Although Israel’s Gaza war is most visibly being waged against Hamas, the ultimate adversary is Iran. If Israel’s counter-terrorism efforts should sometime bring it into direct confrontation with Iran, the result could be an immediate escalation between these two adversary states.

In such a plausible scenario, even a still-pre-nuclear Iran could elicit a “limited” Israeli nuclear reprisal. The principal escalation dangers would be an Iranian use of radiation dispersal weapons or an Iranian rocket attack on Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor.   

For Israel, a country smaller than Lake Michigan, nuclear weapons and strategy remain essential to national survival. Israel’s traditional policy of deliberate nuclear ambiguity, or “the bomb in the basement,” goes back to its early days. During the 1950s, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion understood the need for a dramatic “equalizer” against larger and more populous regional enemies.  

Today, facing a recalcitrant and soon-to-be nuclear Iran, Israel needs to update and refine its policy of deliberate nuclear ambiguity. The key objective of such needed changes would be credible nuclear deterrence, a goal that will now require selective nuclear disclosure. Though ironic and counter-intuitive, Iran will need to be convinced that Israel’s nuclear arms are not too destructive for actual use. 

There will be perplexing nuances. For Israel to fashion reason-based nuclear policies, Iran should be considered rational. But it is conceivable that Iran might act irrationally, perhaps even in alliance with other states (such as Syria or North Korea) or kindred terror groups (such as Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad or the Houthis).  

Unless Jerusalem were to consider Pakistan an authentic enemy, Israel presently has no already-nuclear enemies. Still, as an unstable Islamic state, Pakistan is potentially subject to a coup d’état by assorted Jihadist elements and is closely aligned with Saudi Arabia. The Sunni Saudi kingdom could sometime decide to “go nuclear” itself because of Shiite Iran’s steadily accelerating nuclear progress.

For Israel’s nuclear deterrence to work longer-term, Iran will need to be told more rather than less about Israel’s nuclear targeting doctrine and the invulnerability of Israel’s nuclear forces. In concert with such changes, Jerusalem will need to clarify its still-opaque “Samson Option.” The point would not be to “die with the Philistines” (per the biblical Book of Judges), but to enhance “high destruction” options of its nuclear deterrence posture. 

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