Steps To De-Nuclearization

Today at RCW, Greg Scoblete criticizes SecState Clinton's commitment on behalf of the U.S. to respond to a nuclear attack on Israel as if it were an attack on the U.S. Greg finds the promise simply redundant:

The entire premise of extending this guarantee to Israel strikes me as somewhat illogical. If Iran is going to launch a nuclear weapon at Israel - then they are clearly suicidal and no amount of U.S. retaliation is going to matter. If they are not suicidal, then Israel posses a sufficient deterrent. Is there any scenario wherein 100-plus nuclear weapons landing on Iran is not enough?

I would remind Greg how similar commitments have been used in the past as steps to discourage or reverse proliferation of nuclear weapons technology. The most common reason that states pursue nuclear weapons is to ensure their security. Thus, in order to get them to give up such weapons, some comparable security guarantee must be provided -- a "nuclear umbrella". Such promises were key to preventing nuclear weapons development in Germany and South Korea during the Cold War as well as reversing moves towards nuclear weapons by Taiwan in the late 1970s.

The question of whether such promises can work in the case of Israel is a fair one. Ever since the failure of the League of Nations, the promise that one state will respond to an attack on another -- even an ally -- as if it were an attack on itself has suffered from a credibility problem. And Israel uniquely has a very strong principle of self-reliance in its defense policy and is thus unlikely to accept a U.S. "nuclear umbrella" as sufficient reason to abandon its open-secret nuclear deterrent. But the history of the "nuclear umbrella" as a tool to promote de-nuclearization (or at least present the image of promoting de-nuclearization to skeptical states in the region) is sufficient to answer Greg's question.