Israel Purchases German Submarines
Germany will build two more diesel-electric submarines for Israel, supplementing their three existing Dolphin-class boats (apparently a third new submarine is projected, but it has not yet been ordered). The sale has been the subject of great speculation in the Middle East, as the new submarines are described as missile-capable. Although that probably means no more than that they fire the Harpoon antiship missile already in the Israeli inventory, many commentators in the region interpreted it to mean that the submarines can carry and fire nuclear-armed cruise missiles. Note, however, that in 2004 much publicity was accorded an announcement that Israel had developed a surface-to-surface cruise missile, which turned out to be a version of the small air-launched Delilah, whose warhead weighs all of 30 kilograms (66 pounds). That hardly seems enough to be nuclear. Range is only about 150 miles, again hardly enough to redress the Middle East balance of power.
An Israeli newspaper has described the submarines as national deterrence assets. But that is very difficult to accept unless the Israelis unveil a long-range nuclear-capable cruise missile. In the past, the Israeli submarine force has enjoyed high prestige not because it was expected to sink Arab navies, but because it is an unparalleled way to insert agents and collect intelligence. It is less well known that for much of its history the Israeli Navy had two competing branches, in effect, one for special operations and the other conventional. The special operations branch was generally considered far more competent; the conventional branch gained prestige only after its missile boat successes in the October 1973 Yom Kippur War.
A modern five- or even six-submarine force would be the largest and by far the most expensive in Israeli history. Even if the new submarines are largely paid for by other governments, upkeep costs can be quite substantial. The most likely justification for a force of five or more submarines would be that two could be kept continuously operational, say one each in the Mediterranean and the Red Sea or further afield. A glance at the existing submarines reveals a forest of masts, suggesting that their most important role is intelligence-gathering. That is practicable because the countries against which Israel must operate generally have poor to nonexistent ASW forces.
The Israeli purchase did, however, roughly coincide with inflammatory statements by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In late October 2005 he called Israel a blot that had to be wiped off the map. He has also made it clear that Iran has no interest whatever in giving up its public program to enrich uranium as reactor fuel and, by extension, its widely rumored nuclear bomb program. Iran continues to buy ballistic-missile technology from North Korea (it is offering North Korea oil).
Some analysts see Ahmadinejad's rather aggressive foreign policy as a way of evading responsibility for the poor state of the Iranian economy. Others see it as a way of claiming and maintaining a dominant voice in an Islamic world in which the destruction of Israel would be quite popular. As for the bomb program, it seems clear that international pressure will have little or no effect on Iran. The Iranians have already pointed out that any economic sanctions imposed on them will merely raise the price of oil, to the detriment of those pressing for the sanctions in the first place.
The most immediate threat to the Iranian program is presumably an Israeli attack. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon reportedly ordered planning for a March 2006 attack before his collapse; it is not clear whether his interim successor will execute such a plan. There are two barriers to such an attack. One is physical. The Iranians are apparently planning to simply extract the necessary isotope of uranium from ore. If they can purify it sufficiently, they will not need a reactor at all. Moreover, purification is done in numerous stages, which may cover a huge area. Such a plant may be impossible to knock out using a few conventional bombs. The drawback to this technique is high cost and slow operation. Alternatively, the plan may be to purify uranium enough to use in a plutonium-producing reactor. In that case the target will not really exist until the reactor is about to go on line.
The second barrier is political. The Iranian president certainly made the sort of threat that deserves to be countered. However, the time scale for his threat to materialize, if it turns out to be nuclear, is fairly long. The sort of bomb that can fit a North Korean rocket is relatively small, and miniaturizing an atomic bomb entails considerable delicate calculation. A fizzle would be intolerable, not least because the Israelis have a substantial nuclear arsenal and would feel entirely justified in firing a lot of it back at Iran in retaliation. It would be particularly unfortunate for the Iranian government to cause much of Iran to be wiped out without first doing much damage to Israel. Thus it would seem that a prerequisite for a credible Iranian threat would be one or more atomic tests. No one has reported that the Iranians are close to such a test. Can the Israelis attack widespread Iranian targets when the threat is not yet palpable?
One of the biggest non-secrets in the Middle East is the existence of an Israeli nuclear stockpile. It has apparently been tested. It is not known whether the Israelis have hydrogen bombs, but that would not be surprising. What is fairly well known is that they have delivery systems, in the form both of aircraft and the Jericho land-based ballistic missile. Any estimate of the Israeli stockpile is pure speculation, but it is probably quite sufficient to incinerate the Iranian population centers. Remember, however, that no such attack could possibly be acceptable unless it were clear that the Iranians were about to make their own strike.
Is this where the submarines fit? They can probably covertly monitor Iranian communications, possibly even some cell phone communications. Are they Israel's early-warning system? Alternatively, it is possible that the Israelis envisage a time in the future when the Iranians can imagine making a first strike that destroys the land-based Israeli missile and air forces. In that case submarines would be vital as a second-strike deterrent-if, of course, the Iranians understand deterrence in the first place. Perhaps only in the Middle East would this last question have to be asked.
A Role for Non-Nuclear EMP?
In December 2005 it was revealed that the United States and Britain have been testing a high-powered microwave weapon that may be suited to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and cruise missiles. Developed by MBDA and tested at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, Virginia, it is described as capacitor-driven, producing repetitive pulses. The prototype weapon was about 2 meters long and 0.5 meters in diameter (about 6.5 feet long and 20 inches in diameter). A projected developed version could fit on board a BQM-145 UAV. Presumably MBDA sees the weapon as a warhead for a future version of the British Storm Shadow cruise missile. Thus far tests have involved a simulated vehicle suspended near a simulated command facility.
Although high-powered microwave weapons have been of considerable interest since the late 1960s, and although there was some expectation that examples developed as "black" programs would be used against Iraq in 2003, no such weapons appear as yet to have seen combat and none has been shown publicly until now. The promise of such weapons is that they can destroy, or at least disable, a wide range of modern electronic equipment such as the command and control center in the experiment. How far the effects spread depends on how much energy is pumped into the weapon before it is set off. What is particularly interesting in the published description is that the weapon can be fired repetitively, meaning that it relies on built-up electric charge rather than, as in some other concepts, the effect of an explosive. If the weapon did not disable the UAV carrying it, then, such a vehicle could attack multiple targets with the same weapon.
All such weapons produce a non-nuclear equivalent, on some scale, of the nuclear electromagnetic pulse (EMP). A 1962 high-altitude nuclear test over Hawaii demonstrated what U.S. scientists found to be a surprising result: electrical equipment, even circuit-breakers, was knocked out over a wide area. The immediate conclusion was that EMP was the perfect anti-command and control weapon.
Out of the effort to deal with the nuclear EMP threat came the discovery that EMP pulses, albeit on a much smaller scale, could be produced by non-nuclear means. Once such devices had been built, it was natural to imagine using non-nuclear EMP as a weapon. It would be the ideal means of wiping out an enemy's national command center.
To every such hope of ultimate weaponry there is of course a "but." As it was once described to this author, EMP is something we would not want to face, because we could not be sure that our countermeasures worked-but also something on which we would hate to rely, because the odds were that we would know nothing of the enemy's countermeasures. In war, how would one do battle-damage assessment? How can one be sure, say, that the enemy's national command center has been put out of action, when its communications with the world are difficult to detect in the first place? Would EMP be used as a precursor to a more conventional strike, or would we find ourselves forced to bet that it had worked? This is actually a much deeper question, applying to a wide range of precise weapons that have very small warheads, so that they do only as much damage as is needed. If you drop a 100-pound bomb on the spot in a building where you think the enemy's command is sitting, how do you know that it worked as advertised?
Clearly, as in the case of EMP, fatal damage can sometimes be done, but it may be difficult to be sure of whether it has occurred.