Abstract
Recent judgments on the likelihood and/or desirability of open nuclear weapons status for Israel tend to overstate the case. Application of prescriptive strategic analysis leads to the conclusion that the most plausible objectives of a nuclear weapons program, in Israel's case, are met by an ambiguous public posture, with the actual development of weapons capability highly dependent on technical problems often glossed over in the literature. Available empirical evidence is insufficient to confirm this conclusion positively, but it does create a presumption in its favor. The lessons of the Israeli case are that greater attention should be paid to conventional military balances that can still affect nuclear decisions, the ambiguities of near-nuclear status, and the problems of isolated pariah states in antiproliferation strategy.
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