Nuclear security

Israel's nuclear strategy and US national security

The situation facing Israel is fundamentally different from our nuclear confrontation with the Russians. NATO never really faced a believable threat of being overwhelmed by the Warsaw Pact at the tactical or even the operational level of war. Our hugely powerful NATO military ground forces with dramatic air and sea superiority, and our gigantic western economic power, made it extremely unlikely that we would be forced to use nukes in the absence of an actual threat or use of nuclear weapons by the Russians.

The Russians were also rational actors. They were chess players. They were pragmatic. They were realists. Thankfully, deterrence held until the Russian empire fell apart from internal contradictions.

The Israelis have no such safeguards. They are surrounded by a mass of potentially hostile states and populations who have clearly stated a commitment to the destruction of the Jewish state. These state and non-state actors are motivated by rage and religion, not by geostrategic and pragmatic calculations. If these potential enemy states were able in the coming decades to tactically mass their conventional forces, they could without question overwhelm the IDF, and force a nuclear response to an existential threat.