As President Trump ordered the US to attack three major Iranian nuclear sites, a misguided concept of Israel’s national security morphed into an even more twisted view of US national security.
Only days ago, President Trump reiterated that Iran will never have nuclear weapons. Yet, according to US intelligence assessments, Iran was up to three years away from being able to produce and deliver a nuclear weapon. While Israel built its case for war, the US didn’t buy it. The problem is that Trump did.
The Israel/US Iran offensive is not about nuclear weapons. It is about still another unwarranted proxy war. It aims at the restoration of the pre-1979 Iran.
Ironically, Iran is a member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which Israel shuns. As shown by The Fall of Israel (2025), the US/Israeli path to the carnage across the Middle East was paved almost 60 years ago.
Yom Kippur War
Israel first crossed the nuclear threshold on the eve of the Six-Day War in May 1967, when Prime Minister Levi Eshkol secretly ordered the nuclear reactor scientists in Dimona to assemble two crude nuclear devices. The crude atomic bombs “were readied for deployment on trucks that could race to the Egyptian border for detonation in the event Arab forces overwhelmed Israeli defenses.”
At the eve of Yom Kippur in 1973, despite advance intelligence about the impending attack, Prime Minister Golda Meir decided not to launch a pre-emptive strike fearing the U.S. response could prove adverse as it had in 1956. Mobilization proved grossly inadequate; for a few days, Israel faced an existential threat.
Even the normally sober Defense Minister Moshe Dayan was rattled enough to later tell Meir that “this is the end of the Third Temple.” It was a reference to the collapse of the state of Israel. But “Temple” was also the code word for nuclear weapons.
On the night of October 8, Meir and her kitchen cabinet had thirteen 20-kiloton atomic bombs assembled. Their destructive potential was higher than that of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima, with an explosive yield of the equivalent of about 15 kilotons of dynamite.
At the edge of a nuclear war
The Israelis planned to use the bombs against Egyptian and Syrian targets if Arab forces would advance too far. Leaks suggest that the primary purpose was strategic deterrent; but it also signaled a tentative “Samson Option”; that is, a massive potential Israeli retaliation as a “last resort” option.
At the time, the implications of the devastating aftermath of even tactical nuclear strikes were not well-known. As the Soviets began to resupply Arab forces, particularly Syria, Meir requested Nixon for help with military supply.
After the full nuclear alert, Israelis began to load the warheads into waiting planes. Cognizant of the potential implications, Nixon ordered a full-scale strategic airlift operation to deliver weapons and supplies to Israel. By the time the aid arrived, Israel was gaining the upper hand in the war.
After those days on a nuclear edge, nothing would ever remain the same in the Middle East. American military aid to Israel contributed to the 1973 OPEC embargo against the United States, which was lifted in March 1974, and subsequently to the overthrow of the Shah in Iran 1979, followed by another oil crisis.
The twin crises and the postwar economic expansion ended with devastating stagflation, which led to record-high interest rates. As the Keynesian era faded away, monetarism coupled with Reagan’s rearmament drives ensued.
Nuclear stockpiles
The conventional estimate is that Israel’s nuclear stockpile comprises some 90 nuclear warheads, which makes the tiny country the world’s 9th largest nuclear power. However, unofficial estimates vary. The conventional estimate is at the lower end of a possible range that some analysts suggest could be as high as 200, up to 400 nuclear weapons.68 The latter would make it the world’s 4th largest nuclear power, right after Russia, the U.S., and China, and before France, the UK, India and Pakistan.
World Nuclear Forces
Source: SIPRI, author, January 2024
Most Israelis perceive Iran as the primary nuclear risk. Israel has a broad range of nuclear weapons, while Iran may have enriched enough nuclear material to build them but is thought not to have done so, as of yet. Such weapons, were they to exist, would be deeply underground, possibly inaccessible even by a nuclear strike. In such scenarios, large civilian hubs would not be collateral damage, but intended mass targets.
According to some projections, nuclear weapon detonations in Iran’s densely populated cities would likely result in millions of dead, with tens of millions of injured and without adequate medical care, a devastating loss of municipal infrastructure, long-term disruption of economic, educational, and other essential social activity, and a full breakdown in law and order. These nightmares include thermal burn and radiation patients who would have to suffer their extreme pains without any treatment.
Stated doctrine of “nuclear ambiguity”
Officially, Israel has a long-standing policy of nuclear ambiguity. While it has used psychological warfare leaks to signal its disproportionate nuclear deterrence, it neither officially confirms nor denies that it possesses nuclear weapons. In public, the standard statement has been that “Israel will not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East.”
Yet effectively, the Israeli policy is more preemptive by nature.
The country first flirted with the nuclear option at the eve of the 1967 War, concerned that it might lose. Since the early 1960s, Israel has relied on what investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has described as the Samson Option. The term refers to the biblical figure of Samson who pushed apart the pillars of a Philistine temple bringing down the roof. In the process, he killed not just his enemy, the Philistines, but himself as well. It suggests an ultimate deterrence strategy of massive retaliation.
In October 1973, amid the Egyptian-Syrian invasion, Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan mobilized nuclear warheads for possible use, which led to president Nixon’s massive rearmament drive and the rapid deepening of the bilateral military ties – and eventually the symbiotic relationship that President Trump touted in his Sunday White House commentary, right after the US attacks against Iran’s nuclear enclaves.
The Begin Doctrine
In 1981, Israel destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactor Osirak as the Begin government initiated its war on Lebanon. Despite public criticism by the Reagan administration, the U.S. and Israel signed a strategic memorandum of understanding and began to deepen bilateral ties in defense. The Osirak attack gave rise to the Begin nuclear doctrine, which allows no “hostile” regional state to possess nuclear military capability.
Begin described the strike as an act of “anticipatory self-defense at its best.” He framed it as a long-term national commitment.
- “We chose this moment: now, not later, because later may be too late, perhaps forever…. Then, this country and this people would have been lost, after the Holocaust. Another Holocaust would have happened in the history of the Jewish people. Never again, never again! … We shall not allow any enemy to develop weapons of mass destruction turned against us.”
In a sense, the Begin doctrine reflected the right-wing Likud party’s offensive view of national security. But it also represented continuity and can be dated to the early 1960s Operation Damocles, Mossad’s covert campaign to assassinate Nazi Germany’s rocket scientists working for Egypt to develop bombs using radioactive waste. The legendary head of Mossad, Isser Harel, recruited former Nazis to provide intelligence on Arab countries.
When I met Harel in the mid-1970s, he denied all such stories. But subsequently, he confirmed them. One of these hired hands was the legendary Waffen-SS commando Otto Skorzeny, who had served as adviser to Egypt’s President Nasser. There is a straight line from Operation Damocles to Israel’s 1981 attack on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor and the subsequent targeted killings of Iranian nuclear scientists, particularly since 2010 – and up to the present.
The far-right Messianic dream to “nuke Gaza”
A month after the Hamas offensive of October 7, Netanyahu’s heritage minister Amichai Eliyahu suggested that one of Israel’s options in the war against Hamas was to drop a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip. As the story spread internationally, it was quickly disavowed by PM Netanyahu, but he did not fire his minister.
The far-right Eliyahu objected to allowing any humanitarian aid into Gaza, saying, “we wouldn’t hand the Nazis humanitarian aid because there is no such thing as uninvolved civilians in Gaza.”
In a way, Eliyahu got what he wished for. By late April 2024, Israel had dropped more than 70,000 tons of bombs over Gaza, surpassing the bombing of Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined during World War II. That amounts to more than 30 kilograms of explosives per individual on mainly women and children.
“Bombs Away,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, 2025
Furthermore, the weight of the U.S. nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan was estimated at about 15,000 tons of explosives. Even before the Rafah offensive in May 2024, Gaza had been bombed almost five times more than that. Reflecting extraordinary brutality and blind disregard to human life, it was a shocking war crime with no parallel in recent history.
“Peace through strength”
What made it all the more stunning was the Biden-Harris complicity coupled with the hollow assurances that “we are working 24 hours a day for peace” with the whole world watching – the other way.
It is the same “peace through strength” premise that President Trump relied on when US struck three major Iranian sites, joining overtly the Israeli air campaign against nuclear program that it had until then supported covertly.
American diplomacy no longer exists. It has been replaced by diplomatic deception and historically unprecedent lethal force. All gloves are now off. The premise that this reflects “mission accomplished” couldn’t be more off. The carnage hasn’t ended. It has begun
© 2025 All Rights Reserved