Sur Israel et l’arme nucléaire, ma recherche me fait tomber sur d’autres articles dignes d’intérêt :
The site chosen for the proposed explosion was a mountaintop about 12 miles from an Egyptian military complex at Abu Ageila, a critical crossroads where, on June 5, Ariel Sharon commanded Israeli troops in a battle against the Egyptians. (Mr. Sharon later became prime minister, and died in 2014.)
The plan, if activated by order of the prime minister and military chief of staff, was to send a small paratrooper force to divert the Egyptian Army in the desert area so that a team could lay preparations for the atomic blast. Two large helicopters were to land, deliver the nuclear device and then create a command post in a mountain creek or canyon. If the order came to detonate, the blinding flash and mushroom cloud would have been seen throughout the Sinai and Negev Deserts, and perhaps as far away as Cairo.
So, does all this portend the end? I don’t know. I do think it portends the end of optimism. I’m not trying to be a prophet. I’m not even assuming but simply assessing the worst-case scenario. What is Plan B? What if things work out very, very badly?
Don’t think about it? I’m assuming they are thinking about it there in some sub-sub-basement cyber insulated room in an outlying office of Mossad, where worst case scenarios are handled with care. The same place where they play out scenarios for degrees of nuclear retaliation, perhaps.
I’m not sure how to think about it. About how it happens or what happens after it happens. So think of these as more lamentations than predictions. But I can see an endless debilitating state of war, settling nothing but causing unending suffering.
I can see an internal weakening, a veritable civil war between secular Jews and Bible-crazed Jewish terrorists.
Or something even more dramatic, a conventional war that ends in Israel’s defeat. Worse, a war that escalates—if it’s going badly on the conventional level—to the nuclear level. When I imagined such a scenario in my book on nuclear war, Russia was a distant nuclear power. Now that both nuclear super powers are bombing targets close to Israel’s borders and are on hair-trigger alert protocols, the possibility of something going wrong escalates. A small nuclear war would be more likely than a large one, but of course the most recent estimate was that in such a “small war” a billion people worldwide would die from the atmospheric devastation to crops, meaning starvation that would ensue.
Or the death of Israel might not become that violent and dramatic. It just could mean a slow crumbling under the pressure, under the strains of internal religious-versus-secular conflict. Perhaps BDS will succeed economically as it has culturally. The top one percent of the talent will be snatched up by universities and medical centers perhaps.