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Rethinking the Samson Option: Abandoning Israeli Nuclear Ambiguity

The October 7 attacks provided a poignant reminder of Israel's insecurity vis-a-vis Iran and its proxies. In response,  some have suggested  revisiting Israel's longstanding policy of nuclear ambiguity. This would be a mistake.    Their logic has intuitive appeal. Israel's current nuclear posture was spectacularly incapable of deterring the Hamas attacks on October 7, as well as subsequent aggression by the Houthis and Hezbollah. Iran's terror axis evidently believes the threshold for Israeli nuclear use is sufficiently high as to permit large-scale (but non-existential) attacks to be carried out against the Jewish State without fear of significant reprisal. Israel's nuclear threshold is thought to be high due to its unwillingness to "be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East". And non-nuclear reprisals are not always a viable alternative: Israel's capacity for conventional retaliation is limited, particularly when political prioriti...
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Delays in Key Weapon Deliveries to Ukraine

Author's Note: This article was originally published on August 29th, 2023. Ukrainian requests for key weapons systems since the beginning of Russia’s invasion in February 2022 have met with varying success. Some systems were approved for export and delivered within days of an official request, others are awaiting delivery months after approval, and still others have yet to be greenlit at all. The following analysis seeks to explain this variation. Ultimately, a combination of escalation concerns, procurement complications, logistical considerations, apprehension regarding sensitive technologies, and political dynamics—among other factors—largely explain disparities in lag time between Ukrainian requests for key weapons systems, their approval, and their ultimate delivery.              Many Ukrainian weapons requests were denied or delayed due to escalation concerns vis-à-vis Russia. Generally speaking, longer-range, offens...
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China's Chip Breakthrough Demands an American Response

Earlier this week, a click-bait-y title caught my eye. The article,  China’s Semiconductor Breakthrough , detailed the People’s Republic of China’s recent innovations in advanced semiconductor manufacturing.[ 1 ] Until now, the world’s highest-quality chips—which are essential to accomplish demanding tasks such as cloud computing, machine learning, and 5G—have been produced outside of the PRC. This is deliberate: the United States has attempted to hamstring China’s advanced semiconductor industry by blocking Chinese entities from purchasing essential manufacturing equipment. Only one company in the world—a Dutch company called ASML—produces the advanced Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography (EUV) machines necessary to manufacture top-of-the-line semiconductors, and the United States has lobbied Dutch officials heavily to ban their sale and export to China.[ 2 ]  China has therefore been keen to develop its own chip-production methods and has landed on an alternative: Deep Ultra...
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