Measuring Deterrence

The growing consensus of the establishment foreign policy elites is that Iran can be contained when they get nuclear weapons. This writer doesn't think Iran can be deterred.

I agree, but can we quantify this?

Let me try. It is back-of-the-envelope and relies on minimal research (5 minutes on Google, tops, plus whatever I remember off hand).

The premise of deterrence is that Iran won't launch a nuclear attack on Israel because Israel could counter-attack and inflict unacceptable casualties. We have virtually infinite retaliatory capabilities but Israel will be in the line of fire first, so let's stick with that scenario.

It is common to claim that Israel has 200 nuclear weapons. Israel has never admitted to even having nukes, while hinting at the capability to deter enemies from destroying Israel. These enemies have repeatedly attacked Israel with conventional weapons over the last several decades despite Israel's nuclear arsenal, but no matter--we're discussing nuclear deterrence of nuclear attack.

First, I think that it is unlikely that Israel has 200 nuclear warheads. Britain has 250. France probably around the same number, and China likely has a bit more. So we're really going to say that tiny Israel has nearly as many as three great powers? Remember, Israel has an incentive to let enemies think they have more. I'd guess 80 warheads, for their missiles, subs, and planes. But let's call it 100 nukes to deter Iran from using a single nuke on Tel Aviv.

These aren't going to be huge nukes, I 'd guess. Perhaps they are on the order of Hiroshima/Nagasaki-sized bombs. Let's average the deaths at Hiroshima (66,000) and Nagasaki (39,000) and say Israel can kill 50,000 Iranian civilians in a counter-attack with each weapon, assuming some will hit water, mountains, or desert well outside their CEP.

So if Israel used all 100 of their nukes on Iranian population centers, they could kill 5 million Iranians using all their weapons.

Iran has a population of about 75 million. So effectively wrecking Israel by destroying their largest city might be done at the price of  6.7% of Iran's population.

And that's worst case. Israel can't use all their nukes. They aren't just going eye-for-eye after being nuked. The purpose would be to establish deterrence against any other anti-Semites with nukes by showing Israel can strike back hard. So Israel needs to have more nukes in reserve for the theoretical second and even third or fourth attacker. So perhaps Israel can afford to only use a quarter of their nukes--25.

Let's say the Israelis use their biggest and most accurate weapons and aim them at the densest population centers to increase the lethality to 100,000 per strike. Maybe we're talking total dead as 2.5 million, or about 3.3% of Iran's population.

Would the prospect of losing 3-7% of their population deter Iran?

Iran endured a pounding in the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War (the First Gulf War, as I prefer to call it). Iran lost between 300,000 and 500,000 to kill half as many Iraqis. Let's call it 400,000 dead Iranians to kill 200,000 Iraqis. With a wartime population averaging about 40 million, Iran endured the loss of 1% of their population to kill Iraqis.

So, how much more do Iranians hate Jews than fellow Moslems--albeit Arab Moslems? Twice as much? Ten times as much? Consider that Iran waged war on Iraq after they ejected the Iraqis from Iranian territory in 1982 in order to--as they claimed--get to Jerusalem to kill Israelis. So Iran lost 1% of their population just to get at the real enemy--Israel--they really wanted to fight but for that inconvenient Saddam between them. Then add in the 2% of population losses as the price of killing Jews in large numbers that might wreck Israel.

If you conservatively assume Iranians hate Jews only twice as much as they hate Arabs, you'd have to say that Iran would easily be willing to lose 3% of their population--2.1 million people--to nuke a single Israeli city if they believe Israel truly is a "one-nuke country." Maybe Iran is deterred, based on how many Iranians could die in a counter-strike. But maybe not.

And what if the Iranians aren't thinking of the base population as Iran as the point of measuring acceptable pain? What if Iran really is contemplating taking a spear for the Ummah, thinking that losing 2.1 million Iranians is a small price for the entire 1.6 billion world Moslem population to endure? Losing 0.13 % is nothing from that perspective. Even inflicting 5 million dead on the entire global Moslem population by using all their nukes--which then leaves Israel open to attack with anyone else with a nuke since Israel can hardly deter without any nuclear weapons--doesn't get you to the level that Iran was willing to lose just to fight Iraq.

Can Iran be deterred if this is the calculaton? Not with Israel's arsenal.

And maybe not with anyone's arsenal. After all, deterrence relies on a certain rationality that we shouldn't assume Iran's mullahs share with us.

Iran might not be very good at math, anyway.