2009. I should note, however, that other Israeli leaders—among them even Minister of Defense Ehud Barak, as well as the current opposition leader and former foreign minister, Tzipi Livni—have been reluctant to use this phrase, insisting instead that Israel is the strongest military power in the region and could protect itself under any circumstances.
8. Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert highlighted this outlook in a public speech in Herzelya in early January 2007: “For many long years, we have followed Iran’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons, in the guise of a civilian nuclear program. They are working through secret channels in a number of sites spread out across Iran,” at http://www.pmo.gov.il/NR/exeres/C672BEFF-A736-42A0-83F5-6907958ADCBA,frameless. htm?NRMODE = Published).
9. For a mainstream Israeli analysis of these concerns, see Ephraim Kam, “A Nuclear Iran: What Does It Mean, and What Can Be Done,” Memorandum no. 88 (Tel Aviv: Institute for National Strategic Studies, 2007), at http://www.tau.ac.il/jcss/memoranda/ memo88.pdf.
10. National Intelligence Council, “Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities,” National Intelligence Estimate, November 2007, at http://www.dni.gov/press_releases/20071203_release.pdf. For a dissenting Israeli view of the November NIE, see Bergman, Secret War with Iran, esp. pp. 338–40, 346–49.
11. “How Secrecy over Iran’s Qom Nuclear Facility was Finally Blown Away,” The Times Online, September 26, 2009, at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/ middle_east/article6850325.ece.
12. Yet some Israelis question whether the current religious leadership of Iran could be deterred at all by nuclear weapons, given their views on Israeli and Shi’ite religious beliefs, and Israeli concerns that such beliefs could have an impact on Iranian leaders’ sense of rationality.
13. Shavit, “There Is No Palestinian Sadat.” Of course, with Israel’s nuclear weapon, there is already a nuclear Middle East, something that Israel’s policy of opacity does not acknowledge.
14. This point was central in Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s Herzliya speech in January 2007 (see note 8) .
15. Some Israeli leaders, such as Prime Minister Netanyahu, believe that Israeli deterrence must be fully explicit and crystal clear. In Netanyahu’s words: “Against lunatics, deterrence must be absolute, perfect, including a second strike capability. The crazies have to understand that if they raise their hands against us, we’ll put them back in the Stone Age” (quoted in Bergman, Secret War with Iran, p. 344).
16. Cam Simpson, “Israeli Citizens Struggle amid Iran’s Nuclear Vow,” Wall Street Journal, December 22, 2006.
17. In a speech on November 2006, Netanyahu claimed, “It’s 1938 and Iran is Germany. And Iran is racing to arm itself with atomic bombs. Believe him and stop him.” “Netanyahu: It’s 1938 and Iran Is Germany,” Ha’aretz, November 14, 2006.
18. The substance and much of the style of this section are taken from my contribution, “Israel: Nuclear Monopoly in Jeopardy,” in International Institute for Strategic Studies, Nuclear Programmes in the Middle East.
19. Ehud Olmert, “Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s Address at the 2007 Herzliya Conference,” Prime Minister’s Office, January 24, 2007, at http://www.pmo.gov.il/PMOEng/ Archive/Speeches/2007/01/speechher240107.htm.
20. Chuck Freilich, Speaking about the Unspeakable: U.S.-Israeli Dialogue on Iran’s Nuclear Program, Policy Brief no. 77 (Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2007), at http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC04.php?CID=284.
21. I was one of the critics of this phrase. See Avner Cohen, “Point of No Return?” Ha’aretz, May 17, 2005.
22. Shavit, “There Is No Palestinian Sadat.”
23. National Intelligence Council, “Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities,” National Intelligence Estimate, November 2007.
24. Shlomo Nakdimon, First Strike: The Exclusive Story of How Israel Foiled Iraq’s Attempt to Get the Bomb (New York: Summit Books, 1987).
25. “Mofaz Criticised over Iran Threat,” BBC News, June 8, 2008.
26. Ethan Bronner, “Olmert Says Israel Should Pull Out of the West Bank,” New York Times, September 29, 2008.
27. On the Kennedy–Ben Gurion 1961 meeting, see Cohen, Israel and the Bomb, pp. 131–32.
28. There are also important historical differences in the nuclear situation of the two countries. Technologically, today it is far easier to acquire nuclear weapons than it was in the early- to mid-1960s, when only four countries had such weapons. Politically, however, there is a nuclear nonproliferation regime, whose legal and normative core is the NPT, which did not exist then. Apart from its bilateral political pledges to the United States, Israel was sovereign, in terms of law and international norms, and thus free to pursue its nuclear ambitions, although surely in an opaque way. Dimona has never been under anything like international IAEA safeguards. All Israel had to deal with were bilateral site visits whose ground rules it controlled. This ended with the Nixon-Meir deal in 1969. Ultimately, there was nothing illegal, or even improper, about going nuclear opaquely. This is not the case with Iran today. Iran is an NPT signatory; that is, it has a legal obligation not to develop nuclear weapons. Iran is also under the IAEA safeguards system and under today’s verification technology. Of course, to the extent that Iran may have undeclared secret enrichment facilities—a most severe violation of its obligation under the NPT/IAEA—technology is incapable of detecting such activity.
29. This possibility became even more explicit with the Arab League announcement on March 6, 2008, that if Israel acknowledged it had nuclear weapons, Arab states would collectively withdraw from the treaty.
30. This section draws on a larger paper coauthored with Marvin Miller and commissioned for the International Panel on Nuclear Materials (IPFM). The paper appears in IPFM, Banning the Production of Fissile Materials for Nuclear Weapons: Country Perspective on the Challenges to a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty, a companion volume to Global Fissile Material Report 2008, pp. 27–33, at www.fissilematerials.org.
31. President William Jefferson Clinton, “First Address to United Nations,” United Nations General Assembly, September 23, 1993.
32. United Nations General Assembly, 48th Session, Resolution 75, “General and Complete Disarmament,” December 16, 1993, at http://www.un.org/documents/ga/ res/48/a48r075.htm.
33. Aluf Benn, “The Struggle to Keep Nuclear Capabilities Secret” (in Hebrew), Ha’aretz. September 14, 1999. See also Avner Cohen and George Perkovich, “The Obama-Netanyahu Meeting: Nuclear Issues,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, May 14, 2009.
34. “Fissile Materials Cut-off Treaty,” Reaching Critical Will, at http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/legal/fmct.html.
35. Quoted in Benn, “The Struggle to Keep Nuclear Capabilities Secret.”
36. Ibid.
37. White House, “Remarks by President Barack Obama in Prague,” April 5, 2009, at http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-By-President-Barack-Obama-In-Prague-As-Delivered/. Furthermore, Obama’s vision is not entirely a partisan vision. Senator John McCain has also endorsed a vision of a world without nukes, in which FMCT plays an important role.
38. Mark Fitzpatrick, The Iranian Nuclear Crisis: Avoiding Worst-Case Scenarios, Adelphi Paper 398 (International Institute for Strategic Studies, November 2008).