Israel's Imperative

From the Israeli perspective, the U.S. deployment of an NMD contains several strategic and technological benefits and a number of secondary drawbacks. Having just begun the deployment of its own national antiballistic-missile (ABM) defense system, the Arrow II, Israel cannot but welcome the NMD. To be sure, there is a fundamental difference between the two defensive systems. The U.S. NMD is designed to meet a limited tactical threat: for instance, an attack on a small number of U.S. cities by "rogue states" such as Iraq and Iran. Nonetheless, the strategic threat to the national security of the United States continues to be posed not by the rogue states, but by the great nuclear powers, notably Russia and China, and requires a wholly different range of military, technological, and political measures. By contrast, given Israel's minute size (approximately the size of New Jersey), the nonconventional threat posed by these very rogue states is of the highest strategic order, indeed, a matter of national existence. Given the concentration of Israel's social, industrial, technological, and economic heartland in the tiny triangle of some 30 kilometers long by 10 kilometers wide which comprises metropolitan Tel Aviv, the Jewish state is fatally vulnerable to a nonconventional, and particularly a nuclear, strike.

It is precisely these narrowest of security margins that makes the potential benefits of the NMD so appealing to Israel, regardless of the fundamentally different circumstances for the two countries. To start, there are the technological spinoffs, to be gained through acquisition or cooperation, that could help improve Israel's Arrow II defense system (e.g., upgrading of early warning satellite systems, computer software to deal with the most modern missiles, and so on). The Arrow II is the only operational ABM national defense system with a capacity to destroy warheads in the stratosphere. It has effectively been a joint U.S.-Israeli program, with the United States footing a substantial part of the $1.2 billion bill to date and Israel doing the lion's share of the research, thus serving as a backdoor platform for the testing of new technologies, weapons systems, and strategic concepts that could benefit the U.S. research and development program in general and the NMD program in particular. Once the U.S. NMD is launched, this symbiosis would be reversed, and Israel would become the beneficiary of a far more encompassing development effort than before.

Mutual gains would not be limited to the technological sphere. The political and strategic implications for the United States of the ups and downs of the Arrow II program have not been lost on NMD supporters or critics. Once the NMD is up and running, Israeli policymakers can be expected to exploit its operational success as a means to curb domestic skepticism regarding the Arrow's value and to curb opposition in the United States to further appropriations for Israel's strategic defense.

The importance to Israel of such technological and political benefits cannot be overstated, given the horrendous destruction that could be inflicted on the Jewish state by the strike of a single nuclear missile and the attendant operational requirements of its ABM defense system. Hence, it is of critical importance to Tel Aviv that all internationally available technological, doctrinal, and political resources be pulled together to readily give Israel a measure of added security.

Indeed, a major concern among many analysts over the past few years has been that the spread of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons in the Middle East has not been accompanied by either practical steps or rigorous conceptual theories to prevent, or at least limit, the use of these terminally destructive weapons. Concern has been further compounded by the speed at which proliferation has taken place. This has meant that concepts of deterrence and strategies of restraint have failed to become firmly embedded in national decision making, injecting an added level of insecurity into the process. The extremist qualities of the policy aims of...