Domestic Aspects of Strategic Postures: Past and Future in a Middle East Nuclear Regime

This paper examines domestic aspects of the debate over the establishment of a regional nuclear regime in the Middle East. It does so in order to offset the marginal attention paid to the impact of domestic processes and institutions in the definition of strategic outcomes.<br><br>The call for incorporating domestic politics into the study of international regimes is not new but, with few exceptions, has been rarely followed by actual applications. That failure has not been the subject of great controversy in the analysis of nuclear options in the Middle East, because neorealist assumptions about the primacy of state survival considerations have gained unparalleled analytical supremacy. The potential for physical annihilation compelled a neorealist point of departure, even when neorealist assumptions led to no particular saddlepoint, or solution (in logical terms, the search for survival could have led to a range of means and outcomes).<br><br>That different domestic actors are likely to define strategic options with different considerations in mind seems self-evident. Domestic groups weigh different international outcomes according to the latter's potential effect on their own political and institutional pay-offs. The pay-offs associated with different outcomes can be affected by different mixes of side-payments. For instance, no military establishment entrusted with maintaining conventional deterrence would endanger its access to conventional weapons, the means with which it maintains its mission.<br><br>In general terms, domestic actors rank their preferences according to the rate at which they discount the future, their degree of receptivity to transparency, their sensitivity coefficients to gaps in gains, and/or their definition of a 'balanced exchange'. These four, of course, are influenced by the extent to which actors are concerned with short-term political/electoral gains or with longer-term institutional and bureaucratic survival. Thus, the conventional military establishment may be open to absolute (mutual) gains and transparency at the nuclear level while resisting anything other than relative gains in conventional weaponry. A certain political party may be reluctant to ratify an agreement that does not make its own positional gains clear. Strategic postures are nested in a multidimentional space where foreign aid and investment, technological change, electoral cycles (or their equivalent), and conventional military balances intersect in often unpredictable ways.<br><br>If one construes the past evolution of Middle East nuclear postures with these considerations in mind, where does one look in trying to understand the emergence of nuclear opaqueness on the one hand, and a stillborn regional regime on the other?<br><br> Were these outcomes compatible with the ability of relevant domestic groups to pursue their own political agendas? Were they perhaps even optimal in terms of increasing their internal political latitude? A positive answer to these questions might render domestic considerations a powerful contender in the arena where alternative ways of conceptualizing strategic behaviour claim relative superiority. This study begins with an overview of the historical evolution of nuclear postures in the region, and ends with an assessment of changes in recent years that may affect present and future postures.

relative gains in conventional weaponry. A certain political party may be reluctant to ratify an agreement that does not make its own positional gains clear. Strategic postures are nested in a multidimentional space where foreign aid and investment, technological change, electoral cycles (or their equivalent), and conventional military balances intersect in often unpredictable ways.
If one construes the past evolution of Middle East nuclear postures with these considerations in mind, where does one look in trying to understand the emergence of nuclear opaqueness on the one hand, and a stillborn regional regime on the other? 3 Were these outcomes compatible with the ability of relevant domestic groups to pursue their own political agendas? Were they perhaps even optimal in terms of increasing their internal political latitude? A positive answer to these questions might render domestic considerations a powerful contender in the arena where alternative ways of conceptualizing strategic behaviour claim relative superiority.
This study begins with an overview of the historical evolution of nuclear postures in the region, and ends with an assessment of changes in recent years that may affect present and future postures.

The Past
During the last three decades the Middle East has been considered in the non-proliferation literature to host elements of a nuclear deterrence model, albeit falling short of the overt version of that model that has characterized, for instance, the United States -former Soviet Union strategic balance. Instead of a full-blown open race, we have had an overall ambiguous pattern, with no open acknowledgement of existing nuclear military capabilities or of intentions to acquire nuclear weapons. This ambiguity (nuclear 'opaqueness') has been present both among states, such as Iraq and Iran, that had commited themselves to multilateral full-scope safeguards (through Non-proliferation Treaty membership), as well as in Israel, which had not made such commitments.
Several explanations have been put forth for the emergence of opaqueness; they include, inter alia, the presence of both superpowers as barriers to a full-blown overt nuclear race, and the evolving strength of the non-proliferation regime. 4 Presumably, both forces acted to restrain all regional actors through potentially punitive sanctions, forcing them to veil their postures and to submerge their capabilities. The sources of opaqueness, however, can also be traced to domestic considerations, which at the very least reinforced external constraints, and possible presented an equally compelling reason for maintaining opaqueness. Internal considerations not only shed light on the sources of opaqueness; they also rendered the establishment of a regional regime implausible, given the respective domestic win-sets within each of the Middle Eastern potential partners to a regime. 3

Opaqueness in Israel: Overdetermined?
A survey of Israel's nuclear postures reveals weak domestic support for an open deterrent. Opaqueness, instead, increased the latitude of powerful political coalitions and institutions to pursue their respective agendas. On the one hand, there was Ben-Gurion and his followers, among whom support for a nuclear deterrent was strongest. Moshe Dayan even came close to declaring the existence of such a deterrent. 6 On the other hand, there were the nuclear sceptics, including some mainstream opponents of Ben-Gurion within the ruling party Mapai, as well as leftist coalition partners (particularly the pro-Soviet Mapam and Ahdut Haavoda).
In light of this opposition, Ben-Gurion avoided discussing nuclear policy in full cabinet meetings, while nurturing the nascent programme from his own political resources. 7 The Dimona nuclear complex was started through private fund-raising in 1957, without the knowledge of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Security Committee or the approval of its Finance Committee. 8 Clearly, Ben-Gurion's faction could find ample political ammunition to fuel the country's nuclear programme in Arab calls for the obliteration of Israel, and in active Arab procurement of nonconventional capabilities by the 1950s, including missile and chemical weapons technology. In December 1960 Ben-Gurion addressed the Israeli Knesset on this topic, in response to an inquiry from US Secretary of State Christian Herter.* The timing of the disclosure, and its venue, revealed the interplay of domestic and external considerations.
Opaqueness was instrumental to the maintenance of Israel's Labor coalition. The fragile nature of ruling coalitions stemmed from the inability of any single party to command a clear majority of votes, which granted small parties the power to impose their view on the basis of their coalitional 'value'. Mapam's and Ahdut Haavoda's influence within Israel's politically powerful General Federation of Labor (Histadrui), for instance, enabled these parties to extract concessions from their coalition partners. 10 The leadership of these two parties, including the influential Yigal Allon, rejected an overt deterrent that could unleash a destructive regional race, as well as inflame the anti-nuclear feelings of pro-Soviet constituencies within their parties and exacerbate Soviet sensitivity to Israeli nuclear activities." They consequently opposed then Deputy Defence Minister Shimon Peres' efforts to seek French and West German technical and defence cooperation. 12 Popular opposition to closer relations (particularly military co-operation!) with West Germany was not confined to Mapam and Ahdut Haavoda, and had the potential of igniting a Cabinet crisis, as it did in 1957 and 1959." Eventually, Ben-Gurion's German policy accelerated his political exit.
Coalition and party politics thus played a role in propelling opaqueness as a solution in the early years; different parties had different associations with external actors and different receptivities to transparency. This is far from arguing that policy preferences could be completely reduced to pure political calculi. Ben-Gurion led Israel into statehood out of the ashes of concentration camps, and regarded the survival of the state as his life's historical mission. Such was the goal of other Israeli leaders as well, however, many of whom were not persuaded that a nuclearized Middle East would either guarantee Israel's existence or command extensive domestic support. 14 As argued, opponents of a nuclear deterrent in the 1950s and 1960s included not only leaders of Ahdut Haavoda (Yigal Allon, Israel Gallili) and Mapam (Yaacov Hazan, Yair Zaban), but also leading members of Mapai (such as Prime Ministers Levy Eshkol and Golda Meir, Defence Minister and later Histadrut secretary-general Pinhas Lavon, Finance Minister Pinhas Sapir, and Foreign Minister Abba Eban). 15 Eshkol (formerly a Finance Minister as well) and Sapir were the architects of an incipient policy of economic liberalization, adjustment and privatization, conceived in the early 1960s, aimed at attracting foreign investment and promoting exports. Moving away from a statist, mercantilist strategy and toward economic solvency implied greater reliance on international markets and new political alliances. Eshkol thus opposed nuclear expenditures and was willing to effect some changes in the nuclear programme, which also made him appear more responsive to US concerns.' 6 The US commitment to supply Israel with conventional weapons is often interpreted as a trade-off accepted by Eshkol (in exchange for nuclear restraint), but can also be regarded as useful ammunition for Eshkol -in domestic terms -to pursue a policy he favoured anyway.
Another prominent Knesset member from Mapai, Eliezer Livne, founded the Committee for Denuclearization of the Middle East in 1961including prestigious Israeli scientists -which enjoyed wide access to highlevel Labor figures. 17 Ben-Gurion's tensions with his own Mapai party can be traced to the bitter Lavon Affair of 1955, arguably Israel's foremost political scandal to this day. This affair, involving accountability for a botched espionage operation in Egypt, ultimately led to Ben-Gurion's departure from Mapai, and the creation, before the 1965 elections, of a new party, Rafi, known to a few as 'the atomic party'. 18 Ben-Gurion's political foe Pinhas Lavon (close to the Ahdut Haavoda and Mapam leadership), ridiculed the group around Ben-Gurion as the self-appointed 'defence avant-garde', while Allon accused the same group of 'defence demagoguery'. 19 In effect, important sections of Rafi's constituency valued their leaders' image of reliability and technological sophistication regarding matters of national survival..
With Ben-Gurion's resignation in 1963 (in the midst of debates over relations with West Germany), his own influence over nuclear policy declined (his Rafi followers merged into the Labor Alignment in 1969). Opaqueness continued to provide an equilibrium solution, particularly when Dayan became Defence Minister in 1967 under Prime Minister Eshkol, in a cabinet where Ahdut Haavoda's Allon had been most influential on defence matters. The policy found its institutionalization in the formula articulated by Eshkol, that has since become the country's only declared -and highly ambiguous -policy on the nuclear issue, namely that Israel would 'not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East'. Dayan's occasional references -as Defence Minister -to the advantages of an open deterrent did not prevail within the cabinet headed by Golda Meir in the early 1970s either.
It is hardly surprising, given our discussion so far, that Israel's endorsement of a nuclear-weapon-free zone (NWFZ) in 1975 was formally submitted to the UN General Assembly by no other than Foreign Minister Allon, with considerable support from most political leaders and the Israeli public. 20 By that time, supporters of an open deterrent were becoming marginalized (but far from irrelevant, given the impact of an intractable Arab position on Israeli public opinion). Former Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin declared in 1974, in response to former Defence Minister Moshe Dayan's call for nuclear weapons: 'Attempts to rely on mystical weapons are negative trends'. 21 Moshe Dayan eventually joined Labor's main competitor, Likud, and served as its foreign minister.
A Likud-led coalition defeated Labor in 1977, backed by forces opposed to an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Golan Heights. Likud's rejection of a territorial compromise on the basis of the security requirement for strategic depth could have weakened the party's ability to claim the additional need for a nuclear deterrent. 22 The continuation of opaqueness also prevented any further deterioration in Likud's troubled relationship with the United States. The policy was upheld in spite of apparent shifts among some prominent Likud leaders. Defence Minister Ariel Sharon, traditionally associated with the 'conventional' school of thought, declared that 'Israel cannot cope with the conventional arms race with the Arabs who have superiority in manpower and capital'. 23 This statement echoed earlier statements by Dayan. 24 The two classical coalitions in Israeli politics have responded differently to mixes of outside pressures and inducements. Labor-centred coalitions have used external carrots and sticks (political and economic) to build domestic consensus favouring territorial compromise and a comprehensive political settlement. They have been more receptive than Likud-centred coalitions to use effective international tools (United Nations peacekeeping forces, US diplomacy) to induce trust in regional agreements and compromises among its constituents. 25 A recent statement by Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin summarizes the aims of Labor diplomacy: 'to use the new situation in order to become a more welcome member of the international club'. 26 Likud-led coalitions have generally used external pressures to coalesce forces opposed to a territorial settlement on the West Bank or to a withdrawal from the Golan Heights. These differences between the two coalitions do not necessarily imply a different receptivity to intrusive (external) verification measures and to international inducements for denuclearization of the region, which everybody opposes. However, such differences may presage a gap between the two coalitions, regarding their respective visions of the 'the day after' a comprehensive Middle East peace is reached. Influential former Likud ministers like Ariel Sharon, Yuval Neeman and Rafel Eitan are known to oppose a NWFZ. 27 Moreover, Likud refused to rely on the International Atomic Energy Agency to neutralize Iraq's pursuit of nuclear weapons; in 1981 the Begin government launched an attack on Iraq's Osirak reactor (three weeks before general elections and with Likud lagging in the polls) enunciating the Begin Doctrine, while Labor opposed the strike. 28 Such cleavages, however, did not always easily carry over into a clear-cut partybased partisanship favouring or opposing overt deterrence.
Opaqueness accommodated more than coalitional considerations; it prevented bitter encounters among the conventional and nuclear establishments, a divided scientific community, competing economic agencies, and parties to a potentially explosive public debate.
On the one hand, the influential Israeli military establishment (and its associated military-industrial complex) fundamentally resisted reliance on a nuclear deterrent. 29 This position is not at all unusual among conventional military establishments in countries with an ambiguous nuclear programme. Maintaining conventional superiority had been a long-standing objective of the Israeli Defence Forces. 10 Supporters of an open, full-fledged nuclear deterrent often invoked its value as a means to reduce the need for conventional forces." Such claims represented a potential institutional threat to the conventional military establishment, exacerbating competition for dwindling budgetary resources. Moreover, an overt deterrent could have threatened the external network of procurement of conventional weaponry (high performance combat aircraft in particular) and of sourcing for locally-produced equipment." The military establishment was particularly sensitive to the fact that about 50 per cent of the defence budget was covered by US military aid. Finally, Israel's Defence Forces would have been required to maintain their conventional deterrent and fighting missions even in light of diminished capabilities, at potentially much higher human costs.
On the other hand, there was the prestigious Israel Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) and Israel's nuclear industrial infrastructure, estimated to be relatively small, particularly compared to the extensive network of conventional arms producers. 34 The IAEC's autonomy diminished with Ben-Gurion's departure, and the agency was transferred from the Ministry of Defence to the Prime Minister's office, under Levy Eshkol. The composition of the IAEC was then broadened to include representatives of civilian sectors, including energy, medical, and agricultural research, as well as the Ministry of Finance. 35 This diversification was more than compatible with opaqueness, allowing nucleocrats with divergent agendas (civilian versus military uses of nuclear energy) to cohabit the IAEC. In the end, an opaque programme was the perfect means to sidestep budgetary transparency, to weaken oversight by financial agencies, to avoid bureaucratic hurdles, and to ward off potential challenges from the scientific community.
Prominent scientists had opposed the nuclear programme and six out of seven members of IAEC resigned by 1957, allegedly on the basis of their rejection of nuclear weapons and of the opportunity costs of a nuclear programme for the advancement of basic research. 36 Only Professor Ernst David Bergman -a prominent member of Rafi, founder of the science corps within the Israeli military, and principal adviser to Ben-Gurion on nuclear matters -remained, until Eshkol replaced him in 1966, arguably as part of an effort to freeze the development of the Dimona facilities. 37 The incident with the IAEC and its scientists had more of a symbolic than a practical impact (the programme required technology more than science). In light of the social valuation of scientists in Israeli society, too much attention on the incident had the potential for weakening popular support. From the point of view of the general argument advanced in this paper, it is interesting to highlight the role that maximizing institutional support for basic science played in shaping the position of this prestigious group of scientists.
The benefits of opaqueness also reached sectors that were not directly involved in nuclear policy, but feared potentially detrimental consequences from an unrestrained nuclear posture. In particular, the Israeli economy was highly dependent on Western financial flows, that supported a vast network of state agencies and powerful General Federation of Labor (Histadrut) enterprises, as well as a growing private sector. Mapai, Mapam, and Ahdut Haavoda enjoyed great support within Histadrut, unlike Ben-Gurion's followers. Political constraints precluded ruling coalitions from reducing external dependence by shifting the burden of financing economic development, welfare, and defence, to Israeli society. 38 Important and increasingly concentrated financial and economic institutions subsidized by the state resisted any prospects of upsetting their lifeline dependence on foreign (mostly US) capital, investment and technology.
If there was one single item that had the highest potential of concatenating an economic severance from external sources of economic support, the open embrace of a nuclear deterrent was it. Western powers had developed a regime with formal and informal injunctions, designed to persuade would-be newcomers to the nuclear club that such intentions would involve costly consequences in the economic arena, among others. 39 No Israeli ruling coalition could have survived the domestic political fallout of economic sanctions. Democratic leaders facing electoral approval are far more constrained in distributing the punishing costs of sanctions than has been the case with, for instance, the Iraqi leadership. Finally, the financial agencies of the state (Treasury in particular) have had a long-standing, at times very bitter, dispute with defence agencies over the military budget. Although the size of Israeli nuclear investments is not publicly known, and is often assumed to have been relatively small, the added defence burden of a large-scale programme had the potential of exacerbating such tensions. In a relatively small economy, the opportunity costs of such a programme could not have been kept entirely invisible.

Opaqueness in the Arab World: Regime Survival
Just as opaqueness reflected an equilibrium among Israeli political forces, it was more expedient for successive coalitions in the Middle East to maintain domestic consensus over opaqueness than to embrace overt deterrence. In particular, ambiguity about Israel's -and other Arab states' or Iran'scapabilities helped stem popular challenges to unstable regimes and allayed the concerns of both the conventional military establishment and of economic groups (state agencies as well as private actors). First, any formal recognition that Israel had nuclear weapons would have forced leaders to counter that capability, in response to popular dissatisfaction with the idea of an Israeli nuclear monopoly. 40 What Jabber labels the imperative of 'deterrent emulation' is evident from statements like 'It must be made clear that we cannot possibly stand idly by if Israel introduces atomic weapons into the area' (President Sadat) and 'We in Syria have a counterplan, in the event that Israel gets nuclear weapons' (President Asad). 41 Those who were most forceful in declaring that Israel in fact had such weapons without a shred of doubt -Iraq and Libya -also embarked in the most extensive efforts in the Arab world to acquire nuclear weapons. 42 The more Arab leaders pointed to a clear-cut Israeli capability, the more compelled they became to forge a coherent response to it. Opaqueness, instead, offered at least a partial fig leaf for resisting domestic pressures; it made it possible for Sadat and other Egyptian officials to argue that, although they believed Israel was capable of manufacturing a nuclear bomb, it [Israel] 'does not have nuclear weapons'. 43 President Asad and King Faisal pronounced similar statements imputing to Israel a potential, rather than an actual weapon. Opaqueness thus mitigated the immediate political pressure to match Israeli capabilities and, at least in some instances, helped buy time off for efforts to achieve nuclear parity. 44 The following statement by Mohamed Hasanayn Heikal strengthens the argument that the drive to measure-up with Israeli nuclear endowments was less of a response to strategic interaction considerations and had primarily a domestic basis: 'Israel has nuclear weapons but will not use them unless she finds herself being strangled'. 43 This recognition that Israeli nuclear capabilities -whatever they may be -have been designed as defensive, rather than offensive tools, is particularly astounding coming from the foremost advocate of nuclear weapons in Egypt. Israel's survival motive, however, has been widely acknowledged, despite attempts by radicals to invest an Israeli weapon with offensive objectives. As King Hussein of Jordan declared, the Israelis would not use a nuclear device 'unless they were in mortal danger'. 46 Strategic interaction, in other words, might have arguably played a greater role -in strengthening support for national (qaumyia) nuclear deterrents -in the context of inter-Arab or Arab-Iranian relations than of the Arab-Israeli conflict. 47 In addition to this more or less common constraint shared by most Arab regimes, opaqueness was reinforced by the international-domestic links of competing politics of industrialization. Throughout most of the Cold War era two basic types of coalition -both leaning on the military -ruled over Middle Eastern countries. On the one hand, there were inward-looking nationalist-populist groups which conquered the state to implant pan-Arab versions of Soviet-style regimes (Syria, Iraq, Libya and Egypt in the 1950s and 1960s). This group was the most active in pursuing nuclear weapons. 48 Yet their project was constrained by the fact that Soviet economic support was critical to their ability to maintain domestic legitimacy for their comprehensive revolutionary objectives.
Transgressing the boundaries of the superpower consensus to stem the proliferation of nuclear weapons throughout the world endangered those objectives. These constraints (which transcend the foreign-domestic boundary) precluded a policy of overt deterrence but not one of opaqueness, and they may well explain these countries' eventual decision to sign the NPT. Signing it was not altogether equivalent to abiding by its spirit, as was often suspected and more recently confirmed in the case of Iraq. 49 De facto, therefore, these coalitions implemented a policy of opaqueness that had the double advantage of not compromising the foreign benefactors of their domestic power base while nurturing important political segments in that base.
On the other hand, there were coalitions relying on the political, military and/or economic support of the United States and Western Europe, primarily in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt (1970s and 1980s). For these coalitions, nuclear 'restraint' was also a requirement to maintain the external support on which the interests of important domestic segments relied. Lack of restraint (a pursuit of weapons capabilities) implied bilateral and mutilateral economic sanctions, likely to damage the concentrated interests of rising industrial, contracting and commercial sectors in expanding trade and investments. 50 Restraint (ideally in the form of a NWFZ) was in line with embracing regional policies that would not threaten the domestic beneficiaries of international economic, financial and political exchanges. These benefits included debt-forgiveness, export markets, technology transfer, food imports, aid, and investments. The beneficiaries were generally among these regimes' most economically powerful constituencies, such as the oil-exporting industries in the Gulf and the tourist-based and munfatihun ('openers') economies of Egypt and Jordan. 5  The impact of the political-economic nature of ruling coalitions on nuclear postures can be traced quite clearly in the case of Egypt, in its evolution from a Nasserite strategy of redistribution and import-substitution industrialization to Sadat's post-1973 accumulation-and-growth blueprint. 52 Nasser was reported to have pursued nuclear weapons from the Soviet Union at the height of their strategic alliance, and nuclear technology more generally from other suppliers. 53 M. Hasanayn Heikal, an adviser to Nasser and the editor of Egypt's influential Al-Ahram, was himself an ardent supporter of an Arab nuclear deterrent. 54 It was the requirements of transforming the domestic political economy through infitah (economic liberalization) -the 'economic crossing' -that compelled Sadat to negotiate an unprecedented peace treaty with Israel. 55 That infitah was launched in 1974, the same year Egypt advanced, for the first time, the idea of a NWFZ, is quite suggestive. Sadat understood the prerequisites of his domestic economic programme, that precluded a nuclear arms race with a formidable opponent. 56 Abandoning nuclear ambiguity would also deal a blow to Sadat's domestic political foes, particularly Nasserist, pro-Soviet groups which he regarded as a constant threat to his rule, and which included prominent nuclear advocates. Transcending nuclear ambiguity had the additional advantage of suiting the external requirements of Sadat's strategy for Egypt's transformation, namely, improving relations with the West. President Nixon visited Egypt that year, as a symbol of solidifying US-Egyptian relations. By 1979, Sadat was requesting a foreign aid package of $18 billion from the G-7 group. Egypt's ruling coalition had tied its grand strategy of industrialization to 'internationalist' instruments. The attempt to secure the political survival of its domestic coalition may also explain Egypt's regional entrepreneurship in brokering between regional parties to a regime, pointing to overlapping interests, and designing innovative arrangements, such as a Security Council role in establishing a NWFZ. 37 Key to regime survival in most Arab Middle Eastern countries was the support of the military as an institution. An overt nuclear posture posed similar -and in some cases magnified -challenges to the expansion of conventional military establishments and their industrial complexes in the Arab world and Iran, as they did in Israel. 58 The military has been arguably the most powerful political institution in these countries, unconstrained by concerns with subordination to civilian authorities or democratic challenges. Yet the protracted economic crisis in each of these states imposed some limits on the ability of Arab regimes to extract resources from civil society. 59 Structural adjustment programmes often had adverse effects on arms imports and on the special privileges of military officers. 60 Economic reform also strengthened the hands of civilian technocrats, politicians and economic institutions in charge of adjustment programmes. Under conditions of contracting resources, the pursuit of a nuclear deterrent would have exacerbated the need for trade-offs in military budgets, while leaving intact the conventional mission of 'freeing Arab lands'. 61 Opaqueness, instead, enabled military establishments highly dependent on the flow of weapons, technology and military aid to maintain their power basis. Opaqueness also ensured and extended the institutional half-life of Atomic Energy Commissions, mostly through hidden budgetary allocations and the absence of oversight. The relative strength of nuclear establishments in the Arab world is not easy to assess, but there is evidence that only Iraq's Ba'th regime managed to coalesce a strong infrastructure of interests (technical communities and state agencies) employing 20,000 people with an investment of $10 bn. 62 Iraq promised to become the first Arab state to obtain a military nuclear capability," and the oil bonanza provided the means to back this commitment. Most other nuclear establishments had more severe budgetary and industrial-technological constraints and were likely to forgo advocating overt competition with a highly reputable Israeli, or with fellow Arab or Iranian counterparts.
Summing up, this historical review of the domestic sources of nuclear postures suggests that opaqueness prevailed in the region for many years because it served the parochial political and institutional concerns of most relevant actors well.

The Present and a Future Regime: Which Way the Middle East?
The revolutionary changes in global politics and economics at the end of the Cold War -including the results of the Gulf War -have precipitated regional and domestic changes in the Middle East. These changes led to the Madrid peace process, to the momentous agreements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in September 1993, to the peace Treaty with Jordan, and to a new set of relations between Israel and the Arab world. 64 The latent conditions for this turnabout can be found in the broader process of political and economic change affecting the region in recent years, and in a new modality of coalitional politics in the Middle East. On the one hand, liberalizing domestic coalitions aiming at greater integration with the world economy have become more widely entrenched than ever before. Their strategies of industrialization -and the need to secure economic benefits to its supporting constituencies -required the kind of security arrangements that would gain the blessing of the international community. 65 The Gulf War epitomized the willingness of these coalitions to embrace a more 'internationalist' -rather than a narrow regionalapproach. This process culminated in their decision to enter into unprecedented bilateral and multilateral negotiations with Israel, a process started in Madrid in 1991.
On the other hand, an alternative alliance of political and economic forces has begun challenging liberalizing coalitions throughout the region. The common denominator in this nationalist-populist grouping is the rejection of 'Western' regimes on the basis of threatened material or idealconfessional interests. On the material side, economic liberalization and orthodox stabilization plans, particularly as imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other financial institutions, endanger importcompeting firms with close ties to the state and domestic markets, unskilled, blue-collar workers, white-collar and other state employees, small firms, politicians who oppose the dismantling of state enterprises (a rich source of political patronage), and the underemployed intelligentsia. 66 Radical Islamic groups are perhaps the most significant ideological force in the region espousing an alternative political economy of development. 67 Its tenets include a repudiation of ties to the international economy and its perceived associated scourges: inequalities, corruption, unemployment and enslaving indebtedness. In the words of Hasan al-Turabi, leader of Sudan's National Islamic Front, Islam seeks justice and will 'challenge those who enjoy an advantage under the present world order, in economic relations between north and south, in the UN structure, in the monopoly of information, technology or armaments'. 68 Islamic coalitions often include 'bourgeois fractions, some rural agrarian capitalists, notables and estate-owners, and the virtually proletarianized members of the state-employed petite-bourgeoisie, the underemployed intelligentsia, and the large student population'. 69 The common thread in this logrolled alliance is the advancement of a new socio-political order in which the idea of a peace settlement with non-Muslims seems a contradiction in terms, confounding the clear Islamic dichotomy of dar-al-hlam (Islamic realm) and dar-al harb (realm of warfare). The domestic political appeal of radical (also labelled fundamentalist) movements stems from their call to redress global inequities and frozen hierarchies, and from their willingness to advance 'extreme', final, redeeming solutions to social and political problems. 70 Islamic movements were the most active opponents to the Camp David Peace accords and, more recently, to any negotiations with Israel, including the Madrid peace process. 71 These two contending coalitions -liberalizing and nationalist-populistconfessional -face a new common strategic regional context, and within it, the newest regional nuclear dilemma. The dilemma stems from a growing inability to question the existence of Israel's alleged nuclear arsenal, a position that had become untenable since the mid-1980s, partly as a consequence of Mordechai Vanunu's declarations to the London Times. 12 Regardless of the latter's reliability, it is far harder today to uphold what growing sections of public opinion throughout the Middle East now consider a fiction: that Israel is not yet a nuclear power. Thus, the instrumentality of an ambiguous posture -as a response to an ambiguous threat -to maintaining a balance of domestic interests has withered away. The two coalitions have thus been forced to define contrasting solutions to this dilemma.
Liberalizing coalitions, including Israel, the PLO, Jordan and Egypt, are now negotiating an arms control regime in the context of the multilateral peace process. 73 In the past, Israeli proposals for a NWFZ through direct negotiations were rejected, with Arab states pushing for immediate universal accession to the NPT, without negotiations. 74 The Madrid process offers a new context, where a nuclear regime is to be negotiated through direct negotiations among the partners. There are profound disagreements over the appropriate sequence in tackling conventional and non-conventional aspects of an arms control regime, with Egypt maintaining a firmer demand for Israel's acceptance of NPT status than a decade ago. 75 Yet, the balance of these ongoing negotiations is a huge step forward towards a future regime that could have never been conceived of in the past.
Radical nationalist and/or Islamic coalitions have not, thus far, shown a willingness to negotiate any regimes. In fact, Iran discontinued its formerly active role in promoting a NWFZ at the United Nations in 1979, in the aftermath of the Islamic revolution. 76 Iran has become the foremost representative of a coalition basing its political power on contempt for Western political and economic principles. Reformist, 'economy first', or 'pragmatic' currents (including Rafsanjani) favouring economic liberalization (Baz-Sazi, rebuilding) have not yet prevailed in Iran. 77 Radical Islamic organizations in control of bloated state industries and charity foundations have little incentive to transfer their power to private entrepreneurs, or to discontinue challenging 'Western' regimes and institutions. 78 The continued struggle between these two factions explains the tension in Iran's foreign policy in general, and nuclear postures in particular. On the one hand, President Rafsanjani has forcefully denied any nuclear weapon designs by Iran, an NPT signatory.™ On the other hand, Vice-president Sayed Ayatollah Mohajerani argued in 1992 that, 'We, the Muslims, must co-operate to produce an atomic bomb, regardless of UN efforts to prevent proliferation'. 80 The advocacy of an 'Islamic bomb' is not new; it was conceived less in the context of a coherent military strategy and more as an instrument to offset psychological injuries and arguably to restore pride and prestige. In the words of Pakistani physicist Hoodbhoy, 'the concept behind the term [Islamic bomb] is of Muslim origin. The idea of a nuclear weapon for collective defence of the entire Muslim ummah was, after all, articulated and advocated by Muslim leaders who recognized its popularity and determined to benefit from it'. 81 However, fundamentalist movements are not an ideological monolith, and an 'Islamic nuclear club' seems little more than a myth, as Hoodbhoy himself argues, particularly considering the past record of success of integrative frameworks (pan-Arab, pan-Islamic) in the Middle East. 82 Whatever nuclear capabilities Iran may be interested in seeking, they are now a problem of the international community, and not merely of its neighbours, and may thus require the kind of international intervention engineered for Iraq, through a UN Special Commission. 8 ' The coalitional cleavages just described -between liberalizing and militant regimes -shape Israel's own dilemma; this is a rather different dilemma to that Israel has confronted for most of its existence as a state. On the one hand, changes in the Arab world toward liberalization and the end of armed struggle have strengthened segments of the Israeli electorate and leadership calling for a negotiated territorial compromise. The intifada had earlier sensitized the Israeli public to the need for political, rather than techno-military solutions to Israel's security predicament. On the other hand, most of the major actors in the region are assumed to have chemical weapons and strenuously to pursue biological, ballistic missile, and in some cases, nuclear capabilities (Iran and Iraq, in particular). 84 Most major Arab states have not signed the 1992 Chemical Weapons Convention. Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran are not party to the multilateral regional peace talks. Moreover, the unprovoked Scud attacks by Iraq during the Gulf War -and their threatened chemical payload -transformed public perceptions of the country's vulnerability. 85 There has been no popular debate in Israel over the merits of alternative nuclear futures. However, in 1986 almost 66 per cent of the public explicitly rejected basing Israel's security on nuclear weapons or their use, under any circumstances. 86 Following Saddam Hussein's threats to 'incinerate half of Israel' with chemical weapons, in 1991, 88 per cent of Israelis responded that the use of nuclear weapons could be 'justified in principle'. 87 That percentage fell to 66 per cent only two years later. In 1993, 72 per cent of the sample also supported the idea of abandoning all non-conventional weapons if the other countries in the region did so as well. These responses not only render themselves to ambiguous interpretations but, as with other surveys in other countries, reveal some volatility (and perhaps flexibility) on popular attitudes regarding nuclear issues.
Labour's electoral comeback in 1992 has already helped transform Israel's place in the region. An arms control regime is under discussion in the context of multilateral peace talks, and could take one of two forms: 88 first, a limited regime, ensuring compliance with non-deployment, an agreement not to attack each others' nuclear facilities, perhaps a comprehensive test ban, and other confidence-building measures; and second, a NWFZ, imposing a complete ban on the production, purchase, test, use, or presence of nuclear weapons (as with the South Pacific's Rarotonga and Latin America's Tlatelolco Treaty).
An effectively-verified regime to free the region from all weapons of mass destruction may now, more than ever before, be part of Israel's domestic win-set. 89 Yet, before Israel relinquishes any of its alleged advanced nuclear weapons, such a regime will have to be: 1. Far more robust than what current NPT procedures can guarantee, and regionally-based. Israeli concerns with compliance have been vindicated by the widespread Iraqi violations of NPT rules. 90 2. Far more comprehensive than narrowly nuclear. It will require a ban on all weapons of mass destruction. 3. Far more inclusive than the countries currently represented in the multi-lateral arms control negotiations. 91 4) Far more rooted in a comprehensive political settlement than the ongoing official discussions are. There are signs of growing Arab recognition that the alleged Israeli nuclear deterrent will not whither away prior to such settlement." Yezid Sayigh, co-ordinator of the Palestinian team to the Multilateral Working Group on Arms Control, suggested that 'nuclear disarmament and the establishment of a nuclear-weapons-free zone could be delayed until the conventional threat was removed'; such concessions would, of course, need to be reciprocated in other areas. 93 All this implies that we are only at the beginning of a long road, and internal developments within each country will largely define its course. NOTES