Israel's Nuclear Dilemma

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xii, 327, [1] pages. Notes. Bibliography. Index. This is one of the Cornell Studies in Security Affairs. The chapters are: The Nuclear Status of the Middle East States; The Dynamics of the Conflict: Israel's Posture of Conventional Deterrence and the Limited Relevance of a Nuclear Capability; Nuclear Weapons in the Middle East: The Consequences for Strategy and Policy; International Reactions to Nuclear Proliferation in the Middle East; Management of a Nuclear Middle East; the Nuclear Dimension of the Gulf Crisis and War; and Israel's Strategic Alternatives. Yair Evron has taught international relations at the Department of Political Science, Tel Aviv University and was its chairman 1987-1990. He established the graduate program on Security Studies at Tel Aviv University and was its head from 1994-1998. Prior to this he taught at Sussex University and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. At different times he was Visiting Professor or Visiting Fellow at the following universities: Harvard; UCLA; Cornell; Georgetown; Concordia; MIT; Oxford. He was co-director of the project on Security and Arms Control in the Middle East at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has also served as a member of the academic advisory committee and on the Board of Directors of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies. Professor Evron has published extensively on international politics, strategic affairs, the Arab-Israeli conflict, nuclear proliferation, arms control, and international security regimes. In the 1970s he was the first Israeli scholar to research arms control in the Middle East. Yair Evron examines the problems and dilemmas for Israel that are caused by her possession of nuclear weapons, and the wider implications for Arab/Israeli relations. He gives an account of the development of Israel's nuclear capacity and of disagreements within the military elite over whether an overt nuclear posture should be taken. The author contends that Israel's possession of nuclear arms has not - with the exception of Iraq - influenced Arab military policy towards the country. He also argues that a system of nuclear deterrence, along the lines of the old Cold War model, would be inappropriate for the Middle East. The book concludes with an analysis of the big powers' antiproliferation policies and the possibilities for nuclear arms control in the region.