Effects of a Mideast nuclear war

Summarized by Daniel Pipes, Anthony Cordesman estimates the consequences of a nuclear war between Iran and Israel. It is the opposite of former Iranian president Rafsanjani prediction in 2001 that such an exchange “would not leave anything in Israel but the same thing would just produce minor damages in the Muslim world.” According to Cortesman, Israel might lose up to 800,000 dead but would be able to continue functioning as a society, while Iran, because of the greater number and yield of Israeli warheads, would lose up to 28 million dead and would cease to exist as a functioning society. He says the same would happen to Syria or Egypt if they got involved.

- end of initial entry -

Jeff C. writes:

More thinking inside the box, as usual. A nuclear armed Iran has a much better opportunity to destroy Israel than through direct confrontation: by giving the bombs to Hezbollah to use and then denying all responsibility. Who will Israel retaliate against then? Despite Israel’s reputation for disproportionate responses in their actions, there is significant evidence that the moral rot in Israel’s society is so deep that a strong reaction may not happen. Why? Consider the following quote from Menachem Begin, considered one of the most “right wing” prime minister’s in Israel’s history:

“Prime Minister Begin stated unequivocally that Israel would not have bombed the Iraqi Osirak reactor once it became “hot,” which, according to intelligence sources, was expected to occur in July or September 1981: “No Israeli government could contemplate bombing [when] such an attack would have brought about a massive radioactive fallout over…Baghdad [in which] tens of thousands of innocent residents would have been hurt.” The commander in chief of Israel’s armed forces apparently told Begin that he would not have obeyed an order to bomb the reactor under such circumstances. Begin went so far as to to say he did not think that if Tel Aviv had been destroyed by an Iraqi nuclear bomb, he could agree to a retaliatory attack against Baghdad: “That is our morality.” As he put it in an related context, “The children of Baghdad are not our enemy.”

If Hezbollah uses the bomb, it’s anyone’s guess whom Israel would retaliate against between Lebanon, Syria, Iran or all three. Egypt and Saudi Arabia though? I think not a chance (although I sincerely hope they would as well).

Finally, by the end of 2004 Israel had a population of 6,869,500, including 5,237,600 Jews. 3.15 million, almost all Jews, live in the city of Tel Aviv and many more live in the suburbs. Essentially, it’s the heart of Israel’s Jewish population. It wouldn’t take many nukes, including the fallout (which would cause tremendous cancer deaths and ruin the economy), to destroy Israel.

Indian living in the West writes:

That is an unbelievable quote. It is like one of those “saintly” nonsensical things one would expect from the writings of someone like Gandhi. But Begin?

It shows that even the liberal Americans of the Cold War years were healthier than the Israelis. At least they agreed that America should retain the capacity to retaliate against a Soviet nuclear attack—the doctrine of “mutually agreed destruction”, which although titled “MAD” was actually what prevented the Cold War from turning “hot” in the first place.

In a country like the Iran, the mullahs would regard Begin’s sentiments as another example of the weakness of the infidel and confirmation of their own insane belief that the true believers shall conquer the earth.

A. Zarkov writes:

A lot of people seem to believe that Iran cannot be deterred by the consequences of a massive nuclear retaliation. Personally I doubt it. The Iranians are likely employing a variant of Richard Nixon’s “madman strategy,” where government leaders try to convince their adversaries they might be crazy. The Iranians are not stupid, and they can do damage calculations. Anyone can download an unclassified version Glasstone’s report, “The Effects of Nuclear Weapons,” off the web. With his formulas and graphs, you can calculate blast and radiation effects pretty easily, and they are truly terrifying. Israel, having air superiority, could also augment its attack by using fuel-air bombs also known as “thermobaric weapons.” These weapons create an overpressure over a wide area collapsing buildings. They also produce a devastating heat impulse that can roast and suffocate the occupants of non-airtight bunkers and tunnels. Some people even think thermobaric weapons approximate low-yield nuclear weapons.

Iran will probably get rudimentary nuclear weapons, and neither Israel or the U.S. will attack. The West will just have to learn to live with a nuclear Iran, the way it lives with a nuclear China, India and Afghanistan. Both the U.S. and Israel are too timid to kill large numbers of Iranians with conventional weapons. They would try to eliminate Iran’s nuclear capability with so-called “surgical strikes,” and that would most likely fail, leaving us with a nasty war. But if somehow Iran becomes convinced that Israel would not retaliate massively, it might just try a first strike. If the pacifists should come to power in the U.S. or Israel, we might have this problem.

If current trends continue, the U.S. could become a third-world country in less than 50 years. The U.S. stopped testing nuclear weapons in 1993 and signed an unverifiable treaty. I defy anyone to tell me how we can detect tests less than 10 kilotons especially if they are detonated in cavities like hollowed-out salt domes. I ask our politicians, can the U.S. even field a nuclear weapons test today? We have to rely on models and calculations for the so-called “stockpile stewardship program.” Both nuclear design labs (Los Alamos and Livermore) have been put under a morale-destroying private corporation.

In my opinion, the best analysis the nuclear confrontation and deterrence is still Herman Kahn’s (out of print) “On Thermonuclear War.”

Alan Levine writes:

I would be VERY skeptical of the notion that Israel would not respond exceedingly violently to a nuclear attack, even if it could not “positively” identify the attacker or it was done by Hezbollah. It is true that Israel shows some of the signs of the rot prevalent in the rest of the West, but much less so; and in such a catastrophe, even a Britain or France would respond. In fact, I would go so far as to say the militaries involved would respond even if their political masters did not. I think that nuclear attack or other terrorist action producing really big casualties, would probably be the kind of trauma James Burnham wrote of as cutting through even the liberals’ ideological cover.

One would hope the latest riots in France will do this there, but it may take something even worse.

I doubt whether it is meaningful to accept the “self-denying ordinances” in which governments say they will never do this or that under attack. I might note that the United States did not regard the North Korean attack in 1950 as a casus belli … until it took place. Similarly, between the World Wars, the British swore they would never fight against Germany over any issue other than a direct attack on Western Europe, but wound up declaring war over Poland; both Western allies wound up endorsing massive fire attacks on enemy cities of the sort they had earlier condemned or even regarded as contrary to international law.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 26, 2007 06:38 PM | Send