“Everything is very simple in war, but even the simplest thing is difficult." Carl von Clausewitz, On War
Despite President Donald Trump’s confident assessment of US diplomacy in Switzerland, nuclear risks from Iran remain predictable and constant. To wit, for unassailable strategic reasons, the Islamic Republic could not rationally relinquish control of its highly-enriched uranium (what Trump calls “nuclear dust") or its growing arsenal of ballistic missiles. In essence, there are no circumstances in which Trump’s viscerally declared “peace" could be anything but contrived.
Serious questions persist. They warrant prompt consideration.
More than the United States, Israel has been compromised by the American president’s incoherent approach to Iran. After all, it is in Jerusalem not Washington that the tangible losses of a false peace will first be made manifest. Under some circumstances, these losses could become existential.
For Israeli planners to proceed rationally, science-based investigations will deserve pride of place. Accordingly, these planners will need to ask: Are there any ascertainable war probabilities to identify and evaluate? To what extent, if any, might these probabilities be affected by considerations or expectations of preemptive strikes? More generally, planners should inquire: What are the estimable impacts of Israel’s nuclear doctrine and nuclear strategy on nuclear war probability?
There will be variously antecedent problems. In science (logic and mathematics), probabilities must be based on a determinable frequency of pertinent past events. But because there has never been a nuclear war, Israel will have to rely on continuously-refined deductive analyses. Inevitably, the usefulness/reliability of these analyses will be contingent on the intellectual capacities of relevant strategists. Under no circumstances should such investigations be left to political decision-makers or their obeisant subordinates.
“Everything is very simple in war," says Carl von Clausewitz in On War, “but even the simplest thing is very difficult." In world politics, managing nuclear risk is never a matter for sycophantic politicians or simplifying pundits. Always, it is an intellectual matter, one that requires refined strategic theory and scholars of exceptional caliber.
What more should Israeli leaders know about the upcoming strategic challenges? Answered succinctly, capable scholars will need to calculate ways in which pertinent political leaders could manage escalation processes during a nuclear crisis, whether an expected crisis or one that surfaces by surprise. Optimally, in meeting this managerial challenge, such calculations could achieve “escalation dominance" without enlarging existential risks.
In all such matters, there will be intersecting details. For one, this complex military imperative would be unique or sui generis (that is, without historical precedent) and could heighten the chances of both unintentional and inadvertent nuclear war. Even in a future stand-off with a non-nuclear adversary, Israel could reach a point (whether suddenly or incrementally) where it would threaten or use nuclear weapons. In bloodless technical terms, this scenario would represent an “asymmetrical nuclear war."
Whatever else might have been declared after the Switzerland meetings, the Iran nuclear threat will remain or plausibly expand. In meeting this threat, any struggle of competitive risk-tasking could be tackled most convincingly by way of measured nuclear threats. Among other things, Israel’s deterrence obligations will require a prior retreat from “deliberate nuclear ambiguity" and be complicated by Iran-supported aggressions of sub-state proxies. To date, Iran-Hezbollah and Iran-Houthi have been operating against Israel as a “hybrid adversary."
To best ensure credible deterrence postures in a relentlessly “balance-of-power" world, Israel will need to display a more conspicuous willingness to take exceptional risks. Such display will be necessary to “dominate" ongoing crisis escalations. Without such a conspicuous display, even a presumptively “weaker" enemy could emerge victorious.
Today, because meeting this obligation could result in accidental or inadvertent nuclear war, capable Israeli strategists should determine (pre-crisis) the “correct" balance between nuclear risk-taking and nuclear war avoidance. Once an authentic nuclear crisis was already underway, it could be too late to make any gainful strategic decisions in Jerusalem.
There is more. To a significant extent, existential military determinations will need to be calculated without any predictive benefits of history. Among other difficulties, it would be a grave mistake for analysts and politicians to assume that a nuclear war between states must always reflect deliberate and rational decision-making processes. Seemingly, at least, the highest risks of a nuclear war involving Russia, India, China, North Korea or Pakistan could involve computer accident or decisional inadvertence.
With all this in mind, how should Israeli strategists proceed? To protect against deliberate nuclear attack, these strategists would have to accept certain core assumptions of enemy rationality. Still, even if these assumptions were reasonable and well-founded, there would remain assorted dangers of an unintentional nuclear war. These potentially existential dangers could be produced by enemy hacking operations, computer malfunction (accidental nuclear war) or decision-making miscalculation.
In the vastly-indecipherable “miscalculation scenario," damaging synergies could arise that would be difficult or impossible to halt. Moreover, as these synergies would necessarily develop within a global context that is nuclear focused, critical survival decisions might need to be ad hoc or “seat of the pants" judgments. Here, synergistic interactions would be those in which “whole" event outcomes would exceed the sum of constituent “parts."
Since 1945, the classical balance of power has been transformed, in part, into a “balance of terror." To a largely unforeseeable extent, any geo-strategic search for “escalation dominance" by parties to a potentially nuclear conflict would enlarge the risks of an inadvertent nuclear war. These often-underestimated or ignored risks would include a nuclear war by accident or by decisional miscalculation.
The “solution" here would not be to wish-away the common search for “escalation dominance" (after all, any such wish would be contrary to the survival “logic" of anarchic world politics), but to manage all prospectively nuclear crises at their lowest possible levels of destructiveness. Wherever feasible, it would be best to avoid such crises altogether and to maintain prudent “circuit breakers" against strategic hacking and technical malfunction. Nonetheless, to fashion more secure modes of nuclear war avoidance, a more reliable strategy than “wishful thinking", would be required.
There is still more to consider. Existential conflict risks to Israel will be related to the country’s formal and informal alliance arrangements. Israeli defense policy planners should more explicitly consider variously changing ties between their country and Sunni Arab states.
In strategic matters, complex problems require complex remedies. Even a non-nuclear Iran could create existential hazards for Israel by expanding the frequency and intensity of surrogate terrorist operations. If such enemy creation were to succeed in bringing Israel “to the brink," Jerusalem could suddenly find itself using pre-calibrated portions of its nuclear arsenal. Though this scenario reveals a “last resort" narrative, it is by no means inconceivable. To avoid such a scenario, Israel will have to shift its nuclear deterrence posture from “deliberate nuclear ambiguity" to “selective nuclear disclosure."
Iran is still pre-nuclear, but codified terms of the Switzerland peace settlement (Memorandum of Understanding) effectively allow uranium enrichment and ballistic missile production. Iran will retain its capacity to use radiation dispersal weapons and launch conventional rockets at Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor. Because Tehran maintains close military ties to Pyongyang, it is conceivable that a nuclear North Korea could sometime operate as a strategic “stand-in" for a not-yet-nuclear Iran. Should that happen, Israel would require enhanced strategic support from the United States, a scenario fraught with additional hazards and uncertainties. Israel could not “win" a nuclear war with North Korea.
What more is vital to a full understanding of Israel-US security interdependencies? Israel’s nuclear posture, whether ambiguous or selectively disclosed, could have especially serious consequences for US security and vice-versa. Currently, Israel has no nuclear adversaries in the region, but even the war-delayed approach of a nuclear Iran could encourage sudden or rapid nuclearization among certain Sunni Arab states or Turkey. Plausibly, non-Arab Pakistan, hailed as a “peacemaker" by US Vice President J D Vance in Switzerland on June 21, 2026, could become a direct adversary of Israel.
Pakistan is an already-nuclear Islamic state with close ties to China. Pakistan, like Israel, is not a party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty or NPT. But Pakistan, unlike Israel, has openly opted for a nuclear counterforce or nuclear war fighting strategy. For some reason, this last point was ignored by Vice-President Vance at the June 2026 Swiss summit.
Regarding the continuing prospect of Iranian nuclear weapons, Israel should consider whether and to what extent there could be an expedient role for nuclear threats against a non-nuclear foe. In part, at least, “correct answers" would depend on Jerusalem’s prior transformations of “deliberate nuclear ambiguity" (the “bomb in the basement") into visible postures of “selective nuclear disclosure." Though any such consideration would concern matters that lack historical precedent, Israel has no logical alternative to launching appropriately deductive analytic investigations. In the ongoing belligerence between Israel and Iran, the core battle-front for Jerusalem should always be acknowledged as “intellectual territory."
A specific question presents itself. What is the probabilistic difference between a deliberate or intentional nuclear war and one that would be unintentional or inadvertent? Though rarely discussed among general publics, unless this core polarity is systematically considered, little operational utility could be predicted about the likelihood of a nuclear conflict.
As there has never been an authentic nuclear war (Hiroshima and Nagasaki don't count), determining relevant probabilities must become a sorely problematic task. In logic and mathematics, true probabilities always derive from the determinable frequency of pertinent past events. Because there have been no such events, Israel will need to make its most delicate strategic decisions without a traditionally indispensable capacity. This is the ability to assign tangible odds to intersecting threat scenarios, some of which could involve synergistic interactions.
Going forward, capable Israeli analysts will have to devise cost-effective strategies for calculating (and thus averting) a nuclear war. Whatever the particularities, all relevant calculations will vary (among other things) according to (1) presumed enemy intentions; (2) accident or hacking intrusions; and/or (3) plausibility of decisional miscalculations. When taken together as cumulative categories of nuclear war threat, these three component risks of unintentional nuclear war may also be described as “inadvertent."
Any specific instance of an accidental nuclear war would be inadvertent. Not every case of inadvertent nuclear war, however, would be the result of an accident.
Some additional warnings are required. The problem of accidental and inadvertent nuclear war should never be approached by Israeli or American security policy-makers as a narrowly political or tactical issue. Rather, informed by best-available historical understandings and by carefully refined analytic capacities, military planners in Jerusalem/Tel Aviv should prepare themselves to deal with a large variety of overlapping explanatory factors. At times, these complex intersections could be “force-multiplying." At all times, uses of force would be bound by the law of armed conflict or humanitarian international law.
For both Israel and the United States, the North Korean nuclear threat should be kept in plain sight. In dealing with derivative nuclear war risks involving North Korea, no single concept could prove more important than synergy. Unless synergistic interactions are reliably and correctly evaluated, the American president could sometime underestimate the cumulative or total impact of nuclear engagement. The flesh and blood consequences of such underestimations could defy both analytic imaginations and post-war justifications.
There is more. In any strategic risk assessments regarding North Korean military nuclear intentions and Kim Jung Un's nuclear forces, the concept of synergy will warrant analytic pride of place. The only conceivable argument for an American president choosing to ignore ascertainable effects of synergy would be that US defense policy considerations were "too complex." When fundamental US national security issues are at stake, of course, any such dismissive argument would be unacceptable on its face.
For both the United States and Israel, the competitive dynamics of nuclear deterrence will not simply fade away. In our relentlessly anarchic world order, the US president and Israeli prime minister should prepare to prevail in all complex struggles for “escalation dominance." In the best of all possible worlds, to be sure, there would be no need for such corrosive preparations, but we obviously do not yet live in such a world.
For the foreseeable future, nuclear war avoidance will require the United States and Israel to continuously refine and partially coordinate national nuclear deterrence postures. In all imaginable scenarios, the common crisis task in Washington and Jerusalem will be to achieve “escalation dominance" against Iran or other pertinent adversaries without simultaneously enlarging risks of a nuclear war. For Israel and the United States, significant adversaries would be states, sub-states or “hybrid" foes that could be either rational or non-rational in nuclear decision-making processes.
In the final analysis, looking less to “common sense" than to science, planners in Israel will need to envision all considered strategic policy refinements as a challenge of science and intellect. After the contrived American peace in Switzerland, strategic planners in Israel will still need to focus comprehensively and systematically on nuclear risk management. More than anything else, this means logic-focused decision-makers, courageous national leaders willing to prioritize complex challenges of “mind" over simplifying concessions of politics.
In strategic analyses, scholars and planners should always attempt to see things through the eyes of an adversary. Looked at from the post-Switzerland (post- MOU) perspective of Iran, it would “simply" be irrational to accept US demands regarding highly-enriched uranium or ballistic missile production. It follows that unless Israel were to assume Iranian irrationality in assessing these demands, Tehran could not reasonably be expected to make the concessions obligated by Trump’s “peace." Ironically, any such assumption of enemy irrationality would open up an even larger and more worrisome set of Iranian nuclear options.
Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971) and is the author of many books, monographs, and scholarly articles dealing with various aspects of nuclear strategy and international law. In Israel, he was Chair of Project Daniel (PM Sharon, 2003-2004). He has published on nuclear warfare issues in many journals. His twelfth book, published in 2016 (2nd ed., 2018) is titled: Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel's Nuclear Strategy. https://paw.princeton.edu/new-books/surviving-amid-chaos-israels-nuclear-strategy He was born in Switzerland at the end of World War II.