The article quoted below on an Israel-Iran nuclear exchange is interesting. Not that I'm making light of it. But after the Cold War when we were in the equation, it is possible to push off the pants wetting aspects a bit.
I didn't know about the unusual vulnerability of Iranian cities. That's news to me and I only sort of addressed that as a generic assumption in my own estimates of Israel's capacity to nuke Iran.
But this seems kind of speculative given the supposed lessons of not seeing through Saddam's WMD bluff before 2003:
An Israeli attack on the Iranian capital of Tehran using five 500-kiloton weapons would, the study estimates, kill seven million people -- 86% of the population -- and leave close to 800,000 wounded. A strike with five 250-kiloton weapons would kill an estimated 5.6 million and injure 1.6 million, according to predictions made using an advanced software package designed to calculate mass casualties from a nuclear detonation. ...
Israel has never confirmed or denied possessing nuclear weapons, but is widely known to have up to several hundred nuclear warheads in its arsenal. ...
Israel is presumed to have extremely powerful nuclear weapons and sophisticated delivery capabilities including long-range Jericho missiles, land-based cruise missiles, submarine-launched missiles, and advanced aircraft with precision targeting technology.
One, Israel has up to several hundred nukes with yields of up to half a megaton? Our missile warheads aren't that big. What evidence is there for such massive warheads?
Why is that widely believed? And why the estimate of two or three hundred warheads as I've read?
Why would Israel have a nuclear arsenal that rivals China's and exceeds those of Britain and France? Why pay for that expense when no Arab state or Iran has any nukes (yet) and when Israeli conventional superiority is pretty high?
I think I'm being generous to assume Israel has a maximum of a hundred smaller nukes not much bigger than the ones we used in World War II.
If the Israelis keep one sub on station with nuclear armed cruise missiles, why would they have more than a dozen nuclear weapons on board? There aren't that many Jericho missiles, either. And I don't think there are many land-based cruise missiles (I wasn't aware that they had any, actually) or aircraft fitted out with the equipment to launch/drop nukes and pilots trained to use them. I really find the notion that Israel has more than a hundred (and I think that is stretching it) small nukes far fetched.
Obviously, Israel has an incentive to over-state their nuclear arsenal. I guess I find it funny that our chastened press corps simply accepts what is "widely known" about Israel's nuclear arsenal.
