A Nuclear Necessity?

by Daniel E. Levenson

May 4, 2010

As discussions of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty have been underway at the United Nations, the question of whether or not Israel should have nuclear weapons has been raised repeatedly by Arab leaders over the past couple of days. In a recent Associated Press article posted on the Haaretz website, it was noted that Jordanian Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh expressed concern over the fact that Israel is not a signatory to the treaty, and said that “…Israel's failure to sign the NPT and allow international monitoring of its nuclear program renders the NPT a source of instability in the Middle East.” In the same article, it was noted that Egypt is also pushing for discussions of a “nuclear free” Middle East.

All of this talk about Iran, Israel and nuclear weapons in the region has me thinking about a deeper issue, and that is whether Israel should have a nuclear program at all. From my perspective, the question of whether Israel should have nuclear weapons or sign onto the NPT, is a difficult question to answer, because it is really two questions. The first question is whether any nation should have nuclear weapons, and if so, under what circumstances is a country justified in possessing weapons capable of such unparalleled destruction? The Second question comes after we have decided that some nations will inevitably possesses nuclear weapons, and now we must ask ourselves if Israel falls into the category of nations which are indeed justified in having them as part of its military arsenal. Personally, I think that conventional arms technology has advanced to a stage anyway where even small countries are more than capable of causing great destruction should they feel inclined to do so, and there is no question in my mind that great powers, such as the United States, Russia and China have sufficient resources to utterly annihilate any enemy without having to use nuclear weapons.

If, however, we accept the premise that some nations are bound to have nuclear weapons because the technology exists, then we are in more difficult territory, because we then have to ask ourselves which nations should be “allowed” to have them.  In general, I would say that liberal democratic nations who need them because they face a real existential threat should be allowed to possess nuclear weapons, and so Israel would certainly be included in this category.

The problem with this logic, of course, is that there are other countries, such as India, for example who could make the case that they are a democratic nation under threat from a belligerent (and nuclear) Pakistan, so the math doesn’t quite work out here. The truth of the matter is that the real implications of Israel’s need for nuclear weapons are truly horrible to think about. This is because, in my mind, if Israel were to actually use a nuclear weapon, it would do so in response to either a nuclear attack against itself or because the state was about to be completely overrun and destroyed by an invading army, and if things have gotten that bad, most likely we will be in the middle of World War III. At the end of the day, whether someone is killed by a conventional bomb or a nuclear bomb, the end result is the same, but what seems noteworthy to me in all of this discussion about nuclear weapons in the Middle East is that when Israeli leaders discuss the direction of their national security efforts they are still very much worried about the continued existence of the State of Israel. Until that is no longer the case, I highly doubt that Israel would ever consider giving up its nuclear arsenal, and sadly, I’m inclined to think that they shouldn’t.

Copyright Daniel E. Levenson 2010.