The Politics and Strategy of Nuclear Weapons in the Middle East: Opacity, Theory, and Reality, 1960-1991—An Israeli Perspective, and: Chemical Weapons and Missile Proliferation: With Implications for Asia/Pacific Region (review)

154 SAIS REVIEW The Politics and Strategy ofNuclear Weapons in the Middle East: Opacity, Theory, and Reality, 1960-1991—An Israeli Perspective. By Shlomo Aronson, with Odede Brosh. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York, 1992. 398 pp. $19.95/Paper. Chemical Weapons and Missile Proliferation: With Implications for Asia/ Pacific Region. Edited by Trevor Findlay. Boulder, Col.: Lynne Rienner Publishers , 1991. 179 pp. $30.00/Cloth. Reviewed by David J. Karl, MA. SAIS, 1989, and PhD. Candidate, School of International Relations, University ofSouthern California. Galvanized by the recent breakup ofthe Soviet Union into four nuclear-armed states and the discovery of an energetic Iraqi weapons program, international attention has once again focused on the proliferation ofweapons ofmass destruction as a threat to international security. The Politics and Strategy ofNuclear Weapons in the Middle East: Opacity, Theory, and Reality, 1960-1991—An Israeli Perspective , by Shlomo Aronson, and Chemical Weapons and Missile Proliferation: With Implications for Asia/Pacific Region, edited by Trevor Findlay, deal with different aspects of the proliferation issue. Aronson's work offers an interpretation of the effect Israel's possession of nuclear weapons has had on the international politics ofthe conflictive Middle East region. Findlay's compilation examines the prospects and possible consequences ofthe spread ofchemical weapons and ballistic missiles. Readers will draw quite different lessons from the two books. While the underlying theme in Aronson's work is the basic deterrence value ofnuclear weapons, Chemical Weapons and Missile Proliferation suggests, notwithstanding the recent upsurge of concern over their spread, that ballistic missiles and chemical weapons have little military utility. Of the two, Aronson's work is both the more interesting and problematic because of the ambiguity of the subject he seeks to elucidate. Nuclear weapons have always been obscured in secrecy by even those countries that admit to possessing them. Unlike members of the world's exclusive nuclear club who explicitly base their security policy upon open advertisement of their nuclear might, Israel has declined to publicly acknowledge itself as a nuclear power and has eschewed the use of direct nuclear threats as a means of protecting its security interests. The Israeli pattern of nuclearization has been described as nuclear "opacity." In theyears since Israel's accession to the nuclear club, this opaque pattern ofproliferation has been followed by India, Pakistan, and, perhaps, South Africa. Notwithstandingthis opacity, Aronson is convinced that Israel's nuclear efforts have decisively influenced every dimension of Middle Eastern politics. He maintains , for example, that Israel decided tojoin France and Britain in their 1956 war against Egypt in order to secure French assistance in building a nuclear weapons infrastructure, and that Arab fears of the imminence of an Israeli nuclear option precipitated the military crisis that led to the 1967 Six Day War. Equally important, Aronson claims that the possession ofa nuclear option gradually changed the very essence of the Arab-Israeli conflict, from its original existential character to one in which Israel's presence has been tacitly accepted by most ofits Arab neighbors. Fear ofnuclear retaliation led the Arabs to critically limit their military operations BOOK REVIEWS 155 in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and later served to induce Egypt to end its basic enmity with Israel. These are all plausible, if somewhat unconventional arguments. Yet in The Politics and Strategy ofNuclear Weapons in the Middle East, Aronson's assertions are more speculative than substantiated. His proclivity is to assert claims rather than cogently delineate their logic or provide empirical support. As a result, they are never persuasively developed. The esoteric nature of the subject matter is no doubt partly to blame. To inquire into the political effects of nuclear weapons and the nuanced ways they are employed in statecraft is often to ponder unanswerable questions. Despite the general intuition that nuclear weapons have influenced the conduct and content of international politics, our understanding ofthe parameters of this impact is little more than what it was at the beginning of the nuclear era. Even with a relative wealth of information, the role played by nuclear weapons in such a starkly-drawn event as the Cuban Missile Crisis is still disputed. Explication of these issues is all the more difficult in...