“End Nuclear Insanity Before Nuclear Insanity Ends Humanity” ~llaw
Oct 27, 2024
LLAW’s NUCLEAR VIEWS, ISSUES & COMMENTS, Sunday, (10/27/2024)
An interesting — and more than valid today — point of view from “Modern Diplomacy” and author Prof. Louis René Beres from a comment made in reference to the the use of the 1st atomic bombs used against Japan from physicist, Leo Szilard, who was a team member of the United States’ Manhattan Project.
May I just say, today, “The ‘hive’ is much larger these days.” ~llaw
Survival Limits of Military Nuclear Power: Israel and “The Sting of the Bee”
Even while Israel remains the only regional atomic power, a nuclear war with the Islamic Republic remains possible.
October 27, 2024
In a now classic 1965 article on nuclear weapons,[1] physicist Leo Szilard offered a clarifying metaphor on different types of national nuclear capability. For some situations, the Manhattan Project physicist explained, belligerent use of nuclear ordnance could become self-annihilating. Recalling that one type of honey bee dies after it has stung, Szilard proceeded to identify certain “weaker” nuclear states as those with “sting of the bee” survival limits.
Such imaginative characterizations remain relevant to world politics. Were he writing today about possible Russian or North Korean interventions on behalf of Iran, Szilard would likely caution Israel that even its most powerful nuclear weapons could be immobilized by such surrogate foes. In essence, Szilard would warn Israel against ever being reduced to “bee sting” nuclear status. Following Israel’s October 26 self-defense retaliations against Iranian aggression – lawful counter-attacks against an enemy displaying continuously criminal intent or mens rea – this would be an appropriate warning.
For Israel’s senior military planners, issues of Iranian nuclearization are already dense and soon-to-be opaque. Even while Israel remains the only regional atomic power, a nuclear war with the Islamic Republic remains possible. More precisely, even a pre-nuclear Iran could bring Israel to the point where Jerusalem’s only strategic options would be intolerable capitulations or nuclear escalations. In effect, the second option would represent an “asymmetrical nuclear war.”
Would Israel allow itself to reach such an “all-or-nothing” decisional precipice? Though there are several persuasive answers, all that really matters is that Jerusalem consider this chilling prospect with attention to force-multiplying intersections and “synergies.” Accordingly, a one-sided nuclear war scenario should come to mind in which Iran would target Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor and/or employ radiation dispersal weapons against the Jewish State. Unique escalations could also follow in the wake of an Iranian resort to biological or electromagnetic pulse (EMP) ordnance. In a next-to-worst-case scenario, Israel would be prevented from striking preemptively against designated Iranian targets by Russian and/or North Korean nuclear threats. The worst-case scenario would be a “bolt-from-the-blue nuclear attack launched by Russia or North Korea (or both together).
Where does Jerusalem actually stand on such existential challenges? Looking toward its steadily-expanding conflict with Iran, any “one-off” preemption against Iranian weapons and infrastructures (an act of “anticipatory self-defense” under international law) would be problematic. At this late stage, any such defensive action would need to be undertaken in increments and during an ongoing war. In 2003, when this writer’s Project Daniel Group[2] presented its early report on Iranian nuclearization to then-Israeli PM Ariel Sharon, Iranian targets had already become more daunting than had been Iraq’s Osiraq reactor on June 7, 1981 (“Operation Opera”).
What next? There is a revealing strategic dialectic. During any expanding war against Iran, Israel could calculate that it has no choice but to launch multiple and mutually-reinforcing preemptive strikes against specific enemy targets.
At the same time, Russian and/or North Korean threats of support for Iran could lay the groundwork for a multi-state nuclear war, one that could come to involve the United States and/or China. While it might be tempting to claim such jaw-dropping interventions as “speculative” or “unlikely,” there is no science-based way to estimate the probabilities of any unique event. True probabilities can never be determined ex nihilo, or “out of nothing.”
There would be variously important qualifications. To the extent that they might still be usefully estimated, the risks of an Israel-Iran nuclear war will depend on whether such a conflict would be intentional, unintentional, or accidental. Apart from applying this critical three-part distinction, there could be no adequate reason to expect operationally-gainful strategic assessments of any such war. Ensuring existential protections from openly declared Iranian aggressions, Jerusalem should always bear in mind that even the Jewish State’s physical survival can never be “guaranteed.” At some point, even a nuclear weapons state could be left with only “the sting of the bee.”
There are further nuances. An unintentional or inadvertent nuclear war between Jerusalem and Teheran could take place not only as the result of misunderstandings or miscalculations between rational leaders, but also as the unintended consequence of mechanical, electrical, or computer malfunction. This should bring to analyzing Israeli minds a further distinction between an unintentional/inadvertent nuclear war and an accidental nuclear war. Though all accidental nuclear wars must be unintentional, not every unintentional nuclear war would need to occur by accident. On one occasion or another, an unintentional or inadvertent nuclear war could be the result of fundamental human misjudgments about enemy intentions. This catastrophic result could be both irremediable and irreversible.
History matters. An authentic nuclear war has never been fought. There are no genuine experts on “conducting” or “winning” a nuclear war. Reciprocally, Jerusalem ought always to disavow strategic counsel drawn from “common sense.” Complicated strategic problems can never be solved by “seat-of-the-pants” judgments or glaringly empty witticisms, For Israel, nothing could prove more important than to understand this imperative and to reserve complex nuclear calculations to small cadres of “high thinkers.” We are speaking here of the caliber of Szilard, Fermi, Oppenheimer, Einstein, Bohr and assorted others, not to make another “gadget,” but to plan for nuclear deterrent success via calculated non-use. All such urgent planning should be initiated on a theoretical level; it is not a task for conceptually unfortified operational designs.
There is more. Providing for Israeli national security amid a still-nuclearizing Iran ought never to become an ad-hoc “game” of chance. Without a suitably long-term, systematic and theory-based plan in place, Israel would render itself unprepared for an Iranian nuclear conflict that is deliberate, unintentional or accidental. At every stage of its lethal competition with Tehran, Jerusalem should never lose sight of the only sensible rationale for maintaining its national nuclear weapons and doctrine. That justification is (1) stable war management at all identifiable levels; and (2) reliable nuclear deterrence.
More than anything else, Israel’s strategic plans should include a prompt policy shift from “deliberate nuclear ambiguity” to “selective nuclear disclosure.” The core logic of this shift would not be to simply reframe the obvious (i.e., that Israel is already a nuclear power), but to remind would-be aggressors that Jerusalem’s nuclear weapons are operationally usable at all imaginable levels of warfare. Nonetheless, even with optimal prudential planning, Russian and/or North Korean threats to Israel could sometime become overwhelming. Ipso facto, Jerusalem will need to remain prepared for all plausibly related scenarios.
Reduced to its essentials, an authentically worst case scenario for Israel would commence with progressively explicit threats from Moscow about Israeli preemption costs. Israel, aware that it could not reasonably expect to coexist indefinitely with a nuclear Iran, would proceed with its planned preemptions in spite of the dire Russian warnings. In subsequent response, Russian military forces would begin to act directly against Israel, thereby seeking to persuade Jerusalem that Moscow is in a patently superior position to dominate all conceivable escalations. Alternatively, Putin could delegate such military responsibilities to North Korea, an Iranian ally that is presently preparing (within Russia) to augment Russian military forces against Ukraine.
For Vladimir Putin, such persuasive effort would not be a “hard sell.” Unless the United States were willing to enter the already-chaotic situation with unambiguously support for Israel, Moscow should have no foreseeable difficulties in establishing “escalation dominance.” In this connection, well-intentioned supporters of Israel could over-estimate the Jewish State’s relative nuclear capabilities and options. Significantly, there is no clear way in which the capabilities and options of a state smaller than America’s Lake Michigan could actually “win” at competitive risk-taking vis-à-vis Russia or North Korea. For Israel, in such unprecedented matters, self-deflating candor would be much safer than self-deluding bravado. As a strategic objective, Israel’s avoidance of “bee sting” nuclear capacity would be indispensable.
What about the United States? Would an American president accept an alliance commitment that could place millions of Americans in positons of grievous vulnerability? For those most part, the answer would lie with the character and inclinations of the American leader. It this president would visibly assume the long-term benefits of honoring US security guarantees, the world could be looking at another Cuban Missile Crisis or some similar confrontation. If, however, this president would take the openly-stated position of candidate Donald Trump concerning Russia’s aggression against Ukraine (“Let Putin do whatever the hell he wants”),[3] Jerusalem could have no choice but to accept a nuclear Iran. After all, a military confrontation with Russia would be one in which Israel could not reasonably expect to prevail.
There are additionally important issuers of nuclear doctrine. In his continuing war of aggression and genocide against Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has been recycling provocative elements of Soviet-era strategic thinking. One critical element concerns the absence of any apparent “firebreak” between conventional and tactical nuclear force engagements. Now, much as it was during the “classical” era of US-Soviet nuclear deterrence, Moscow identifies the determinative escalatory threshold with a first-use of high-yield, long-range strategic nuclear weapons, not a first use of tactical (theater) nuclear weapons.
But this perilous nuclear escalation doctrine is not shared by Israel’s United States ally, and could erode any once-stabilizing barriers of intra-war deterrence between the original superpowers. Whether sudden or incremental, any such erosion could impact the plausibility of both a deliberate and inadvertent nuclear war. As Israel could need to depend on firm US support in countering Russian nuclear threats, Vladimir Putin should be granted a prominent place in Israel’s threat assessments of Iranian nuclear progress. In principle, at least, this place ought even to be preeminent.
For Israel, the bottom-line of such dialectical analysis is an invariant obligation to analyze still-pertinent preemption–options as an intellectual task. Among other things, reaching rational judgments on defensive first strikes against a still pre-nuclear Iran will require fact-based anticipations of (1) Russian and/or North Korean intentions; and (2) United States willingness to stand by Israel in extremis. Prime facie, Israel’s growing nuclear war hazards include variously tangible scenarios of Russian or North Korean interventions on behalf of Iran. Remembering Leo Szilard’s elucidating metaphor, Jerusalem should consider in its strategic calculations that even with conspicuously refined nuclear weapons and doctrine, Israel could end up with “the sting of a bee.”
For the imperiled Jewish State, no such end could be survivable.
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TODAY’S NUCLEAR WORLD’S NEWS, Sunday, (10/27/2024)
All Things Nuclear
NEWS
Israel’s first open attack on Iran targets missile sites and apparently spares oil and nuclear ones
AP News
Get caught up on what you may have missed throughout the day. See All Newsletters … things no one ever said · Russia’s central bank raises …
Israel launches airstrikes on Iran | Utah Public Radio
Utah Public Radio
All Things Considered. Next Up: 6:30 PM Marketplace. 0:00. 0:00. All Things … There has been worry leading up to this that Israel might try to strike …
How Iran might react to Israeli airstrikes | Prairie Public
Prairie Public
All Things Considered. Next Up: 6:00 PM … There had been great concern over the past few weeks that Israel would hit Iran’s energy or nuclear …
Nuclear Power
NEWS
The Debrief: What is behind the revival of nuclear power? – YouTube
YouTube
washingtonexaminer #nuclearpower #kamalaharris #environment #energy Washington Examiner Editor-in-Chief Hugo Gurdon joins Investigations Editor …
From Nvidia to nuclear power to extra spicy hot sauce – Yahoo Finance
Yahoo Finance
From Nvidia to nuclear power to extra spicy hot sauce · The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the …
Nuclear Energy Renaissance: Should You Buy NuScale Power Stock? – Yahoo Finance
Yahoo Finance
Companies and governments around the world are building and restarting nuclear power plants after realizing they are perfect for the growth in …
Nuclear Power Emergencies
NEWS
Onagawa No. 2 nuclear reactor set for restart amid mixed local reception – The Japan Times
The Japan Times
The No. 2 unit at Tohoku Electric Power’s Onagawa nuclear power … Some emergency power generators at the plant stopped functioning due to damage from …
Coalition confident new Queensland government will back nuclear power – ABC News
ABC
Nationals leader David Littleproud says he would expect the new LNP government in Queensland to work with the Coalition on nuclear power if it won …
Nuclear War
NEWS
Satellite images show damage from Israeli attack at 2 secretive Iranian military bases
AP News
… that experts in the past have linked to Tehran’s onetime nuclear weapons program and at another base tied to its ballistic missile program.
Whitmire: The long stupid saga of Kay Ivey’s nuclear war – AL.com
AL.com
This is an opinion column. On Tuesday, Gov. Kay Ivey fired a man. Veterans Affairs Commissioner Kent Davis didn’t resign to spend more time with …
Survival Limits of Military Nuclear Power: Israel and “The Sting of the Bee”
Modern Diplomacy
Even while Israel remains the only regional atomic power, a nuclear war with the Islamic Republic remains possible.
Nuclear War Threats
NEWS
NATO begins its two week nuclear war exercises – Daily Excelsior
Daily Excelsior
… threat.” The announcement of the nuclear exercises came just as survivors of the two US atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima …
Survival Limits of Military Nuclear Power: Israel and “The Sting of the Bee”
Modern Diplomacy
At the same time, Russian and/or North Korean threats of support for Iran could lay the groundwork for a multi-state nuclear war, one that could come …
Killing Iran’s nuclear program: Did Israel throw away a golden opportunity? – analysis
The Jerusalem Post
… threats by the Biden administration about weapons transfers if the … First, Jerusalem had more legitimacy to attack the nuclear program than at any …