Trent Telenko – Nice article on the S African program by David Albright, of later fame on Iraq WMD.
Once you have the enriched material, the technology and manufacturing down, cranking out nukes appears to be as easy and cheap as I suspected based on S Africa data. 2.5-3 thermonuclear devices for the price of one fighter jet was purportedly the Soviet thumrule. We and the Russians once had “assembly lines” that cranked out 500-to over 1,000 nuke weapons of a particular model in a year.
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But many of those tests had something in common: they resulted in failures, ranging from missiles that blew up in flight, failed to achieve the desired range, or strayed badly off course.
The author misses that early missile programs test to fail – to find out every bug in testing, even a series of missile failures in flight – to get to the point where those bad boys are proven reliable and accurate after launch.
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The problem is that experts declared that once Israel had major WMDs and widely was known to have missile-deliverable nukes, that Israel’s time of possessing a WMD monopoly was finite.
Just as with all military technology, any edge is temporary as rivals determine there is no more critical a national priority than achieving deterrence against a deadly enemy through getting naval warship, rifle, artillery, logistics, air, electronic warfare partity. Or nuclear.
The US stayed ahead of the Soviets, in most but not all areas, by continuous military technology improvement – but nevertheless, a “clunky” Soviet 15 megaton H-Bomb on top of a “nearly-obsolete” and fairly inaccurate SS-12 is still enough 40 years after design to still be unstoppable by all but the US and Japan in the last 5 years only, and make any major city a smoking crater.
And that is the 1st of three flaws with anyone that thinks Israel can perpetuate its quantum edge in WMD in the ME. “Improvements”, while hugely important in the Cold War counterforce capacity, matter much less in a ME conflict where sophisticated and “crude” missile warheads cross paths on their way to enemy cities.
The 2nd great flaw is believing Israel can maintain it’s WMD dominance by aggressively warring against any nation that starts to seek parity. Geostrategic, economic and religious factors will not allow Israel to be an endless attacker of others working to establish a strong military, peacefully. Nor can Israel use it’s nukes – but once.
The 3rd great flaw is believing the US is morally obligated, somehow, to send its own people to death in ME wars, regularly, to safeguard it’s “Special Friend” Israel’s regional WMD “monopoly”.
The endpoint, experts predicted 30 years ago, is that when the Muslims advanced technologically in a generation or two to build their own stuff or purchase and understand other’s technology – Israel had only two real choices after the impossiblity of sustaining regular aggressive war on rivals from Morocco to Indonesia or counting on the USA to act as it’s big, dumb Golem to do Israel’s work for them – was understood.
a. Resolve the Palestinian mess in large part -at least to where permanent borders were recognized by all ME Parties even if that meant Large Powers arm twisting. And then to declare ME borders inviolate and the ME nuke-free, with some international enforcement mechanism.
b. MAD. With Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, KSA&Gulf States and perhaps Syria all having nuke weapons in 25-50 years time.
