NY Times correspondent attacks Israel's ultimate existential deterrent

Leo Rennert
American Thinker
17 October '10

In a review of Avner Cohen's "The Worst Kept Secret," Ethan Bronner, the Times' Jerusalem bureau chief, joins a growing tide of pressures on Israel -- from the Arab League, the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference, and even the Obama administration -- to come clean and open its nuclear program to global scrutiny.

Israel's half-century-old policy of nuclear ambiguity -- "don't ask, don't tell" whether it has a nuclear arsenal -- has served it well as its ultimate deterrent. Today, it keeps Iranian leaders, in their vow to destroy the Jewish state, guessing whether an all-out missile attack on Israel from their proxy Hezb'allah in Lebanon might prompt nuclear retaliation that would incinerate Tehran. And with Iran hell-bent to develop a nuclear arsenal, the Iranian threat to expunge Israel would rise exponentially.

Even without an Iranian nuclear capability, It doesn't take much imagination to visualize a scenario of Israel being on the ropes if Hezb'allah fired its 40,000 Iranian-supplied rockets against Israel's major population centers. In such an eventuality, Israel might not be able to mount an adequate, commensurate conventional response and, as a last resort, might well have no choice but to go nuclear.

This was exactly the military posture of NATO during the darkest days of the Cold War when U.S. strategic thinkers wondered how the West could stand up to a massive Soviet tank attack across Germany with merely conventional weapons. NATO then might indeed have been forced to stem such an offensive with atomic weapons.

Avner Cohen and Ethan Bronner, however, are oblivious to current existential threats to Israel emanating from Iran's theocracy. In his review, Bronner showers praise on Cohen's 1998 book, "Israel and the Bomb," for "exposing the history of Israel's nuclear program" and he's equally generous in his assessment of Cohen's new tome, "The Worst Kept Secret."

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