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CHAPTER NINE The Doctrine of Opaque Nuclear Monopoly Shortly before the 1981 elections, the Israeli Air Force attacked and destroyed the Iraqi nuclear reactor Tammuz 1 near Baghdad. Several months later, Begin became prime minister for the second time, thanks, among other things, to the successful attack, and to the unpopular counterarguments presented by Shimon Peres, the new chairman of the Labor Party. The election victory was narrow, though, and Begin needed every vote he could muster in the Knesset, including that of Ariel Sharon, a general-turned-politician who had joined Begin's nationalist-populist Likud bloc, but had retained his independence within it at the same time. Soon General Sharon, who had publicly advocated such an attack without being specific, became the new minister of defense. According to Begin's cabinet secretary, Arieh Naor, in about October 1980 (about a year before the attack), the prime minister had brought a motion before the cabinet that was linked to the attack. Later on, the initial decision was formulated in public to the effect that "Israel would not allow an enemy state to develop or acquire means of mass destruction."1 According to Naor, this "Begin Doctrine" was linked by the prime minister directly to the Iraqi nuclear effort: "Begin argued that three ... Hiroshima ... type bombs would suffice to destroy Israel. Iraq, he said, might be tempted to use this weapon, once she had succeeded in developing it." Thus the motion, endorsed as it was, gave Begin, his future defense minister Sharon, and chief of staff General Rafael Eitan the formal base on which to act. When he took office in the autumn of 1981, Sharon made several public announcements that could have been interpreted as a new 167 168 The Politics and Strategy of Nuclear Weapons in the Middle East defense doctrine. The most important was a speech about Israel's strategic agenda, which was printed inMa'ariv on December 18,1981, under the title "An Undelivered Speech." The speech was scheduled to be presented a few days before its publication as the opening address at a symposium at the Tel Aviv University Strategic Center, but it was never delivered, because at the time the Knesset was embroiled in a debate on the annexation by Israel of the Golan Heights. The annexation itself was meant to be one of the Begin-Sharon cabinet's responses to American displeasure with Likud's nationalist policy.2 Sharon's speech was described in the Arab world as something like "an opaque nuclear monopoly." And it was closely tied up with Sharon's self-image and his domestic political calculations. Sharon's manners and behavior in the past-a mixture of aggressive , sometimes unscrupulous and opportunistic outbursts-could lead one to underestimate him. Yet he was able to think in a strategic and political "grand" fashion, though the same approach was grand enough to be shallow as well. His habit of ignoring details every now and again proved disastrous several times during his career. His new doctrine must have been founded on his analysis of the four forms of war-making mentioned in Chapter 7: (1) a war of destruction (for example, Israel's War of Independence); (2) an escalating limited war (which could become a war of destruction and was the common Israeli perception of the events leading up to the Six-Day War); (3) a limited war on Israel's margins or a war of attrition (aimed at limited territorial gains, at killing as many Israeli soldiers as possible, and at gaining superpower intervention-Sharon's public definition of the 1973 war)3 ; and (4) a guerrilla or a terrorist campaign. This last form of warfare was meant to describe activities emanating from Lebanon of various Palestinian organizations in Israel and abroad after 1970. Sharon's new doctrine was supposed to address all four possibilities "without buying one more airplane or tank" to boost Israel's conventional power. Despite the growing conventional might of all of the Arab states-including Egypt, but especially Syria-Sharon publicly promised something close to absolute security without further procurement of conventional weapons.' One reason for the disparity between Arab and Israeli "might" was that Israel's manpower seemed to have been exhausted in the large conventional efforts since 1973, while Arab manpower was just beginning to mobilize. And shortly before he died in 1982, General Dayan had protested against further Israeli conventional efforts, in line with his older nuclear stance coupled with his peace strategy...

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