In the final analysis, Israel’s survival requires intellectual supremacy over its adversaries. Though difficult to measure, such supremacy is indispensable to preserving the beleaguered country’s tactical and strategic advantages. Superior weapons technologies and infrastructures could never be adequate or determinative. Going forward, especially after Donald Trump’s patently false peace, these tangible assets could confer only partial and transient benefits.
For Jerusalem, it is high time for pertinent details. Even with a presumptive nuclear monopoly in the Middle East, the IDF will need to optimize Israel’s military advantage at multiple and intersecting levels. On prospectively urgent matters concerning future war with Iran and its jihadi surrogates, Israel would have to clarify that its military assets were purposeful at all levels of destructiveness. As a practical matter, this would include evident capacity to achieve “escalation dominance” during any significant crisis.
For the moment, the most plausible paths to a renewed Israel-Iran war - one in which Iran remained non-nuclear - would involve unpredictable escalations against Islamic Republic surrogates. At some conceivable point during such an escalating conflict, a not-yet-nuclear Iran could elicit “limited” Israeli nuclear responses. While such responses could be made consistent with authoritative international law,[1] their cumulative effects would still be destabilizing for friend and foe alike.
Notably worrisome escalation dangers would lie in any Iranian use of radiation-dispersal weapons and/or Iranian conventional attack on Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor. In a worst-case scenario, an already-nuclear North Korea would engage Israeli military forces on behalf of Iran. In such an under-examined but still-credible scenario, North Korea would operate as an “equalizing” nuclear state proxy for non-nuclear Iran.
Historically, at least, this is not a contrived scenario. North Korea engaged militarily with Israeli forces in the past, most visibly during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Back on October 31 2024, Pyongyang successfully completed missile tests demonstrating ICBM capacities against the United States. Israel, for targeting comparisons, is less than half the size of America’s Lake Michigan.
For Jerusalem, there are immediately important specifics to identify. By definition, all imaginable scenarios would be unprecedented or sui generis. This means, among other things, that related and derivative predictions could never express anything more than “quasi-scientific” judgments. In formal logic, it ought not to be overlooked, all assessments of probability must stem from a determinable frequency of relevant past events.
There has never been such an event. There has never been a genuine nuclear war. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not elements of a nuclear war. More precisely, these mass-destruction events represented singular atomic attacks within a conventional war.
Even if Iran were to remain pre-nuclear, Jerusalem could at some stage calculate that it would be gainful to cross the nuclear combat “firebreak.” This high-stakes scenario would concern intra-crisis bargaining wherein the non-introduction of Israeli nuclear weapons could allow Iran to gain the upper hand. Accordingly, during an eleventh-hour existential crisis, Israel could decide to “go nuclear” at conspicuously limited levels to establish or maintain “escalation dominance.”
Prima facie, these are weighty analytic matters. They are not in any fashion matters of ordinary politics or “common sense.” In such challenging matters, common sense is the beguiling enemy of science and logic. Looking ahead, arcane matters of nuclear war and nuclear peace ought never to be left to politicians, generals or pundits.
For Israel, like it or not, nuclear weapons and deterrence remain essential to national survival. Jerusalem’s traditional policy of deliberate nuclear ambiguity or “bomb in the basement” goes back to early days of the state. During the 1950s, David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, understood the need for a dramatic "equalizer" vis-à-vis larger and more populous regional enemies. For “BG,” those original enemies were Arab states, primarily Egypt, Jordan and Syria. Today, after Trump’s dangerously false peace, exceptional perils could come from Arab Qatar, but also from non-Arab Pakistan and Turkey.
What next for the Jewish State? Still facing an intransigent and potentially nuclear Iran, Israel will need to update and refine its posture of “deliberate nuclear ambiguity.” The key objective of such enhancements would be credible nuclear deterrence, a goal requiring prompt policy shifts to “selective nuclear disclosure.” Though counter-intuitive, Iran and certain other adversaries will need to be convinced that Israel’s nuclear arms are not too destructive for operational military use.
There will be perplexing nuances. For Israel to fashion reason-based nuclear policies, Iran’s leaders should generally be considered “rational.” Still, it is conceivable that Iran would sometime act irrationally, perhaps in alliance with other generally rational states like North Korea and/or jihadi terror groups. In the case of North Korea, waging an actual and direct war would be more challenging for Israel than any conflict with Iran.
In the Middle East, Israel currently has no nuclear state enemies. But Pakistan, as an increasingly unstable Islamic state, is subject to coup d'état by jihadi elements and is closely aligned with both Saudi Arabia and Iran. The Sunni Saudi kingdom could sometime decide to “go nuclear,” not because of Israel per se, but in response to reasonable fears of Shiite Iran’s nuclear progress. This consequential decision could be reinforced by parallel or coinciding nuclear decisions in Egypt or non-Arab Turkey.
Facing the dissembling results of a “Trump Peace,” Israel needs to place less faith in “common sense” than in science. Above all, it needs consistent faith in disciplined and refined strategic reasoning. Such reasoning will have to be logic-based and continuously dialectical. In principle, at least, its creators should approach J. Robert Oppenheimer or Yuval Ne’eman[2] intellectual status. A tall order, to be sure, but compelling nonetheless.
For Israeli nuclear deterrence to work longer-term, Iran and other potential state foes should be told more rather than less about IDF nuclear targeting doctrine and the invulnerability/penetration-capability of its nuclear forces. In concert with such major changes, Jerusalem will have to substantially clarify certain core elements of its still too-opaque “Samson Option.” The point of such clarifications would be not to “die with the Philistines” (per the biblical Book of Judges), but to enhance “high destruction” options on Israel’s strategic deterrence continuum.
Though the only purposeful rationale of Israel’s nuclear weapons should be viable deterrence at variable levels of military destructiveness, there will always remain circumstances under which Israel’s nuclear deterrent could fail. How might such prospectively intolerable circumstances arise? It’s not a hypothetical question. A comprehensive answer could be extrapolated from four basic conflict scenarios or narratives. Most plausibly, these narratives would be a “by-product” of Israel’s re-started war against Hamas and associated jihadi forces or the result of a re-started direct belligerency between Israel and Iran.
There is more. All such narratives could be impacted, modified or changed by anti-Israel interventions of Russia and/or North Korea. By definition, such game-changing interventions would remove Israel’s ongoing advantages regarding “escalation dominance” and render more realistic the specter of an Iranian-jihadist victory. Because such narratives would be historically unique, however, it would be impossible for Jerusalem to make any science-based judgments of probability. Here, intellectual supremacy would remain the source of all durable Israeli power, strategic and tactical, but still could not represent an absolute assurance of national survival. In all of these scenarios, nothing could be predictable except unpredictability.
(1) Nuclear Retaliation
If Iran or other enemy state were to launch a massive conventional attack against Israel, Jerusalem could ultimately/incrementally escalate to a limited nuclear retaliation. If adversarial first-strikes were to involve chemical or biological weapons, electromagnetic weapons (EMP) or radiation-dispersal weapons, Israel could immediately or incrementally launch a calibrated nuclear reprisal. This decision would depend, in large but unspecifiable measure, on Jerusalem's expectations concerning follow-on aggression and comparative damage-limitation. A nuclear retaliation by Israel could be ruled out only in those circumstances where enemy state aggressions were conventional and “hard-target” oriented; that is, aimed toward Israeli weapons and military infrastructures and not involving Israel’s civilian populations. Foreseeably, there are residual circumstances wherein Israel could judge limited nuclear weapons use to be rational, lawful and cost-effective.
(2) Nuclear Counter Retaliation
If Israel should feel compelled to preempt enemy state aggression with conventional weapons, that belligerent state’s response would determine Israel’s escalatory moves. If this response were in any way nuclear, including “only” radiological weapons, Israel would likely turn to correlative forms of nuclear counter-retaliation. If this enemy retaliation were to involve other non-nuclear weapons of mass destruction or mass disruption (e.g., EMP weapons), Israel could still feel compelled to take enhanced escalatory initiatives. Assuming rational decision-making, this vital decision would depend on Jerusalem's considered judgments of adversarial intent and its timely calculations of damage-limitation.
If the enemy state response to Israel's preemption were limited to hard-target conventional strikes, it is unlikely that Israel’s decision-makers would move toward nuclear counter-retaliations. If, however, the adversary’s conventional retaliation was "all-out" and directed in whole or in part toward Israeli civilian populations, an Israeli nuclear counter-retaliation could not be excluded. Such counter-retaliation could be ruled out decisively only if the enemy conventional retaliation were presumptively proportionate to Israel's preemption; confined to Israeli military targets; circumscribed by codified legal limits of “proportionality” and "military necessity;" and accompanied by variously persuasive assurances of non-escalatory intent.
(3) Nuclear Preemption
It is highly unlikely that Israel would ever decide to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against Iran or other state enemy. Though circumstances could arise wherein such a strike would appear rational in strategy and permissible in law, it is still implausible that Israel would allow itself to reach such “end-of-the-line” circumstances. An Israeli nuclear preemption could be expected only where Iran or other adversary had (a) acquired authentic (chain-reaction) nuclear and/or other weapons of mass destruction; (b) clarified that its intentions paralleled its capabilities; and (c) was believed ready to begin a "countdown to launch.” Also incentivizing would be belief by Jerusalem that exclusively conventional preemptions could no longer be consistent with preservation of the Jewish State.
(4) Nuclear War Fighting
If nuclear weapons should ever be introduced into a conflict between Israel and an enemy state, some form of nuclear war fighting would ensue. This would hold true so long as: (a) enemy first-strikes would not destroy Israel's second-strike nuclear capability; (b) enemy retaliations for an Israeli conventional preemption would not destroy Israel’s nuclear counter-retaliatory capability; (c) Israeli preemptive strikes involving nuclear weapons would not destroy enemy second-strike nuclear capabilities; and (d) Israeli retaliation for conventional first-strikes would not destroy enemy nuclear counter-retaliatory capability. For the time being, at least, any adversarial nuclear capacity without Russian, North Korean or Pakistani backup would be limited to radiation dispersal weapons and/or conventional rocket attacks against Dimona.
Summing up, Jerusalem’s overriding security focus should remain fixed on enemy state capabilities and intentions, but ought also to include variously coinciding intersections with state and sub-state surrogates. The Iran/jihadi threat to Israel is not “just” an isolable terror threat, tactical threat or strategic threat, but a multi-dimensional peril that could at some point trigger nuclear warfare with Iran.[3] As for the incendiary warnings still blaring from Tehran, acting to fulfil such threats without tangible Russian/North Korean/Pakistani assistance would plausibly be more injurious to Iran than to Israel.
This logic-based conclusion is likely well-understood by authoritative leadership elements in Tehran et. al., and Israel will seemingly retain the upper hand in future struggles for “escalation dominance.” To best ensure that this Israeli advantage remains continuous and undiminished, Israel should promptly (1) declare credible shifts from “deliberate nuclear ambiguity” to “selective nuclear disclosure;” and (2) reveal the most potentially persuasive contours of its “Samson Option.” Among other things, both remedies should be oriented not to actual nuclear war-fighting, but rather to advantage-based postures of nuclear war-avoidance.
More than anything else, Israel’s survival will require intellectual supremacy.
LOUIS RENÉ BERES was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971). Born in Zürich at the end of World War II, he is the author of many books, monographs, and articles dealing with Israeli nuclear strategy. Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue, he has lectured on this topic for over fifty years at leading universities and academic centers for strategic studies. Dr. Beres' twelfth book, Israel's Nuclear Strategy: Surviving amid Chaos, was published in 2016 (2nd ed., 2018). https://paw.princeton.edu/new-books/surviving-amid-chaos-israel%E2%80%99s-nuclear-strategy
Professor Beres is the author of seven lead articles at Oxford University Press’ annual publication: Oxford Yearbook on International Law and Jurisprudence. In 2003-2004, he was Chair of Israel’s “Project Daniel” (Iranian nuclear weapons/PM Ariel Sharon). Beres was also an early recipient of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Rabinowitch Prize