Nuclear options

I REFER to the piece on Israel’s perceived nuclear capacity, its Dolphin-class submarines, a possible second-strike capability, and its policy of nuclear ambiguity or nuclear opacity (Israel’s German-built submarines secretly got nuclear weapons, 4 June).

The Samson Option alluded to, and referred to in a recent article in the German title, Der Spiegel, is far from any new revelation.

This possible Israeli deterrence strategy was written about in the early 1990s by Seymour Hersh, an American investigative journalist, and the term may have been expressed first by Israeli political and military elites as early as the 1960s.

That the strategy has been spotlighted yet again and by the German media, and has caused angst in Germany, has probably got more to do with the ongoing debate prompted by Gunter Grass and his criticism of the Israeli nuclear programme, and with the mature discussion about the value to its economy of contracts in the defence and military-technology sectors.

Germany and the UK, and other countries with significant defence industries, will know full well it is not Israel’s nuclear programme that causes anxiety in Saudi Arabia, for example, but the nuclear ambitions of Iran.

They know too that Israelis capable of building its own submarines should the Dolphin-class sub contracts collapse, just as the Israeli Merkava (Chariot) tank emerged after the collapse of British-Israeli collaboration 40-odd years ago.

GRAEME D EDDIE

Bothwell Gardens, Dunbar