In the many-sided
conflict now underway against Iran (i.e., simultaneous
and complementary operations led by the United States
and Israel), little concern has been expressed for a nuclear
war. To be sure, keeping Iran non-nuclear remains a preeminent
objective of Washington and Jerusalem, and nothing plausible
suggests any short-term nuclear threats from Teheran.
Still, the strategic situation between multiple belligerents
is dynamically unstable, and could be continuously undermined
by US President Donald J. Trump’s openly unscientific
approach to war and peace.
There are
tangible particulars. In the 2025 film A House of Dynamite,
an unidentifiable nuclear missile is heading for the United
States. For the American president and his operational
chain of command, there is no way of determining if incoming
weapons have been launched intentionally or as the result
of accident or inadvertence. While the film lacks substantive
analytic content, its underlying warning is nonetheless
clear, commendable and suitably “on-point”:
In a global military universe of belligerent nationalism
and expansive complexity, something vast and irremediable
will inevitably go wrong.
This is not
“just” an academic conclusion. In essence,
science-based policies are prerequisite to global survival.
What, therefore, should be done by the United States,
Israel and other belligerent states, nuclear and non-nuclear,
to prevent a nuclear war? There could not possibly be
a more urgent policy question.
More particulars
warrant attention. To grapple with this core survival
imperative, a primary distinction should be introduced.
Immediately, it needs to be understood, the risks of an
intentional nuclear war are never the same as ones of
an unintentional or accidental nuclear war. Scholars who
are capable of deciphering increasingly complex nuclear
war scenarios (by definition, a tiny universe) will need
to acknowledge this clarifying bifurcation. Always, in
such hyper-challenging intellectual tasks, pride of place
should be accorded to seriously disciplined thinkers,
not to viscerally clamoring politicians.
There is more.
If political leaderships take comfort from assumptions
of enemy rationality, they would ignore indispensable
calculations. More precisely, even perfectly rational
adversaries could commit consequential errors in strategic
reasoning and thereby fail to prevent certain miscalculated
or accidental firings.
In dealing
with nuclear weapons, anything less than perfect “reliability
of intercept” would be unacceptable. Operationally,
however, even a presumptively flawless system of missile
defense (e.g., Donald Trump’s “Golden Dome”)
could never be 100% effective. It follows, inter alia,
that American survival in our currently-dissembling nuclear
“balance” must depend on credible nuclear
deterrence.
Further nuances
and details deserve reference. For the United States,
an accelerating threat of a nuclear war ought never to
be dealt with as a “one-off” peril. Instead,
this threat should always be assessed as part of a comprehensive
systemic obligation; that is, to ensure national survival
in a global “state of nature.”
Impacted by
the structural limitations of global anarchy – limitations
highlighted by the continuous absence of any centralized
world authority – no state belligerent should be
expected to prioritize considerations of international
law. Nowhere should this warning be more obvious than
in the case of Donald J. Trump’s United States,
a self-imperiling country where the incumbent president
no longer even pretends to abide by long-settled civilizational
rules. This assertion is offered here not as a narrowly
ad hominem or politically partisan judgment, but only
as an evident and incontestable fact.
More questions
warrant thoughtful replies. What is there to learn about
nuclear war avoidance? What can be discovered by science?
To respond, because a nuclear war has never been fought,
gainful national security policies will need to be based
on variously abstract deductions. Significantly, this
limitation does not signify any automatic absence of science-based
inquiry, but it does render impossible any logic-based
appraisals of nuclear war probabilities.
EXPECTATIONS
OF ESCALATION DOMINANCE
There is more.
In the inherently ungovernable “state of nature,”
international crises and belligerent confrontations are
inevitable. Ipso facto, the historically “correct”
way for powerful states like the United States to remain
powerful is by demonstrating both the capacity and the
willingness to dominate all “high-value” crisis
escalations. To best ensure perceived capacity and willingness,
this country will at times need to take exceptional risks,
but to simultaneously avoid nuclear warfare.
It will be
a delicate balancing act. In nuclear matters, decisional
errors could prove unforgiving and irreversible. Always,
above all, such potentially existential errors will need
to be unraveled intellectually before they could ever
be manageable politically.
In world politics,
nothing is more practical than good theory. To figure
out what is actually happening or about to happen between
the United States and its adversaries, both non-nuclear
and nuclear, it will be necessary to situate pertinent
crises within broad theoretical frameworks. What should
be the optimally useful framework?
Whoever the
specific adversaries, American strategists seeking to
protect the United States from a deliberate nuclear attack
(unintentional nuclear attack risks will pose different
risks and remedies) will have to accept facilitating assumptions
of adversarial rationality. Without such assumptions,
ipso facto, there could be no meaningful theory of nuclear
strategy and nuclear warfare. At the same time, such reassuring
assumptions display no recurring basis in world history
and might not hold up in certain still-foreseeable confrontations.
For all countries,
there is a common dilemma. Going forward, critical dangers
will be created by enemy hacking operations, variously
unrelated computer malfunctions and/or decision-making
miscalculations In each relevant scenario, certain damaging
synergies could arise that would prove difficult or impossible
to reverse.
HISTORICAL
CONTEXT AND EXPANDING THREATS
In such bewildering
matters, history will deserve some recognizable pride
of place. Since 1945, the global balance of power has
been transformed, in considerable measure, to a “balance
of terror.” In crisis circumstances where at least
one adversarial state party is already-nuclear, an uncontrolled
search for “escalation dominance” would enlarge
the risks of unintentional or inadvertent nuclear war.
Though widely overlooked and underestimated, these risks
include nuclear war by accident or decisional-miscalculation
(there are not the same problem) and could be incurred
in different parts of the world. As a clarifying point
of terminology, in cases where only one state party was
already-nuclear, risks would define an “asymmetrical
nuclear war.”
The “solution”
to now-proliferating nuclear crisis risks is not to wish-away
any adversarial search for “escalation dominance”
(such a wish would be contrary to the internal “logic”
of anarchic or chaotic world politics), but to manage
all prospectively nuclear confrontations at their lowest
possible levels of destructiveness. Wherever feasible,
therefore, it would be best to avoid such confrontations
altogether and to maintain “circuit breakers”
against both strategic hacking and technical malfunction.
In world politics,
US survival planning has granted conspicuous importance
to presumptively still-worrisome Iranian nuclear plans.
Plausibly, the prospect of a nuclear Iran[17] has already
encouraged counter-vailing nuclearization planning by
Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey. In this connection, moreover,
non-Arab Pakistan[18] could become a direct adversary
of the United States and/or Israel.
Pakistan is
an already-nuclear Islamic state with close ties to China.
Like Israel, Pakistan is not a party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation
Treaty (NPT). Nuclear China has never renounced its presumed
right to “recover” Taiwan by military force.
MORE FROM
CLAUSEWITZ
“Everything
is very simple in war,” says Carl von Clausewitz
in On War, “but the simplest thing is very difficult.”
With America “in the loop,” Israel will continue
to prioritize those circumstances wherein nuclear threats
against a still pre-nuclear adversary in Tehran would
seem gainful. In part, at least, Israeli conclusions would
depend on the Jewish state’s prior transformations
of “deliberate nuclear ambiguity” (the “bomb
in the basement”) into schematized variants of “selective
nuclear disclosure.” Though such considerations
would concern matters that are sui generis or without
historical precedent, Israel could at some point have
no rational alternative.
International
relations have reached a point where country-strategists
must become more theoretical and more specific. What is
the analytic difference between a deliberate or intentional
nuclear war and one that would be unintentional or inadvertent?
Without considering this vital distinction, little of
calculable policy use could be said about the likelihood
of nuclear conflict. Still, because there has never been
an authentic nuclear war (Hiroshima and Nagasaki don’t
“count”), scientifically determining relevant
probabilities will remain technically impossible.
Now in the
“final innings” of an incomparably important
competition, capable American thinkers will have to identify
optimal strategies for anticipating and averting nuclear
warfare. Among other things, this task will vary according
to (1) presumed enemy intentions; (2) presumed plausibility
of accident or enemy hacking intrusions; and/or (3) presumed
plausibility of decisional miscalculation. Considered
together as cumulative categories of nuclear threat, these
component risks of a nuclear war should always be described
as “high-urgency.”
There will
need to be associated linguistic clarifications. Any particular
instance of accidental nuclear war would be inadvertent,
but not every case of an inadvertent nuclear war would
be the result of accident. Most worrisome could be damage-limiting
strikes that leave the target state unsure about launching
follow-on strikes. Here, to protect itself against such
more-or-less plausible escalations, the target state could
launch a massive or all-out retaliation.
A DOUBLE-EDGED
SWORD
Recalling
Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz, certain fundamental
nuclear issues will still need to be “pondered and
analyzed” in Washington and Jerusalem. Such existential
matters should never be approached by American or Israeli
national security policy-makers as a political or tactical
problem. Rather, informed by in-depth historical understandings
and refined analytic capacities, pertinent military decision-makers
should prepare to deal with a large variety of overlapping
threat-system hazards. At unpredictable times, the analyzed
intersections would prove “synergistic” or
force-multiplying.
For the United
States and Israel during the 2026 war against Iran and
its proxies (Operations “Epic Fury” and “Roaring
Lion”), Washington and Jerusalem should expect the
unexpected. In this connection, North Korean intervention
as an Iranian nuclear proxy should not be dismissed out
of hand. And unless synergistic interactions are figured
in, American and Israeli decision-makers could seriously
underestimate the total or cumulative impact of belligerent
engagements with Hezbollah, Houthis and variously assorted
other sub-state foes.
STAYING ON
A COLLISION COURSE
In the global
“state of nature,” unprecedented dynamics
of nuclear risk-taking and nuclear deterrence will not
fade away on their own. Operating rationally in our centuries-old
world system of belligerent nationalism, the US president
and Israeli prime minister likely face a rational Iranian
leader, but still remain subject to accidents, ambiguities
and miscalculations. If for any reason the Iranian adversary
does not remain similarly rational, (1) the traditional
logic of deterrence would be undermined; and (2) Washington
and Jerusalem will need to re-define traditionally accepted
criteria of “escalation dominance.”
To employ
a nautical metaphor, this result would mean sailing in
uncharted waters. Among new threats, Sunni Arab states
that had formerly shared Israeli and American fears of
a nuclear Iran, could coalesce into a new and even greater
danger. Recalling the portentous designations on medieval
maps, this ironic outcome (remember the so-called “Abraham
Accords”?) would reveal “dragons.”
There is more.
Over time, no matter how carefully, responsibly and rationally
military survival preparations are carried out, an international
order based on an unmanageable “state of nature”
will fail. For the moment, certain risks of catastrophic
failure concerning an unintentional nuclear war with North
Korean or Pakistani surrogacy seem unrealistic. Still,
conflict with a pre-nuclear Iran could at some not yet
determinable point become an “asymmetrical nuclear
war” (because Israel and its US ally would see no
other way to achieving “escalation dominance”),
and even a one-sided advantage for Israel and the United
States would not preclude extensive harms to the already-nuclear
belligerents.
Recalling
philosopher Karl Popper’s succinct summation, the
analytic task for Washington and Jerusalem should be to
advance serial statements of interrelated hypotheses,
and test these linked propositions “step by step.”
At its core, this task would underscore a preeminently
scientific responsibility for disciplined thinkers and
strategic theorists. Though counter-intuitive, the only
role for national political leaders should center on interpretation,
clarification and policy-implementation.
It’s
time for a summing up. In choosing survival over extinction,
the United States and Israel should grasp that growing
nuclear war risks are “vast” and “impersonal,”
and that even a non-nuclear Iran could at some point precipitate
a nuclear war. Immediately, therefore, strategic thinkers
should clarify analytic distinctions between an intentional
and unintentional nuclear war.
Simultaneously,
these thinkers will need to assess corollary risks, both
separately and in all ascertainable forms of intersection.
Unless this primary intellectual responsibility is accepted,
no American president’s assurances of “peace
through strength” (assurances that Trump claims
he would “feel in his bones”) could ever represent
anything more than a caricature of science-based reasoning.
From presidential strategic doctrine based on “feelings,”
there could be neither escape nor sanctuary.
