Publication date:
04 April 2016Length of book:
194 pagesPublisher
Rowman & Littlefield PublishersDimensions:
239x158mm6x9"
ISBN-13: 9781442253254
Now facing a genuinely unprecedented configuration of existential threats, Israel's leaders must decide whether to continue their deliberate nuclear ambiguity policy (the "bomb in the basement") as they consider such urgent and overlapping survival issues as regional nuclear proliferation, Jihadist terror-group intersections with enemy states, rationality or irrationality of state and sub-state adversaries, assassination or "targeted killing," preemption, and the probable effects of a "Cold War II" between Russia and the United States. Israel must develop a strategic posture that will involve a suitably coherent and refined nuclear strategy. This book critically examines Israel's rapidly evolving nuclear strategy in light of these issues and explains how it underscores the overarching complexity of strategic interactions in the Middle East.
This timely and original scholarly book critically examines Israel's rapidly evolving nuclear strategy, a subject with which the author has been authoritatively acquainted for many years…. Surviving Amid Chaos, therefore, is a book that presents an altogether original synthesis of strategic and jurisprudential factors regarding Israel's nuclear strategy. In the final analysis, as this new book argues convincingly, Israel's nuclear strategy must spring from antecedent nuclear doctrine….Among other things, his book will explain why the best argument for ending deliberate nuclear ambiguity has nothing to do with simply re-stating the obvious, but rather with the deterrence-enhancing advantages of undertaking certain limited and incremental disclosures. Iran and other centers of future nuclear threat could be more durably deterred by Israel's nuclear strategy if that strategy suitably expressed the usability, survivability, and penetration-capability of Israel's indispensable nuclear forces.