Israel will be forced to act alone if it doubts American resolve to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons

Some of you may recall my Saba Yeshayah blog in another location and that it is inspired by a verse -   Isaiah 62:1 (Yeshayah in Hebrew).  I had not been able to post to it much because much of time was taken up with being president of my synagogue.  Now, however, my nearly three years of service is complete and with this coming Shabbat being when we read the haftarah containing Isaiah 62:1, it seems a good time to relaunch this blog - now on Blogger which is easier for me to use.

Now to return to a topic that has come up frequently before, the threat of Iran developing nuclear weapons.  There is a detailed article in The Atlantic going into the calculus Israel is facing as Iran continues its drive to obtain nuclear weapons and whether it should or can rely on American and Western efforts to stop Iran through sanctions. One of the issues in the article is that one of the founding purposes of the State of Israel was to prevent another Holocaust. By having strong military power, Israel is supposed to be able to prevent a repetition of the Holocaust when the Jewish people had no such power of their own. There are those who would argue that assuming, as is widely believed, that Israel already has a formidable nuclear arsenal, it can deter a nuclear Iran from attacking. This view is analogous to the mutually assured destruction (MAD) doctrine that kept the peace between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

The problem is that there is a big difference in these scenarios. In the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union were both vast continent-spanning powers whose leaders accepted that the other side could inflict comparable damage. In an Iran-Israel nuclear scenario however, there is a very different situation. Even if Israel is assumed to have a much larger nuclear arsenal than Iran, Israel's margin of safety is much smaller. Israel is a tiny country - about the size of New Jersey. The bulk of Israel's population is concentrated in the narrow central waist of the country. One or two nuclear warheads detonated in Israel's center could destroy most of its population. In a 2001 speech former Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani noted that Muslim nuclear powers could destroy Israel with nuclear weapons while Israel's nuclear arsenal would only cause damage in Muslim lands. Recall that Rafsanjani was viewed as a "moderate" in the 2009 Iranian presidential election dispute. Rafsanjani's statement is based on military and geographic reality. If the Iranian leadership is willing to sacrifice large parts of its population and to see major damage to its country in exchange for destroying Israel, then Iran cannot be deterred. If that is the likely scenario and if the Obama Administration will not act decisively before Iran can obtain its own nuclear weapons, Israel will have no choice but to try to eliminate this threat on its own.