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CIAO DATE:06/07
International Security, Spring 2007 (Volume 31, Issue 4)
Osirak Redux? Assessing Israeli Capabilities to Destroy Iranian Nuclear Facilities
Whitney Raas and Austin Long
Does Israel have the ability to conduct a military attack against Iran's nuclear facilities similar to its 1981 strike on Iraq's Osirak reactor? The Israeli Air Force has significantly upgraded its equipment since the early 1980s, but the Iranian nuclear complex is a much harder target than was the Osirak reactor. Iran has three facilities that are critical for nuclear weapons production: a uranium conversion facility, an enrichment facility, and a heavy-water production plant and associated plutonium production reactor. This article analyzes possible interactions of Israel's improved air force, including the addition of F-15I aircraft and U.S.-supplied conventional “bunker-buster” precision-guided munitions, with the Iranian target set and air defense systems. It concludes that Israel has the capability to attack Iran's nuclear infrastructure with at least as much confidence as it had in the 1981 Osirak strike. Beyond the case of Iran, this finding has implications for the use of precision-guided weapons as a counterproliferation tool. Precision-guided weapons confer the ability to reliably attack hard and deeply buried targets with conventional, rather than nuclear, weapons. Intelligence on the location of nuclear sites is thus the primary limiting factor of military counterproliferation.
NATO's International Security Role in the Terrorist Era
by Renée de Nevers
What role does NATO play in combating terror? NATO's missions have expanded dramatically since the end of the Cold War, and most of the United States’ closest allies are members of the alliance. Nevertheless, NATO plays, at best, a supportive role in U.S. efforts to combat terrorism. The alliance contributes to preventive and defensive missions to address the threat of terrorism, and its consequence management plans aim to respond to terrorist attacks and to mitigate their effects. But many of the essential activities of the fight against terrorism occur outside NATO, through bilateral cooperation or loose coalitions of the willing. Three factors help to explain NATO's minor role in combating terrorism: shifts in alignments and threat perceptions caused by systemic changes, the alliance's limited military capabilities, and the nature of the fight against terror itself. Over time the consequences of NATO's limited role could be severe. If NATO's strongest members do not seek to address their core security threats within the alliance, NATO may have difficulty sustaining its military value.
Why Japan Will Not Go Nuclear (Yet): International and Domestic Constraints on the Nuclearization of Japan
by Llewelyn Hughes
Japan's status as a nonnuclear weapons state remains of ongoing interest to policy analysts and scholars of international relations. For some, Japanese nuclearization is a question not of whether but of when. This article reassesses the state of the evidence on the nuclearization of Japan. It finds that support in Japan for the development of an independent nuclear deterrent remains negligible. Evidence demonstrates that ministries and agencies with responsibility for foreign and security policy have sought to consolidate Japan's existing insurance policies against nuclear threats—multilateral regimes and the extension of the U.S. nuclear deterrent to Japan—rather than seeking an indigenous nuclear deterrent. The article also finds, however, that the door to independent nuclearization remains ajar. Policymakers have ensured that constitutional and other domestic legal hurdles do not significantly constrain Japan from developing an independent nuclear deterrent. Further, recent centralization of authority in the prime minister and Cabinet Office has increased the freedom of action of leaders, enabling them to overcome political opposition to changes in security policy to a degree not possible in the past. This suggests that Japan's future position toward nuclear weapons could be more easily altered than before, should leader preferences change.
Getting Religion? The Puzzling Case of Islam and Civil War
by Monica Duffy Toft
From 1940 to 2000, Islam was involved in a disproportionately high number of civil wars compared with other religions, such as Christianity or Hinduism. To help explain the overrepresentation of Islam in these wars, this article introduces a theory of “religious outbidding.” The theory holds that embattled political elites will tender religious bids when they calculate that increasing their religious legitimacy will strengthen their chances of survival. In combination with three overlapping factors—the historical absence of an internecine religious civil war similar to the Thirty Years’ War in Europe, proximity of Islam's holiest sites to Israel and large petroleum reserves, and jihad (i.e., defense of Islam as a religious obligation), religious outbidding accounts for Islam's higher representation in religious civil wars. The article includes a statistical analysis of the role of religion in civil wars and tests the logic of the argument of religious outbidding in the case of Sudan's two civil wars.
From Prediction to Learning: Opening Experts' Minds to Unfolding History
by Richard K. Herrmann and Jong Kun Choi
Although it would be nice if the intelligence community's tradecraft or the academic community's theories could predict the future, it is essential that international security experts learn quickly and accurately from unfolding history. This article reports on a multiyear study of experts dealing with security on the Korean Peninsula. It examines how experts learn and what can derail rational updating. Three factors common to much of the work in security studies contribute to the problem: the tendency to treat the intentions of other actors as unknowable private information that is beyond empirical examination; the inclination to believe that power provides a parsimonious explanation, even though it is multifaceted and dependent on numerous components; and the penchant for engaging in “factor wars” over which causal factors are most important while paying little attention to the cumulative and interactive effect of multiple factors. Collectively, these three factors produce overconfidence in hindsight and leave experts prisoners to their preconceptions. The article investigates in the Korean case whether translating narrative expert beliefs systems (i.e., theories) into Bayesian networks can open minds and promote more appropriate updating, and suggests that it can.
The Winning Weapon? Rethinking Nuclear Weapons in Light of Hiroshima
by Ward Wilson
This article reexamines the widely held presumption that nuclear weapons played a decisive role in winning the war in the Pacific. Based on new research from Japanese, Soviet, and U.S. archives, it concludes that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, played virtually no role in this outcome. A comparison of the responses of high-level Japanese officials to the bombing and the Soviet invasion on August 9 makes clear that the Soviet intervention touched off a crisis, while the bombing of Hiroshima did not. The article examines the evidence that, to save face, Japanese leaders blamed the bomb for losing the war. Finally, it sketches the profound impact this reappraisal may have on how nuclear weapons will be viewed in the future.
Correspondence
Hate Narratives and Ethnic Conflict
by Arman Grigorian, Stuart J. Kaufman
Index to International Security