by Mark H. Gaffney, The Unz Review:
A week ago, University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer delivered an outstanding lecture on a timely subject: Israel’s nuclear weapons program. Mearsheimer briefly reviewed the history, from the program’s inception in the mid-1950s to Israel’s first deployment of nukes sometime in 1966-67. He also discussed a related issue: former president Obama’s nuclear treaty with Iran (the JCPOA) that Benjamin Netanyahu worked so hard to scuttle, and which Donald Trump mooted in 2017 when he unilaterally pulled the US out of the deal. And Mearsheimer also spoke (with some obvious trepidation) about the logic of nuclear deterrence and its perfect record of success, to date, in averting a major war between members of the nuclear club.
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Usually I agree with the realist Mearsheimer who is a first-rate scholar. However, as I listened, I could not help but wonder, given the Ukraine war and the fragile cease fire hanging by a thread in Gaza, if the success of deterrence has been illusory. Is the doomsday clock running out on our complacency?
If deterrence fails in the near future, the most likely flash point is the Middle East. Israel developed the Bomb covertly to acquire a weapon of last resort, what Seymour Hersh called “the Samson Option.” And, for a number of years, Israel’s nuclear deterrent did serve (or appeared to serve) in that capacity. But was it all a mirage?
In the early 1990s, there was some reason to hope that Israel might agree to a historic peace deal with the Palestinians. Unfortunately, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 dashed those hopes and set the stage for the ascendancy of Benjamin Netanyahu and the extreme right. Since then, the outlook has only worsened. Today, Israel finds itself in an increasingly untenable situation, one largely of its own making. At the end of this article I will return to the question of outcomes. But first, I need to review some pertinent facts about Israel’s nuke program.
In late 1981, while Israeli defense minister Ariel Sharon was preparing to invade Lebanon to destroy the PLO, an Israeli whistleblower approached US government officials with new evidence about Israel’s nuclear project. In his book Seymour Hersh does not name the individual, but evidently he was a scientist or technician who had worked at the Dimona nuclear complex. The man claimed that Israel’s arsenal numbered more than a hundred nuclear warheads, and he documented the claim with numerous photos taken inside an Israeli weapons depot. The photos showed warheads lined up in cold storage. US experts were shocked and amazed because the obviously genuine photos meant that Israel’s program was considerably more advanced than intelligence experts had imagined. The weapons were plainly thermonuclear warheads. (Seymour Hersh, The Samson Option, 1991, p. 288-291)
