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CHAPTER ONE Strategy, History, and Politics Nuclear strategy-both in regard to proliferation and nonproliferation -must be studied within a political-historical context. Yet one of the original assumptions behind the nonproliferation campaign can be sought through deductive and apolitical thinking, as Robert Jervis argued about Western deterrence theories ten years ago.1 An apolitical approach harbors many of its supporters' values and status quo biases, some of which characterize not only nonproliferation thinking in the West but also General Pierre Gallois' and Kenneth Waltz's "pro-proliferation " thinking.2 These arguments neutralize each other, leaving only one direction for fruitful discussion, that of historical analysis. Like many deductive theories of human behavior, non- and proproliferation thinking harbor contradictory assumptions about human nature. Thomas C. Schelling, otherwise a liberal thinker, is pessimistic about humankind's common sense and responsibility with regard to nuclear weapons, and he bases his opinion on the assumption (discussed in Chapter 2) that madmen and children cannot be deterred. In Schelling's view, the more people with access to nuclear weapons, the greater the likelihood that one of "them" will be prepared to use these weapons, even in the face of countemuclear threats. The rather conservative French General Gallois, on the other hand, as well as his American colleague Waltz, take the optimistic view that nuclear elites are forced to socialize with each other, because they realize that each has the power to destroy the other. Such generalizations, I believe, require examination in contemporary historical terms. But we must always be conscious of the way these theories have already influenced reality. Let us start our argument with the contention that nonproliferation thinking is based, among other things, on deterrence-theoretical 1 2 The Politics and Strategy of Nuclear Weapons in the Middle East thinking, and on what we will call the "strategic" approach. This approach is highly technical and relies on a specific terminology. Furthermore , nonproliferation is anchored in a moral-political commitment against the bomb, whose historical roots should be studied from the vantage point of the 1990s. Finally, nonproliferation is, of course, an obvious tool used by the possessors of nuclear weapons for their own purposes; however, as a result of the open nuclear race and nuclear threats of the past, possessors have developed various kinds of responsibilities toward each other, as well as toward third parties. As we have already stated, nuclear proliferation, including its opaque pattern, is politically motivated, and must be studied as a political -historical, culture-bound phenomenon.3 The actual scholarly work in this regard requires a good knowledge of the cultures and histories of the nations involved. Such a very broad study could not be offered here; the political aspects are the main focus of this book. The reader can consult history books and other sources of such information to put my political science into the utterly necessary framework of historical analysis . In the context of cultural-historical values and beliefs, "political" is understood here as the use of power to acquire and maintain control over people, over territory and natural resources, or to influence human behavior. "Political" can be divided into two categories: "high politics," referring to basic values, as one understands them and scholars may judge them to be; and "low politics," referring to personal, partisan, and prestige calculations (when we grossly simplify these matters for our purposes). Still, the question remains as to whether the nuclear age has not transformed this complex from that of a mere power game to a struggle whose results are more predictable. In other words, whereas a conventional power game could be efforts to attain and use power at all costs, because at least one party believed that the results were undeterminable in advance, the nuclear age may have transformed politics into an effort to acquire those things of value in an individual cultural-historical context with power, which must be used with care, as a major item among them. In this connection, we must ask ourselves which power has an opaque posture due to its peculiar character. But, before discussing this, let us return to our definition of politics, which, in our view, may include the well-known goal of"grand strategy": to influence the enemy's will to fight.• The values and the history, the psychology and the cultural aspects of the enemy's existence, are no less important to our understanding than the "means," the actual subject matter for many strategic-military thinkers. "High politics" could mean...

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