Thinking the Unthinkable?

Great interview with Israeli national security advisor Uzi Arad over at MESH. This, by far, is the most interesting (and puzzling) message:

"The second note of importance is the continued building of infrastructure to prepare the ground for action to prevent Iranian acquisition of the bomb. Arad does not believe that the non-military options will work, and that a maritime blockade might escalate in any event. At the same time, he defines preventing an Iranian bomb as an existential imperative: we cannot live with a nuclear Iran because a nuclear Middle East would not be the same as the Cold War nuclear stalemate. A nuclear Middle East would become a multi-nuclear Middle East, with all that entails.

There is an ironic contradiction here. Arad puts great weight on preventing nuclearization of the region, but at the same time declares himself an acolyte of the late Herman Kahn, the nuclear strategist who rejected the idea of mutual deterrence and insisted on “thinking about the unthinkable,” that is, the actual waging of war with nuclear weapons. Arad even mentions that he once wrote a paper on possible limited nuclear war in Central Europe. If it is so critical to prevent Iran emerging as the first declared nuclear-weapons state in the region, then why is Kahn, of all people, put forward as an icon for the new era?"

Comments

[moz]

I thought Israel had admitted that they're nuclear armed? It's old news that they are, but a tear or two ago I thought they'd actually admitted it.

Which would make Iran the second nuclear armed nutcase in the middle east, not the first. Which is, as the Israelis so correctly point out, very likely to cause a war fought with nuclear weapons. Because, as the Israelis insist, no-one else can be allowed to have them, and they're willing to start a war to stop it.

This is exceptionalism at its worst (but Israel is based on exceptionalism). We can have X/do X, but no-one else can. Wrong.

[A.E.]

I think the Kahn angle is particularly interesting. It is rather schizophrenic to refuse to contemplate a possible future of Iranians with nukes yet champion a military theorist who delighted in coming up with gruesome scenarios of nuclear war precisely because he wanted to explore the "unthinkable" for its own intellectual (and policy) merit. Perhaps this is the Israeli problem---wanting Kahn's hardheaded nature without his daring and introspection.