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Introduction In May 1991, United States President George Bush announced an arms control initiative for the Middle East. His main targets were nuclear weapons, missiles capable of carrying them, and other weapons of mass destruction, such as chemical and biological warheads. Mr. Bush's public initiative was rather short; but in it, he declared the Middle East to be especially dangerous in regard to nuclear weapons, and he promised action. The presidential initiative seemed to be the tip of the iceberg-or of several icebergs, whose emergence and development are the subject matter of this book. Bush's initiative-when specifically aimed at the Middle East-remained general and universal, at least on the face of it. It addressed itself to phenomena that proliferation scholars sometimes call"undeclared bombs."1 We shall call them "opaque" nuclear cases. The adjective "opaque" is derived from physics. In this context, it can be used to describe what happens when one looks at an object through a certain type of crystal. Depending on how you hold the crystal , you might not see the object clearly-it will be distorted. But if you hold the crystal"properly," you will see the object very clearly indeed. This is the challenge: to inquire into very important phenomenathe most important in the nuclear age-when the available, official information is incomplete, sometimes missing, and many times purposely misleading. I have used three sources of information, so that when all sources were compatible, an agreed-upon version could be offered. First, I have used official information-from various sources, public and archival, at home and abroad. In spite of the veil of security and censorship that ix x The Politics and Strategy of Nuclear Weapons in the Middle East usually covers sensitive subjects like ours, a wealth of firsthand information can now be found in the American presidential archives, in the Library of Congress, in private freedom of information institutions, and even in memorabilia that must be carefully compared to the primary sources themselves. True, this is not the whole story. Therefore, as a second source, I have studied the actions as well as the words of various actors in the arena; and thus their behavior-as far as it could be reconstructed -was added to their public stances and to the archival sources. And third, I have used a very large body of secondary sources related to the issue. My methodology was empirical-historical and inductive. I began with only one preconceived assumption; that nuclear weapons meant a new phase in human history, not only because of their power of destruction but also because of the symbolism and the emotions attached to them. I started with the facts and developed from them a larger picture in which some basic features could be seen repeatedly. Patterns emerged. These patterns could then be used-with much care-to study further developments and deviations from the patterns. None of the patterns, however, became a universalistic law-except in very broad and probabilistic terms-because of the uniqueness of the profound change imposed on human history by nuclear weapons, and because of their historical, cultural, and political uses. Mr. Bush's initiative has seemingly closed a circle that began in Eisenhower's and Kennedy's days. At that time, proliferation became a source of concern to the superpowers-and Israel did not escape their attention. Since then, however, "undeclared bombs" have been added to the declared ones in the Middle East and in the Subcontinent. Something like a worldwide nuclear underground is in the making, and it is possible that previous efforts to limit or ignore it have failed. In this connection, we must ask whether opacity, or the undeclared status of existing bombs, had seemed to be better than a declared status until it seemed clear that proliferation, declared or not, had reached such dimensions that it might prove dangerous to the international order. According to Mr. Bush, by the end of the century many countries may possess nuclear bombs, in the fashion that is the subject of this bookprobably undeclared. Our problem is to inquire into the relationship between proliferation and the nonproliferation campaign. But first we must study the initial motives for the acquisition of "national nuclear options" by countries such as Israel in comparison to the motives of the official members of the "nuclear club." There have been a number of contextual solutions to proliferation, Introduction xi such as the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968, the London...

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