Synopsis
This monograph analyzes military escalation and intrawar deterrence by examining two key wars where these concepts became especially relevant—the 1973 Arab-Israeli War and the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq. Intrawar deterrence is defined as the effort to control substantial military escalation during an ongoing war through the threat of large-scale and usually nuclear retaliation should the adversary escalate a conflict beyond a particularly important threshold. The deep contrasts between the 1973 and 1991 dangers of escalation underscore the range of problems that can occur in these types of circumstances. In the first case, this monograph relies upon an extensive body of openly available scholarship and investigative reporting on the 1973 War to discuss the potential for Israeli nuclear weapons use during that conflict. Although Israel is not a fully declared nuclear power, virtually all serious academic analysis both in and outside of that country assumes that there has been a strong Israeli nuclear weapons program for decades. Most major studies of the 1973 war suggest that Israel had or probably had some sort of nuclear option that it could have gone forward with in the event of an existential threat. Broad “hints” by the Israeli leadership, as well as their ongoing spending on nuclear research and nuclear-capable missile delivery systems, tend to support this. The work has proceeded on the assumption that the vast majority of scholarship about Israeli possession of a nuclear option during this conflict is correct, and that strong evidence included in this scholarship (which will be recounted here) suggests that Israel probably had a nuclear weapons option in 1973. In the very unlikely case that it did not, the Israelis probably had a different weapons of mass destruction (WMD) option that it could have used in conjunction with systems such as the Jericho I missile. This work asserts that the Egyptians and the Syrians attacked Israel in 1973 with limited goals that included the capture of important territorial objectives but did not include the destruction of the Israeli state. Waging war into Israel itself beyond the range of their integrated air defense systems was beyond the capabilities of the Arab militaries, and they knew it. The Arab leadership appeared to believe that this situation should have been obvious to the Israeli leadership, but it was not. Although some military professionals such as then- Major General Ariel Sharon immediately understood the situation, others such as Defense Minister Moshe Dayan feared an existential threat. The sudden onset of a new war that began with a series of Arab battlefield victories deeply disoriented some Israeli leaders and appears to have pushed some into serious consideration of a nuclear solution. This outcome appears to have been avoided by the ability of Israeli leaders to discuss the threat in an open, professional, and democratic fashion which in this case allowed the most reasonable voices to come to the fore. The decisive Israeli battlefield victory of October 14 eliminated the need for Israel to consider nuclear weapons use, although the Egyptians then faced defeat themselves and signaled that they also had serious options for escalating the war.
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