Afraid not. Mutually Assured Destruction kept the US and Russia at bay but there were moments of near failure. A bunch of little local MAD scenarios just increases the risk that one of them will flair up, either through error or bad policy.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

MAD: It's all fun and games until someone loses a (sub)continent.

MAS is mad, but Nathan makes a good point.

Israel's nuclear deterrent is worse than worthless. (Israel can win any war by conventional means.)
All it does is incite others (like Iran) to nuke up. Once that happens, Israel will be at a disadvantage because of its size. (It takes only 1 bomb to wipe it off the map.)

Read this book. Ken Waltz, realist extraordinaire, argues that nuclear proliferation is a good thing, and Scott Sagan rebutts him. It's a staple of IR classes everywhere.

Not sure I get your point. Pakistan got a bomb. NK did. Iran's next.

Delivery systems. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs physically weighed 5-10 tons. A modern US ICBM or SLBM warhead is a few hundred pounds.

In the case of Israel, only ballistic missiles, and possibly a submarine [likely suicide] has any chance of breaking through the air defenses. The physically heavier the bomb, the less range you have unless you increase rocket power. It's entirely likely the Taepodong-2 blew because the North Koreans were trying to reduce all parasitic weight, and made something too weak to withstand the aerodynamic forces of launch.

Pakistan and India have bombs and missiles, although there isn't hard unclassified evidence that they have successfully mated them, and launched under operational conditions even with an inert warhead of the same weight. NK went BOOM. Iran is reasonably 5-10 years from miniaturizing to the point that they can missile-deliver a bomb.

This isn't a simple matter of having the plans. There's a great deal of experience that has to be built up in both practical engineering of independently designed systems, and also the practice of assembling and firing. Both the US and USSR had lots of missiles blow up in the early years, and many of the reasons were the nuances of handling exotic fuels, avoiding aerodynamic damage during takeoff (that's what got the last Shuttle, and the US has a great deal of experience), and weather effects at launch and in the target area. Local weather at the target can have a huge effect on where the warhead lands.

You say Pakistan has a bomb, and probably more than one. Nevertheless, there seems an assumption that a single bomb, within the capabilities of the usual suspects, could obliterate Israel. They don't have things with megaton yields, or MIRV technology...even MRV.
Realistically, and why I gave the reference to Glasstone, it would take a fair number. Complicating the picture is that Israel does have some antimissile defense in the Arrow and PAC-3.

Immense damage, yes. Total destruction, especially of the deterrent, less likely.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

4-5 KT would surprise me, unless that was an incomplete ("fizzle") yield. Your basic first- or second-generation fission bomb, which apparently has worked the first time for everyone that's tried, comes out in the 10-20 KT range. Having something controllably smaller (e.g., the US W54, with about an 0.1 KT or 10 ton yield) requires lots of design and experimentation to keep that small. Typically, that's going to take much more complex linear implosion system to use a smaller amount of fissionable material.

The US used a conventional bomb with 7.5 tons of yield in Desert Storm, and the newer MOAB has greater high-explosive yield although I don't remember the number.

There have been reports that some of the Indian test were fizzles, possibly because they tried to make tritium-boosted fission work and failed.

Let them stay nuclear for a while. A physician friend and I did some preliminary estimates for an engineered bioweapon that potentially could wipe out everything dowb through the reptiles; the amphibians might make it. We assumed cockroaches, lawyers, and sharks would survive, but we didn't have adequate data.

"The Merry Minuet" by the Kingston Trio
They're rioting in Africa
They're starving in Spain
There's hurricanes in Florida
And Texas needs rain.

The whole world is festering
With unhappy souls
The French hate the Germans,
The Germans hate the Poles

Italians hate Yugoslavs
South Africans hate the Dutch
And I don't like anybody very much

But we can be grateful
And thankful and proud
That man's been endowed
With a mushroom shaped cloud

And we know for certain
That some happy day
Someone will set the spark off
And we will all be blown away

They're rioting in Africa
There's strife in Iran
What nature doesn't do to us
Will be done by our fellow man.
--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

In support of your argument, the US gave the Soviets some of our most sensitive technology: the permissive action links (PAL), which prevent a weapon from detonating without a coded external signal not known to the crew. The weapons are designed that attempts to bypass the PAL will damage them to the point of needing factory rebuilding.
--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Since Israel has had a nuclear program since the late 1950s I highly doubt there is much connection between Israel's nuclear program and that of Iran. If you ever look at a map you will note that Iran is separated ffrom Israel by Iraq and Syria. Furthermore except for the current regimes continuing threating of Israel generally Israel has had good relations with Iran.

I would suggest that Iran's nuclear program has a lot more to do with both making itself feel powerful and allowing itself to intimodate Iraq, it did start before Saddems fall, and the Saudis.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

I still don't see your point. Iran is a big, rich country with a highly educated elite. It's a matter of time before they overcome all these technical problems. And anyway don't forget the psychological impact. If Israel's protection against a nuclear attack lies in the hands of a bunch of Arrows and PACs, I doubt people will sleep well at night.

"Since Israel has had a nuclear program since the late 1950s I highly doubt there is much connection between Israel's nuclear program and that of Iran."

Given that Iran had a nuclear energy program under the Shah and the US supported that, and the US today recognizes that Iran requires nuclear energy to deal with its energy needs over the next twenty years, I highly doubt there is any connection between the Iranian nuclear energy program and any sort of of "nuclear weapons program".

Especially given that there is absolutely NO evidence that Iran HAS a "nuclear weapons program" other than some documents they got from the Khan network.

As I've point out repeatedly here, the purpose of any Iranian "nuclear weapons program" would be to take "regime change" by Israel via its proxy the US off the table.

And THAT is directly connected to Israel's nuclear arsenal.

Israel has NEVER had ANY requirement for nuclear weapons and never will. The SOLE purpose of Israel's nuclear arsenal is precisely the goal of any Iranian such - to be able to remove "regime change" - in this case of Israel's regime - off the table by any conventional military pressure.

In other words, Israel used its nuclear arsenal to render itself invulnerable to any geo-political pressure from the surrounding region.

Iran logically wishes to be able to do the same. If and when it ever gets a nuclear weapon, Israel will then be unable to use the US to attack Iran - because the mullahs, being subject to attack anyway, will no longer be motivated not to first-strike Israel - and Israel, despite having a second-strike capability, cannot survive a first strike that takes out its capital and a major portion of its population by losing Tel Aviv.

THAT is precisely WHY Israel is now forcing the United States into a war with Iran by its present actions.

The story is told that during WWII, Niels Bohr toured the U.S., specifically the labs and installations devoted to building an atomic bomb.  He said that he initially had that such a weapon was not possible, because building it would require the transformation of an entire country (and its economy) into a factory.  He then added that the United States had indeed done so.

As a side note, within ten days of the discovery of the fission process, physicists had the theory of an atomic bomb.  J. Robert Oppenheimer wrote that a kilogram of uranium could easily "blow itself to hell."  The theory behind the bomb was clear; that's part of why Edward Teller devoted his time to the Super (or fusion or hydrogen) bomb -- the atomic bomb wasn't interesting to him.

Things have changed in the last 61 years, but it remains a substantial step from the theory of atomic weapons to the actuality of atomic weapons. 

PSA: There is a Users' Help Forum.

Clancy has an afterword in which he says that certain details were deliberately made inaccurate. This is the only book where he makes such a comment, but, being somewhat familiar with biological weapons, the details in "Executive Orders" don't quite make engineering sense.

A sonar engineer friend made similar comments about "Hunt for Red October". Mind you, he got a little excited when we watched the movie version. In the sub-to-sub "dogfight" near the end, Art suddenly jumped up, yelled, at the top of his lungs, "go active, you idiot", realized where he was, and sat down very quickly.

Actually, the bomb in SoaF was intended as a two-stage fission-fusion device. One of the plot details never explained is that while they got the special nuclear material for the fission (Primary) trigger from the salvaged Israeli bomb, it was never explained where they got lithium deuteride for the Secondary fusion stage, and if they had enough extra plutonium for the "spark plug" rod in the center of the Secondary.

The point about helium poisoning of the Primary may bear on the real world, as it appears that the Indians tried and failed to get tritium-boosted fusion to work.

While the implosion system of the Primary is the hardest first challenge, there have been recent reports that challenge Howard Morland's explanation (Progressive magazine, then the book The Secret that Exploded) may not have gotten quite right the method of radiation compression of the Secondary. The government, after trying to suppress the whole idea of radiation pressure ("the H-bomb secret" or Teller-Ulam patent), may have succeeded in planting a false trail on one of the tough engineering problems for thermonuclear weapons.

One of the incentives for thermonuclear (fusion) weapons is that they miniaturize much better than nuclear (fission) weapons. It's implausible that anyone could put a significant fission-only weapon on a missile with ICBM range. No, I don't consider a W54 "significant".
--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Worth mentioning is what you pointed out--in the story the primary is stolen, not made from scratch. This is still the biggest worry, I feel--fund Nunn-Lugar.

The devil is in the details for negotiating peace and stability in the Middle East, but when it comes to nuclear weapons how one reacts to their usage and proliferation relies heavily on what theory of international politics one adheres to.

MAD is the outcome of the theory of deterrence. If two states have comparable nuclear capacity (say, destruction of 5-10 cities each), then the horror of unleashing such destructive power will be sufficient to deter leaders from ever using it, hence providing peace. A problem with deterrence (held up by foreign policy realists such as Dr. Rice) is that it contradicts the stated policy goals of the US and others to commit to nuclear non-proliferation. Think about it for a moment: if you believe deterrence theory to be sound, then ought not the policy be to arm everyone with nuclear weapons, ensuring no one has a strategic advantage, and ushering in an era of peace?

Obviously one cannot commit to both nuclear non-proliferation and deterrence theory without being intellectually dishonest. I submit that the problem is with deterrence theory, since nuclear disarmament seems, to me, to be a laudable, humane, and defensible goal. Nuclear weapons, in my view, don't deter. Take the historical example of the Cold War. Parity between the United States and the Soviet Union appears to validate MAD and deterrence but only if you believe parity existed between the US and USSR during the past 50 years. In fact, the closer to parity the two superpowers became, the more likely war became! The Cuban missile crisis is the perfect example. Afterwards, American nuclear superiority far outpaced that of the Soviets and the ineffective Soviet economy could not match the economic strength of the West. By the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US economy was twice the former's size and there was not military parity.

In the Middle East, Israel is dominant militarily and economically. But as Iran's power increases in these two areas, the two states approach parity. Furthermore, the challenger (Iran) is dissatisfied with Israeli dominance in the region. This increases the chances of war, total war, in which nuclear weapons would not be a deterrent, but simply another weapon to choose from the stockpile of so-called "conventional" weapons. Once committed to total war, no one exercises moral judgment about being too brutal. Recall that Col. Ernest LeMay averred that had they not won WWII, they would have been tried for war crimes stemming from the firebombing of Japanese and German cities (See The Fog of War, 2003).

This is why the theory of international politics you subscribe to is so important. I have been citing textbook examples of the Power Transition theory, which has thus far been unable to dislodge the dominant realist, neoliberal and balance of power thories in the academy (but is supported by a strong body of historical evidence, and an increasingly convincing body of empirical evidence). But hopefully I've demonstrated that the notion of global nuclear armament--indirectly prescribed by deterrence--is not the path to peace, for the reasons of relative power and regional political satisfaction.

[duplicate deleted]

Duck and cover...I was in junior high school, and, fortunately or unfortunately, had been through a reasonable number of nuclear weapons effects manuals, from my mother, an Army reservist.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Count me conditioned by nuke fear-- I remember banging my head on the underside of the little school desk.

I share those feelings, but they are in an uneasy tension with another set.

Those other feelings are that there may be a special seriousness that no one involved with nuclear weapons is free from. The Cuban Missile Crisis is from a distance impossible to believe. We should have gone to war if people acted normally. Something else kicked in, a sense of godlike power and risk that made other issues smaller. How to explain Kruschev giving in so thoroughly, in the public version? How to explain him accepting the invisible fig leaf of removed Jupiter missiles in Turkey, at a later time?

How to explain the young President standing up to Lucius Clay? It may have something to do with the feeling, reported by WH participants, of being unsure of waking in the morning.

Combined with these feelings is a pessimistic certainty that nuclear knowledge is not containable, except for its financial challenge, now. What is possible to contain, I feel, is control of weapons.