Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez: How Not to Block a Mideast Bomb
You are the leader of a strong Middle Eastern state. You have fairly solid intelligence that your most formidable adversary is about to acquire nuclear weapons. The leaders of this rival nation, while uttering pious but ambiguous statements to the contrary, have spared no effort to ensure that no one believes them. The superpower friendly to this incipient nuclear state goes through the motions of opposing the nuclear project, but it is unlikely to exert meaningful pressure or enforce effective sanctions. To your consternation, your own superpower ally has abruptly shifted its approach and has tried to engage this hostile neighbor—to no avail. A bomb in your enemy’s possession will change the rules of the neighborhood rivalry dramatically and irrevocably to your disadvantage; in public statements, you charge that it will pose an existential threat to your country. Now that you have learned the program’s fruition is imminent, should you take advantage of the shrinking window of opportunity and strike, regardless of any collateral consequences?
In mid-1966, this was the dilemma faced by Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, when he received—from his Soviet backers and others—convincing reports that Israel was about to cross the nuclear threshold.
A mild disclaimer is in order here: We are not comparing, much less equating, Israel and Iran, nor the character and purposes of their respective nuclear programs; indeed, we have no first-hand knowledge of the Israeli project, much less the Iranian one. What we researched, and where we found intriguing parallels with the present day, is how the Israeli nuclear enterprise was perceived and counteracted by the Egyptians and Soviets. In our book Foxbats Over Dimona: The Soviets’ Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War, we described how fear of an Israeli nuclear bomb became a central motive for their joint, deliberate instigation of a crisis designed to precipitate a war in May and June of 1967....