The US-Israeli strikes on Iran may have set back Tehran’s nuclear program — but they have also forced a reckoning with a question Jerusalem has long avoided: is nuclear secrecy still a survival strategy?
At first glance, neither the June 2025 operation against Iran nor the follow-on attacks of late February 2026 carried any real risks of a nuclear conflict. Allegedly, in those large-scale military actions, cooperative efforts by Israel and the United States were launched to prevent Iranian nuclearization. Still, in any future armed conflict against the Islamic Republic, Jerusalem could issue deterrent threats of an “asymmetrical nuclear war” (only Israel would be nuclear) and/or Tehran could enlist already-nuclear state allies (North Korea or Pakistan) as equalizing surrogates.
These are just basic scenarios. To be useful to actual strategic decision-making in Jerusalem, they will need augmentation with variously clarifying details and nuances. In both scenarios, inter alia, Israel’s nuclear deterrent would benefit from a carefully-calibrated replacement of “deliberate nuclear ambiguity” by “selective nuclear disclosure.”
There is more. At some not yet determinable point, Israel’s survival could become contingent on the harms of a “symmetrical nuclear war.” These unprecedented harms could prove irremediable, and be suffered even if Israel were the manifestly “stronger” or “more powerful” nuclear adversary.
For conceptual and operational benefit, understanding diplomatic backgrounds will be very important. For Israel, nothing was tangibly improved by US-brokered pacts with the UAE and Bahrain – hastily contrived agreements that formally aligned Jerusalem with Sunni Arab opponents of Shiite Iran. Though some Israeli planners might still believe that Iran’s nuclear threat was diminished by the “Abraham Accords,” such thinking would be erroneous ipso facto. Among other things, it would rest on a too-optimistic view of “countervailing” Sunni military power at conceptual and policy-making levels.
Looking ahead at the ever-changing Israel-Iran axis of conflict, strategic questions will be many-sided and densely complicated. Iran need not always remain Israel’s greatest military concern and an incremental or sudden growth of Sunni Arab power would not necessarily be in Israel’s security interests. In time, Saudi Arabia, Egypt or even non-Arab Turkey could decide to “go nuclear.” To argue that such a development would necessarily represent a net-positive for Israel would be an unjustified deductive leap.
There is still more. Much will depend on the changing balance of Sunni-Shiite power, a theoretical equilibrium that is inherently subjective and potentially indecipherable. In a worst case scenario, those enemy states presumably “neutralized” by the Abraham Accords would no longer offer Israel a purposeful anti-Shiite bloc. Instead, these Sunni Arab states would reconstitute themselves as an adversarial coalition, thereby replacing Shiite Iran as the Jewish State’s most formidable enemy.
Even if there were no Sunni Arab nuclear proliferation factor to consider, Israel’s nuclear forces and strategy would remain relevant to conventional war avoidance. While rarely discussed publicly, nuclear weapons could offer substantial security benefits to Israel in deterring non-nuclear foes. These foes could include various sub-state enemies and/or “hybridized” (state-sub-state) blocs.
Creating a Viable and Law-Enforcing Nuclear Deterrent
A summarizing question warrants immediate emphasis: After the 12-day missile war with Iran in June 2025 and February 2026 US-Israeli attacks on Iran, how should Israel best ensure a viable and law-based nuclear deterrence posture? Generically, military assessments of any individual state’s nuclear deterrent should focus on a changing number of different and sometimes complementary elements. These elements would concern multiple weapon systems (offensive and defensive), weapon system infrastructures and enhancements of threat credibility. In the specific case at hand, analytic focus ought generally to highlight Israel’s missile and anti-missile capabilities and its expected willingness to launch under diverse enemy threats.
To suitably reinforce Israel’s nuclear deterrence posture, a continuously updated assessment will be in order. This dynamic focus should be directed at world system context, an obligation that calls forth both geo-strategic and jurisprudential objectives. At times, these objectives could be strongly interdependent or overlapping. At other times, they could be “force-multiplying” or synergistic. Presently, even Iran-centered military planners in Jerusalem should think of linkages with ongoing and future conflict developments in Russia-Ukraine, North Korea, India-Pakistan and China/Taiwan.
Returning to antecedent matters of methodology, deeply serious questions will need to be asked, answered and asked again, sequentially and dialectically. But how precisely should such analyses proceed? At some point, the original Cold War superpowers could find themselves on the same side. Ironically, under President Donald J. Trump, the United States has openly favored the Russian aggressor over Ukrainian victim. In a once-unimaginable scenario, it is now plausible that Trump’s “Department of War” would align the United States with Vladimir Putin’s Russia against NATO.
Credo quia absurdum, cautioned Christian theologian Tertullian: “I believe because it is absurd.”
Intersections and Synergies
There is more. To assess the prospective impact of inter-state interactions on a nuclear war involving Israel, scholars and policy-makers will have to account for starkly bewildering relationships. On occasion, assorted interactions could be synergistic. This would express an always-daunting quality, one in which the “whole” of any single effect is greater than the calculable sum of its “parts.” [1]
Such hard-to-predict expectations will require capable evaluations. To a greater or lesser extent, hard-to-quantify effects could be filtered by variously appropriate and “peremptory” considerations of international law. In the final analysis, Israel’s strategic choices should always take jurisprudential factors into close account. In the end, neither Israel nor the United States could benefit from transient military victories [2] in a continuously Hobbesian “state of nature.” [3]
For Israeli military planners and others interested in Israel’s nuclear strategy, US-Russian antagonisms should be studied together with Israel’s relevant weapon systems and nuclear threat postures. For refined analysts, these system-defining antagonisms should be considered as core elements in constant flux. Complicating calculations, system changes would be both foreseeable and unforeseeable.
Superpower relations, whether or not tempered by authoritative international law, could quickly become vital or even determinative for Israeli nuclear deterrence. Ultimately, a great deal will depend on the precise manner in which Trump-era American realignments (pro-Putin, anti-NATO) impact this relationship and the variously underlying components of Israel’s strategic posture. To the extent discoverable, this impact would depend on Jerusalem’s multiple and overlapping nuclear power alignments with the United States. Moreover, in figuring Israel’s optimal strategic moves, China and North Korea could represent a starkly dissembling “wild card.”
Reason and Anti-Reason
Antecedent to any such complex considerations, much will depend on the expected rationality or non-rationality of each national nuclear power and the plausible interactions or synergies between these nuclear adversaries and their alliance partners/clients. Regarding the first concern, Israel’s strategic planners will need to bear in mind the subtle wisdom of German philosopher Karl Jaspers’ Reason and Existence (1935): “The rational is not thinkable without its other, the non-rational, and it never appears in reality without it.” [4]
Never without it. This unambiguous assumption exhibits a rudimentary understanding for anyone engaged in strategic nuclear threat analyses. “Everything is very simple in war,” counsels Carl von Clausewitz in On War, “but even the simplest thing is difficult.” This generally useful insight remains persuasive not only during periods of active conflict, but also in those unsteady periods of latent hostility (what Thomas Hobbes meant as a “state of war” in Leviathan) that obtain between still-possible or still-impending wars of aggression.
Even during the expansive pre-nuclear era in world law [5] and world politics, a precarious logic of deterrence obtained within the global state of nature. Already, there had obtained a palpably fearful condition of raw competition and corrosive violence. Despite considerable nuance from century to century and year to year, this balance of power has existed since the 17th century Peace of Westphalia (1648.) In specifically legal terms, the “Westphalian” system is best described as a decentralized or “horizontal” system of international law.
Long before the advent of nuclear weapons, the worst “state of war” would have been characterized by “dreadful equality.” Here, world politics would have taken place within a broadly chaotic bellum omnium contra omnes, a vastly confusing context wherein “the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest.” In such bitterly opaque circumstances, potential sources of decision-making bewilderment could quickly magnify and multiply.
In any such worst case configuration – most apparent today wherever nuclear proliferation would continue without any meaningfully correlative legal inhibitions – the life of individual human beings and entire states must be (per Thomas Hobbes) “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” For Israel, the shifting parameters of “Cold War II” and related issues of enemy rationality could soon produce indeterminable and foreseeable effects on its presumptive nuclear doctrine. Inter alia, these effects would include diverse issues surrounding upcoming policy choices between “deliberate nuclear ambiguity” and “selective nuclear disclosure.”
Nuclear Ambiguity and Israeli Nuclear Deterrence
For Israel, a state sorely lacking in strategic depth, [6] the former posture has been left unchallenged. This doctrinal stance is sometimes referred to as Israel’s “bomb in the basement.” Still, as a multipolar axis of conflict is now being shaped in world politics by the three principal superpowers (US, Russia and China) and as prospects for enemy irrationality are tangibly greater than ever before, Jerusalem will have to make appropriate and incremental modifications to its nuclear deterrence doctrine. Included here, among other things, would be assorted policy considerations of preemption or (as described under authoritative international law) “anticipatory self-defense.”
In principle at least, Israel’s national nuclear doctrine and posture have remained deliberately ambiguous. At the same time, traditional ambiguity has been ostentatiously breached at the highest possible level by two of Israel’s prime ministers, first, by Shimon Peres, on December 22, 1995, and then by Ehud Olmert on December 11, 2006. Peres, speaking to a group of Israeli newspaper and magazine editors, had affirmed publicly: “…give me peace, and we’ll give up the atom. That’s the whole story.” Later, when Olmert offered similarly general but still-revelatory remarks, they were widely interpreted as “slips of the tongue.”
Today, a basic question should be resurrected in Jerusalem:
Is comprehensive nuclear secrecy always in the best survival interests of the Jewish State?
To respond properly, Israel should begin with the problematic assumption that in any such complex strategic matters, “truth” could at some point be counter-intuitive. Any useful answer to this challenging query ought to be grounded in the delineable expectations and exigencies of formal strategic doctrine. Whatever else Jerusalem may already have in mind concerning such doctrine, its response should never be a series of ad hoc decisions or other unreflective “seat-of-the-pants” policies; that is, positions casually invented or re-invented from one beleaguering national security crisis to the next.
Fashioning Israeli strategic doctrine should never consist of disjointed or ad hoc calculations. Any purposeful loosening of Israeli nuclear ambiguity would need to be subtle, nuanced, more-or-less indirect and visibly incremental. Contrary to the often parodied views of such prospective disclosure that may be found in popular news stories, this loosening would not have to take the potentially-provocative form of official Israeli policy pronouncements. Instead, it could be allowed to “leak out” or “spill out” on its own, thereby allowing a crucial point to be made without precipitating any immediate crisis or sense of impending misfortune.
From Doctrine to Strategy
Among other things, formal doctrine, consistent with world law, would represent the vital framework from which any gainfully pragmatic Israeli nuclear policy of selective disclosure could be extrapolated. In all military institutions and traditions, doctrine must describe the tactical or operational manner in which designated national forces ought to fight in variously plausible combat situations; the prescribed “order of battle;” and all manner of corollary operations. Appropriately, the literal definition of “doctrine” derives from Middle English, from the Latin doctrina, which means teaching, learning and instruction.
There is more. The central importance of codified Israeli military doctrine lies not only in the way it could animate, unify and optimize national military forces, but also in the manner it could transmit desired “messages” to an enemy state, enemy states, sub-state proxies or state-sub-state “hybrids. Understood in terms of Israel’s comprehensive strategic nuclear policy, any indiscriminate, across-the-board ambiguity would prove net-injurious to the country’s national security. Continued nuclear ambiguity would also jeopardize certain protective functions of international law. [7] For Israel, this is the case because truly effective deterrence and defense should call for military doctrine that is at least partially recognizable by such adversary states as Iran and by certain sub-state terrorist foes.
In fashioning Israel’s strategic military plans, creating operational options for strategic surprise could prove necessary to subsequent combat operations. But successful deterrence is another matter entirely. In order to persuade would-be adversaries not to strike first – in current circumstances, a manifestly complex effort of dissuasion – projecting too much secrecy could (at least on occasion) prove counter-productive.
In matters of Israel and its enemies, especially Iran, optimal military success must lie in credible deterrence, not in any actual war-fighting. [8] Examined in terms of ancient Chinese military thought offered by Sun-Tzu in The Art of War, “Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.” With this still-worthy dictum in mind, there are times for Israel when successful deterrence policies will require the deliberate “loosening” of information that had formerly been tightly held. Such information would concern Israel’s capabilities, its intentions or both qualities taken together.
In this connection, we may recall a popular Cold War I-era movie in which Dr. Strangelove, an “eccentric” strategic advisor to the American president discovers, to his horror, that the existence of America’s “doomsday machine” had not been made known in advance to the Soviets: “The whole point of the doomsday machine is lost,” shrieks Dr. Strangelove, “if you keep it a secret.” To have been suitably deterred, the film instructs, Soviet leaders ought to have been given prior warnings of the “doomsday machine.”
This device had been designed to ensure the perceived automaticity of America’s nuclear retaliatory response. Remembering the commonly-held strategic posture known as MAD, this response would have been made instantly recognizable to the Kremlin as “assuredly destructive.”
Deterrence Ex Ante, Not Revenge Ex Post
It follows from this and from general expectations of the laws of war (humanitarian international law) that Israel’s nuclear weapons should remain oriented to deterrence ex ante, not war fighting or revenge ex post. As designated instruments of a law-based system of deterrence, nuclear weapons can succeed only in their protracted non-use. Once they have been employed for any tangible “battlefield,” deterrence will have failed. Also worth noting, once nuclear weapons are actually used, all traditional meanings of “victory” instantly become moot.
The Cold War is over, and Israel’s still-worrisome deterrence relationship to a potentially nuclear adversary in Tehran is not comparable to the traditional US-Soviet “Balance-of-Terror.” There are crucial elements of now-prevailing superpower antagonisms that could substantially impact Israel’s nuclear choices. This means, among other things, that Israel ought never construct its own nuclear strategic doctrine and policy apart from close assessments of US-Russia-China relations.
In essence, there are several Cold War deterrence lessons that should be learned and adapted by Israel. Most urgently, any unmodified continuance of total nuclear ambiguity concerning Israel’s (a) strategic targeting doctrine; (b) strategic basing modes; and/or (c) capacity to penetrate a designated enemy’s active air defenses, could cause a newly-nuclear enemy state or still-nuclearizing enemy state (Iran) to underestimate Israel’s retaliatory capacity or decisional resolve.
As a subsidiary but still urgent nuclear concern, Israeli planners will need to continually assess the capability and intentions of Pakistan, an already-nuclear Islamic state that has openly declared a “nuclear war fighting” concept of national nuclear deterrence. Returning to the formative lexicon of Cold War thinking, this non-Arab Islamic state has already undertaken a formal shift from “mutual assured destruction” to “nuclear utilization theory.” In the specialized discourse and parlance of orthodox nuclear strategic theory, this represents an overt shift from MAD (mutual assured destruction) to NUT (nuclear utilization theory). Moreover, any such shift could have profound legal consequences concerning the presumed likelihood of a nuclear conflict (probability) and the presumed injuriousness of such a conflict (disutility).
Going forward, assorted uncertainties surrounding presumed components of Israel’s nuclear arsenal could lead such enemy states as Iran to reach the “wrong” conclusion. In part, this is because Israel’s willingness to make good on any threatened nuclear retaliation could then be seen as inversely related to weapon system destructiveness. Ironically, if Israel’s nuclear weapons were sometime believed to be too destructive, or “too apocalyptic,” [9] they might not deter. In these cases, more or less unwittingly, such beliefs would underscore various basic expectations of humanitarian international law. These expectations are known correctly as distinction, proportionality and military necessity.
Enemy Miscalculations and Authoritative International Law
In the future, any continuing Israeli policy of complete ambiguity could cause an already-nuclear enemy state to overestimate the first-strike vulnerability of Israel’s nuclear forces. In part, at least, this overestimation would be the result of a too-complete silence concerning measures of protection that had been deployed to safeguard Israeli nuclear weapons and launch platforms. Such silence, in turn, could be the product of Israel’s perceived alignments with the United States.
To best understand the utility and legal content of Israeli strategic nuclear doctrine and posture, analysts must first clearly identify for themselves the variously core foundations of Israeli nuclear deterrence. These foundations concern prospective attackers’ perceptions of Israel’s nuclear capability and Israel’s willingness to use this capability. Any selective telegraphing of Israel’s strategic nuclear doctrine could potentially enhance Israel’s nuclear deterrence posture and thereby support both nuclear war avoidance and authoritative international law. This would be accomplished by heightening enemy state perceptions of Israel’s capable nuclear forces and its willingness to use these forces in reprisal for previously-designated first-strike or retaliatory attacks.
To deter an enemy attack, or a post-preemption retaliation against Israel, [10] Jerusalem must always prevent a rational aggressor, by threat of an unacceptably damaging retaliation or counter-retaliation, from deciding to strike. Here, Israel’s national security would be sought by convincing the potential rational attacker (irrational state enemies could of course pose an altogether different and possibly insurmountable problem) that the costs of any considered attack will always exceed the expected benefits. Assuming that Israel’s state enemies: (1) value self-preservation most highly; and (2) choose rationally between all alternative options, they will necessarily refrain from an attack on Israel that is willing and able to deliver an unacceptably destructive response.
Iran and other enemy states might also be deterred by the plausible prospect of a more limited Israeli attack, one directed “only” at national leaders. In the usual parlance adopted by military and intelligence communities, this prospect refers to more-or-less credible threats of “regime targeting.” Whether credible or incredible, such threats could be severely problematic in legal terms. At the same time, judging by worldwide unwillingness to challenge US President Donald Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuela’s president, a justice-based system of international law seems more distant than ever.
Two factors must combine to communicate believable deterrence. In terms of capability, the critical components are payload and delivery system. It must be successfully communicated to Iran or any other calculating adversary that Israel’s firepower and also its means of delivering that firepower are capable of inflicting unacceptable destruction. This means that Israel’s retaliatory or counter-retaliatory forces must always appear sufficiently invulnerable to enemy first-strikes and sufficiently elusive to penetrate an enemy’s active defenses.
It need not be communicated to a potential attacker that Israel’s firepower and delivery vehicles are superior to those of Iran or other adversary. Deterrence, Israel’s planners must continuously bear in mind, is never about “victory.” The capacity to deter does not have to be as great as the capacity to “win.”
As a useful example, Israeli planners could think about North Korea and the United States. In this increasingly problematic dyad of international adversaries, the Americans are plainly superior in all usual expressions of hardware and battle-readiness, but the North Koreans could still bring significant harms to US armed forces and to certain portions of the American mainland. And this is to say nothing about parallel or corollary damages that could be visited on US allies in South Korea or Japan.
Increasingly Complex Calculations
With Israel’s strategic nuclear doctrine kept locked in the “basement,” enemy states like Iran could sometime conclude, rightly or wrongly, that a first-strike attack or post-preemption reprisal would be cost-effective. But if relevant Israeli doctrine were made more obvious to enemy states contemplating an attack – “obvious” in that Israel’s nuclear assets seemingly met both payload and delivery system objectives – Jerusalem’s nuclear forces could better serve their multiple security functions.
For Israel, the second requirement of credible nuclear deterrence concerns willingness. How could Israel convince Iran or other potential state attackers that it possessed the resolve to deliver an appropriately destructive retaliation and/or counter retaliation? The answer to this question lies largely in doctrine, that is, in Israel’s demonstrated strength of commitment to carry out such an attack and in the nuclear ordnance that would be made available.
Here, too, continued ambiguity over strategic nuclear doctrine could create the dangerous impression of an unwilling Israel. Conversely, any doctrinal movement toward some as-yet-undetermined level of disclosure could heighten the impression that Israel was in fact willing to follow-through on its nuclear threats.
There are variously persuasive connections between any incrementally more “open” or disclosed Israeli strategic nuclear doctrine and enemy state perceptions of Israeli nuclear deterrence. One such connection centers on the expected relationship between prospectively greater nuclear openness and the perceived vulnerability of Israel’s nuclear forces to preemptive destruction. Another such connection concerns the relation between greater doctrinal openness and the perceived capacity of Israel’s nuclear forces to penetrate an offending state’s active defenses.
To be deterred by Israel, a newly-nuclear Iran or other newly nuclear adversary (potentially, one of the major Sunni Arab states also worried about a resurgent Iran) would need to believe that at least a critical number of Israel’s retaliatory forces would successfully survive an enemy first-strike and that these forces would not subsequently be prevented from hitting pre-designated targets in Iran or elsewhere.
Carefully reasoned, expanding doctrinal openness or partial nuclear disclosure could represent a rational option for Israel so long as the situationally-pertinent enemy state was made aware of Israel’s nuclear capabilities. The presumed operational benefits of any such expanding doctrinal openness would accrue from certain deliberate flows of information about dispersion, multiplication and hardening of Israel’s strategic nuclear weapon systems and from other technical features of these systems. Orderly and doctrinally-controlled flows of information could remove any lingering enemy state doubts about Israel’s nuclear force capabilities and its intentions. Left unchallenged, such doubts could undermine Israeli nuclear deterrence and war-avoidance elements of international law.
Israel and “Friction”: Inadvertent versus Deliberate Nuclear War
A key problem in purposefully refining Israeli strategic nuclear policy on issues of deliberate nuclear ambiguity has to do with what Prussian military thinker Carl von Clausewitz famously called “friction.” [11] No military doctrine could ever fully anticipate the actual pace of combat activity or the precise reactions of individual human commanders under fire. It follows that Israel’s nuclear doctrine should be encouraged to combine adequate tactical flexibility with selective doctrinal openness. To understand exactly how such seemingly contradictory objectives could be reconciled in Jerusalem now presents a primary intellectual challenge to Israel’s national command authority.
In the end, Israeli planners should think about plausible paths to a nuclear war that include risks of an inadvertent or accidental nuclear war. It is possible (perhaps even plausible) that the risks of any deliberate nuclear war involving Israel would be small, but that the Jewish State could still be vulnerable to such a war occasioned by mechanical/electrical/computer malfunction on one side or the other; and assorted decisional errors in reasoning (i.e., human miscalculation).
To properly assess different but intersecting risks between deliberate nuclear war and inadvertent or accidental nuclear war should be regarded in Jerusalem as a core conceptual goal. These risks, including their corollary legal implications, could operate independently of one another and be impacted by Trump-era alignments. Also, Israel – like the much larger United States – should continuously prepare for expanding threats of cyber-attack and cyber-war. Always, such challenges should be considered together with the relentless proliferation of “digital mercenaries.”
One more analytic distinction warrants mention at this late-stage assessment. It references the difference between inadvertent nuclear war and accidental nuclear war. By definition, any accidental nuclear war would be inadvertent. An inadvertent nuclear war, however, need not be accidental. False warnings, which could be generated by technical malfunction or third-party hacking interference would not be included under causes of an unintentional or inadvertent nuclear war. Instead, they would represent cautionary narratives of accidental nuclear war.
Most critical among plausible causes of inadvertent nuclear war would be errors in calculation by one or both (or several) sides. The most conspicuous example would involve misjudgments of enemy intent or enemy capacity that could emerge and enlarge as a particular crisis continued to escalate. In part, such consequential misjudgments could stem from an amplified desire by one, both or several parties to achieve “escalation dominance.”
In any such projected crisis, all rational parties would likely strive for calculable advantage without risking total or near-total destruction. Where one or several adversaries would not be rational, however, all usual deterrence “bets” would be “off.” Where one or several sides would not be identified as rational, Jerusalem would need to input variously unorthodox sorts of security options.
Still other causes of inadvertent nuclear war involving Israel could include flawed interpretations of computer-generated nuclear attack warnings; an unequal willingness among adversaries to risk catastrophic war; overconfidence in deterrence and/or defense capabilities on one or several sides (including Israel); adversarial regime changes; outright revolution or coup d’état among adversaries and (among apparent foes) poorly-conceived pre-delegations of nuclear launch authority.
Markedly serious problems of overconfidence could be aggravated by successful tests of a nation’s missile defense operations, whether by Israel, by Iran or by any of its other adversaries. These problems could be further encouraged by too-optimistic assessments of Trump-era alliance guarantees. An example might be intra-crisis judgment in Jerusalem that Washington stands firmly behind its every move during ongoing escalations, up to and including certain forms of reprisal. Similarly, Iran or other enemy of Israel could mistake the seriousness and commitment of its own preferred guarantor, whether Russian, Chinese, North Korean or American.
Going forward, a potential source of inadvertent nuclear war could be the “backfire” effect from strategies of “pretended irrationality. A rational enemy of Israel that had managed to convince Jerusalem of its decisional irrationality could spark an otherwise avoidable Israeli military preemption. Conversely, an enemy leadership that had begun to take seriously any hint of decisional irrationality in Jerusalem could be frightened into striking first. Regarding this second scenario, it should be remembered that General Moshe Dayan, as Israel’s Minister of Defense, argued: “Israel must be seen as a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.”
Nightmare: New Strategic Meanings
While the “state of nations” has always been a “state of nature,” at least since the seventeenth century Peace of Westphalia (1648), current conditions of nuclear capacity and worldwide anarchy portend a uniquely dangerous amalgam of law-violating infringements. Among other things, the reasons for such dire portents lie in the indispensability of rational decision-making to viable nuclear deterrence and the subtly-interpenetrating fact that rational decision-making may become subject to corrosive modifications or complete disappearance.
In a world morphing from “mere” anarchy to unmanageable chaos, Israeli decision-makers should prepare for increasingly incoherent crises. To avoid being caught unprepared, these leaders will have to prepare capably for unprecedented levels of world-system upheaval and once-unfathomable levels of decisional urgency. In some cases, strategic calculations will have to assume varying levels of enemy irrationality among state, sub-state or “hybridized” adversaries.
For Israel, a country smaller than America’s Lake Michigan, the ultimate survival tasks will be intellectual ones, and will require durable victories of “mind over mind.” In turn, these analytic victories will depend on prior capacities to fully understand the many-sided elements of Trump-era alliance reconfigurations. In principle, at least, such capacities could lead Israel to consider assorted preemption options.
Final decisions regarding such options would be based on (a) expectations of enemy rationality or irrationality; (b) expectations of enemy first-strikes; (c) presumed costs (cumulative “disutility”) of enemy first-strikes; (d) presumed schedule of enemy nuclear or biological weapons deployments; (e) expected efficiencies of enemy active defenses over time; (f) expected efficiencies of Israel’s active defenses over time; (g) expected efficiencies of Israeli hard-target counterforce operations over time; (h) expected reactions of unaffected regional enemies; and (i) expected US, Russian and world community reactions to the Israeli preemptions. [12]
“The terrible `ifs’ accumulate.” What is most critically required of Israel is determined national willingness to face intersecting complexities of world politics with more than just a perfunctory nod to deductive theory and international law. With specific regard to nuclear war with Iran (asymmetrical or symmetrical), Jerusalem will need to craft its policies as an intellectual rather than political task. Israel’s survival interests could never be served by dependence on a conspicuously uncomprehending American president, [13] even if the US leader were willing to maintain Jerusalem’s “qualitative edge.” [14]
Any existential deference to Donald J. Trump by Jerusalem would represent a Faustian bargain, a “soul-wrenching” agreement whereby Israel could easily forget that its capacity to “win” always requires far more than tangible military supremacy. With particular reference to Iran and other foreseeable nuclear states, Jerusalem will need to modify Israel’s posture of comprehensive nuclear secrecy and embark upon a thought-based policy of selective nuclear disclosure. To best operationalize such a forward-directed policy, leaders of the Jewish state will also need to ensure that all pertinent strategies are based on rigorous analyses and would support the dignifying expectations of authoritative international law.
Though the dialectics of nuclear strategy are bewildering per se, they must still be worked out imaginatively, industriously, systematically and comprehensively. The fact that Israel and the United States prevailed in their joint February 2026 military operations against Iran does not necessarily imply safety from all future conventional conflicts or from a symmetrical nuclear war. Even an asymmetrical nuclear war in which Israel was the only nuclear power could inflict grave harms on the Jewish state. It all depends on the manner in which Israel’s decision-makers choose to confront “the terrible `ifs.’”
Notes
[1] See by this author, Louis René Beres, at Harvard National Security Journal, Harvard Law School: https://journals.law.harvard.edu/nsj/2015/06/core-synergies-in-israels-strategic-planning-when-the-adversarial-whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts/
[2] See by this author, Louis René Beres, at Princeton Political Review: https://www.princetonpoliticalreview.org/opinion-1/always-preparing-for-a-next-war-the-infinite-lethality-of-world-politics
[3] See Professor Louis René Beres, Oxford University Press, Global Community Yearbook on International Law:
https://academic.oup.com/book/55768/chapter-abstract/434255464?redirectedFrom=fulltext See also by Professor Beres at Modern Diplomacy: https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2025/07/19/preparing-for-the-next-war-the-infinite-lethality-of-world-politics/
[4] Interestingly, the critical importance of Reason to all legal judgment was prefigured in ancient Israel, which prominently accommodated the concept within its system of revealed law. Jewish theory of law, insofar as it displays the evident markings of a foundational Higher Law, offers a transcending order revealed by the divine word as interpreted by human reason. In the words of Ecclesiastes 32.23, 37.16, 13-14: “Let reason go before every enterprise and counsel before any action…And let the counsel of thine own heart stand…For a man’s mind is sometimes wont to tell him more than seven watchmen that sit above in a high tower….”
[5] In such jurisprudential matters, attention should be paid to long-standing ideas of a “higher law.” Under international law, these ideas, drawn originally from both the ancient Greeks and ancient Hebrews, are contained within the principle of jus cogens or peremptory norms. In the language of Article 53 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (1969: “A peremptory norm of general international law….is a norm accepted and recognized by the international community of States as a whole, as a norm from which no derogation is permitted, and which can be modified only by a subsequent norm of general international law having the same character.”
[6] The heart of this issue was addressed as early as June 29, 1967, when a US Joint Chiefs of Staff memorandum specified that returning Israel to pre-1967 boundaries would drastically increase its vulnerability. The then Chairman of the JCS, General Earl Wheeler, concluded that for minimal deterrence and defense, Israel must retain Sharm el Sheikh and Wadi El Girali in the Sinai; the entire Gaza Strip; the high ground and plateaus of the mountains in the West Bank; and the Golan Heights, east of Quneitra.
[7] No state, including Israel, is under any per se legal obligation to renounce access to nuclear weapons; in certain residual circumstances, even actual resort to such weapons could be lawful. On July 8, 1996, the International Court of Justice at The Hague handed down its Advisory Opinion on “The Legality of the Threat or Use of Force of Nuclear Weapons.” The final paragraph of this Opinion, concludes, inter alia: “The threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, and in particular the principles and rules of humanitarian law. However, in view of the current state of international law, and of the elements of fact at its disposal, the Court cannot conclude definitively whether the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be lawful or unlawful in an extreme circumstance of self-defense, in which the very survival of a State would be at stake.”
[8] This was a major conclusion of this author’s Project Daniel Report (2003) to then Prime Minister Sharon. It was titled Israel’s Strategic Future. http://www.acpr.org.il/ENGLISH-NATIV/03-ISSUE/daniel-3.htm
[9] The underlying idea here of some palpable apocalypse seems to have been born in ancient Iran (Persia), specifically, with the Manichaeism of the Zoroastrians. Interestingly, at least one of these documents, The War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness, found in a Qumran cave, is a comprehensive description of Jewish military tactics and regulations at the end of the Second Commonwealth. In essence, the “Sons of Light” were expected to prevail in battle against the “Sons of Darkness” before the “end of days,” and the later fight at Masada was widely interpreted as an apocalyptic struggle between a saintly few and the wicked many.
[10] Regarding preemption, Israeli precedents for any such defensive moves would be Operation Opera directed against the Osiraq (Iraqi) nuclear reactor on June 7, 1981, and, later (though lesser known) Operation Orchard against Syria on September 6, 2007. In April 2011, the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) confirmed that he bombed Syrian site in the Deir ez-Zoe region of Syria had indeed been a developing nuclear reactor. In this writer’s judgment, both preemptions were lawful assertions of Israel’s “Begin Doctrine.”
[11] See, by this author, Louis René Beres, at War Room, US Army War College, Pentagon: https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/author/louis-rene-beres/
[12] For early commentary by this author on anticipatory self-defense under international law, with special reference to Israel, see: Louis René Beres and (COL./IDF/Res.) Yoash Tsiddon Chatto, “Reconsidering Israel’s Destruction of Iraq’s Osiraq Nuclear Reactor,” TEMPLE INTERNATIONAL AND COMPARATIVE LAW JOURNAL, Vol. 9., No. 2., 1995, pp. 437 – 449; Louis René Beres, “Preserving the Third Temple: Israel’s Right of Anticipatory Self-Defense Under International Law,” VANDERBILT JOURNAL OF TRANSNATIONAL LAW, Vol. 26, No. 1., April 1993, pp. 111- 148; Louis René Beres, “After the Gulf War: Israel, Preemption and Anticipatory Self-Defense,” HOUSTON JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW, Vol. 13, No. 2., Spring 1991, pp. 259 – 280; Louis René Beres, “Striking `First:’ Israel’s Post-Gulf War Options Under International Law,” LOYOLA OF LOS ANGELES INTERNATIONAL AND COMPARATIVE LAW JOURNAL, Vol. 14, Nov. 1991, No. 1., pp. 1 – 24; Louis René Beres, “Israel and Anticipatory Self-Defense,” ARIZONA JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL AND COMPARATIVE LAW, Vol. 8, 1991, pp. 89 – 99; and Louis René Beres, “After the SCUD Attacks: Israel, `Palestine,’ and Anticipatory Self-Defense,” EMORY INTERNATIONAL LAW REVIEW, Vol. 6, No. 1., Spring 1992, pp. 71 – 104. For an examination of assassination as a permissible form of anticipatory self-defense by Israel, see, Louis René Beres, “On Assassination as Anticipatory Self-Defense: The Case of Israel,” HOFSTRA LAW REVIEW, Vol. 20, No. 2., Winter 1991, pp. 321 – 340. For more general assessments of assassination as anticipatory self-defense under international law by this author, see: Louis René Beres, “The Permissibility of State-Sponsored Assassination During Peace and War,” TEMPLE INTERNATIONAL AND COMPARATIVE LAW JOURNAL, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1991, pp. 231 – 249; and Louis René Beres, “Victims and Executioners: Atrocity, Assassination and International Law,” CAMBRIDGE REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS, Winter/Spring, 1993.
[13] See by this author, Louis René Beres, at Princeton Political Review: https://www.princetonpoliticalreview.org/opinion-1/a-house-of-dynamite-donald-trump-and-nuclear-war
[14] See by this author, Louis René Beres, at The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: https://thebulletin.org/2016/08/what-if-you-dont-trust-the-judgment-of-the-president-whose-finger-is-over-the-nuclear-button/#post-heading
Louis René Beres (Ph.D., International Law, Princeton, 1971) is Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue University. He is the author of twelve books on nuclear strategy and world politics, including Apocalypse: Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics (University of Chicago Press, 1980) and Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (2016; 2nd ed., 2018). His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, American Journal of International Law, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and Parameters: Journal of the US Army War College, among many other publications. He has lectured on law and strategy at US and Israeli military and intelligence institutions, including the IDF National Security College. Beres was born in Zürich at the end of World War II.
Opinions expressed in JURIST Commentary are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JURIST’s editors, staff, donors or the University of Pittsburgh.