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As Threats Rise, Israel Must Get Rid of Its Nuclear Ambiguity
Listening to Iran’s repeated threats to initiate aggressive war with Israel, something seems to have been overlooked: Israel is a nuclear power; Iran is not. Iran is hardly in a credible strategic position to make such threats. After all, any actual follow-through on these arguably incoherent threats could produce potentially unendurable Iranian losses.
What is going on here? Why such an ironic disconnect between relative national power capacities and the country issuing existential threats? It seems that in any direct and protracted war with Iran, only Israel would be in a position of “escalation dominance.”
The factor that could substantially change such Israeli superiority would be direct North Korean military involvement. This is because Iran’s belligerent ally in Pyongyang is “already nuclear,” and because Israel is a “fifty target state.” In short, Israel is a geographically small adversary with no meaningful strategic depth. Absent a recognizable nuclear advantage, this is anything but an enviable survival position for an imperiled nation.
The remedy, for Israel, should be an immediate policy shift from “deliberate nuclear ambiguity” (Amimut in Hebrew) to “selective nuclear disclosure.
For decision-makers in Jerusalem, a core commitment of national strategic policy has always been to keep last-resort nuclear assets (aka “The Bomb”) shrouded in the “basement.” Until now, at least, nuclear ambiguity (sometimes called “opacity”) has managed to work. Though this success has seemingly done little to deter ordinary conventional aggressions or criminal acts of terror, it has succeeded in keeping the country’s enemies from launching any conceivable existential aggressions.
How should Israel accurately assess pertinent state and sub-state perils? In all such critical security matters, Israel has no science-based methods to determine useful probabilities. In science, such judgments must stem from the determinable frequency of relevant past events.
There are associated legal issues. Choosing the nuclear option as a last resort would not necessarily be a violation of international law. Among other things, this is because of an International Court of Justice (IJC) Advisory Opinion issued on July 8, 1996. This landmark ICJ ruling concluded that while “the threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict….,” this finding might not obtain “in an extreme circumstance of self-defense, in which the very survival of a State would be at stake.”
Nonetheless, the most urgent considerations in any such impending narratives would be broadly operational, not narrowly jurisprudential. In more expressly military nuclear matters, any national security strategy based upon whispered or sotto voce threats would have conspicuous limits. Israel’s longstanding policy of deliberate nuclear ambiguity may not remain persuasive. To be reliably deterred, an Iranian nuclear adversary would require readily verifiable assurances that Israel’s nuclear weapons were effectively (1) invulnerable and (2) “penetration-capable.” This second expectation means that Israel’s nuclear weapons would not only be well-protected from adversarial first-strikes, but would also be able to “get through” Iran’s active defenses.
There is more. Any adversary’s judgments concerning Israel’s willingness to retaliate with nuclear weapons would depend in good measure upon useable foreknowledge of these weapons as well as their presumptive operational capabilities. There would also be some clarifying ironies.
Looking ahead, Iranian perceptions of only mega-destructive, high-yield Israeli nuclear weapons could effectively undermine the credibility of Israel’s nuclear deterrence. Expressed formally, in making such calculations, Israel’s strategic deterrence could sometime vary inversely with the perceived destructiveness of its nuclear arms. While seemingly counter-intuitive, this argument suggests not only that Israel should have available a wide range of nuclear retaliatory options, but also that it should take properly refined steps to ensure that such an expansive range of options be instantly recognizable.
In the future, if Iran should decide to share some of its offensive nuclear assets with a surrogate jihadist terrorist group (e.g., Hezbollah, Hamas, or the Houthis), Jerusalem would need to have prepared for the nuclear deterrence of assorted non-state adversaries. In all such scenarios, what will first need to be calculated, among other things, is the precise extent of subtlety with which Israel should be communicating its nuclear positions, intentions, and capabilities to Iran and various other categories of possible adversaries.
A refined doctrine is necessarily antecedent to any sound nuclear strategy. The core rationale for Israeli nuclear disclosure would inhere in the basic and immutable understanding that nuclear weapons can serve Israel’s security in several specific ways. Once it is faced with a nuclear fait accompli in Tehran or elsewhere, Israel would need to convince its then-relevant enemy or enemies that it possessed both the will and the capacity to make any intended adversarial nuclear aggression more harmful than gainful. By definition, however, no Israeli move from ambiguity to disclosure could help in the unprecedented case of an irrational nuclear enemy.
To protect itself against enemy military strikes, particularly those attacks that could potentially carry authentic existential costs, Israel should quickly and correctly exploit every aspect and function of its still opaque nuclear arsenal. In this connection, the success of Israel’s efforts will depend not only upon its carefully selected configuration of “counterforce” and “counter value” operations, but also on the extent to which this critical choice was made known in advance to Iran and certain Iranian sub-state/terrorist surrogates. The point of any shift from deliberate nuclear ambiguity to selective nuclear disclosure would be to signal that Israel’s “bomb” (1) is safely beyond any preemptive enemy reach; and (2) is calibrated to variously credible levels of enemy aggression.
In essence, removing the bomb from Israel’s basement could enhance the imperiled nation’s strategic deterrence only to the extent that it would heighten enemy perceptions of secure and capable Israeli nuclear forces. Any calculated end to deliberate nuclear ambiguity could also underscore Israel’s presumptive willingness to use its nuclear forces in sudden or incremental reprisal for enemy first-strike and/or retaliatory attacks.
In the final analysis, any Israeli shift from deliberate nuclear ambiguity to selective nuclear disclosure would need to convince Iran of Jerusalem’s ultimate willingness to use nuclear forces against a non-nuclear adversary with exterminatory intentions and capacities.
Though generally misunderstood and inexpertly discussed, a “Samson Option” could gainfully support this obligatory task of Israeli strategic dissuasion. An explicitly-revealed Samson Option would multiply and magnify the survival benefits of selective nuclear disclosure not by threatening gratuitous Israeli spasms of revenge-based harms, but by reminding Iran that Israel’s nuclear force calibrations would be operational even at the 11th-hour.
There is more. In assessing its optimal levels of deliberate nuclear disclosure, Israel should continuously bear in mind the country’s overriding strategic nuclear objective: This goal is deterrence ex ante, not revenge ex post.
If, however, nuclear weapons should somehow be introduced into an impending conflict with Iran (most plausibly, via military participation of North Korea), one form or other of nuclear war fighting could ensue. This conclusion would be unassailable so long as: (a) enemy state first strike attacks against Israel would not destroy the Jewish State’s second-strike nuclear capability; (b) enemy state retaliations for Israeli conventional preemption would not destroy Israel’s nuclear counter-retaliatory capability; (c) Israeli strikes would not destroy enemy state second-strike nuclear capabilities; and (d) Israeli retaliations for enemy state conventional first strikes would not destroy enemy state nuclear counter-retaliatory capacities. This means that Israel should promptly take appropriately steps to ensure the likelihood of (a) and (b), above, and the reciprocal unlikelihood of (c) and (d).
If for any reason Iranian nuclear deployments were permitted to take place, Israel could forfeit any non-nuclear preemption options. At that stage, Jerusalem’s only remaining alternatives to exercising a nuclear preemption option would be: (1) a no-longer viable conventional preemption; or (2) a decision to do nothing preemptively, thereby choosing to existentially rely upon some form or other of nuclear deterrence and the corollary protections of ballistic missile defense. Ipso facto, any prior decisions having to do with tangible shifts to “selective nuclear disclosure” and also a “Samson Option” would be all important.
For Israel, the time to end its traditional policy of “deliberate nuclear ambiguity” is now. The intellectually lazy argument that it has worked thus far and would therefore work in the future is a classic example of logical fallacy at its worst.
Left unrevised by a more carefully calculated and prudent Israeli nuclear policy, such fallacious reasoning could produce largely unimaginable levels of human harm. As all humans are ultimately creatures of biology, it could even bring millions into the predatory embrace of a “final epidemic.”
Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971) and is the author of many books, monographs, and scholarly articles dealing with military nuclear strategy. In Israel, he was Chair of Project Daniel. Over recent years, he has published on nuclear warfare issues in Harvard National Security Journal (Harvard Law School); Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence; Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs; and more.
The post As Threats Rise, Israel Must Get Rid of Its Nuclear Ambiguity first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Bryan Singer Secretly Filmed Period Drama With Jon Voight Critical of Israel for Lebanon War: Report
Jon Voight at the opening night of the 2023 Beverly Hills Film Festival held at TCL Chinese 6 Theatres in Hollywood, California, on April 19, 2023. Photo: FS//AdMedia/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
Jewish-American filmmaker Bryan Singer has returned to the director’s chair after a long hiatus with a film starring Oscar winner Jon Voight that is set in the Middle East and critical of Israel, Variety revealed on Wednesday.
Singer secretly filmed the period drama and one source who saw the final cut, but is not involved with the production, thinks the feature is “going to be a huge hotbed of controversy” because of its attention on the Middle East. “It makes Israel look really bad and could be polarizing,” the insider told Variety.
The source said the film is set in late 1970s or early 1980s. On June 6, 1982, Israel launched the First Lebanon War against Palestinian terrorists based in southern Lebanon following the attempted assassination of Israeli Ambassador to the United Kingdom Shlomo Argov by a terrorist cell.
The “Superman Returns” director shot the new film in Greece in 2023, and it focuses on the relationship between a father and son, Variety added. Israeli filmmaker Yariv Horovoitz is also reportedly collaborating on the project. There are no details about a release date.
Voight is a longtime supporter of Israel and said in 2018 that he feels an obligation to combat antisemitism. Last year, he was critical of his daughter, actress and filmmaker Angelina Jolie, when she slammed Israel’s defensive military campaign against Hamas in Gaza following the Palestinian terrorist group’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel.
Singer – who was raised Jewish in suburban New Jersey – has not directed in mainstream Hollywood since he was infamously fired by 20th Century Fox from “Bohemian Rhapsody” in 2017 and replaced during shooting, after several absences during the film’s production. He was signed on to direct a remake of the action film “Red Sonja,” but was reportedly fired from the project amid allegations in 2019 of sexual misconduct involving minors, which he denied.
The director’s past credits include four films in the “X-Men” franchise, “Valkyrie,” and the Oscar-winning film “The Usual Suspects.”
Singer faced sexual misconduct allegations starting in 1997, when two teenage boys claimed the director ordered them to strip naked for a scene in his film “Apt Pupil.” The filmmaker has never faced criminal charges for the sexual misconduct allegations made against him in 1997 or in later years.
Singer has been living in Israel for several years and Variety reported in 2023 that he was looking to make a comeback into the mainstream Hollywood film industry with features set in and around Israel.
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Italian Law Professor Faces Backlash Over Viral Antisemitic Social Media Posts
An Italian law professor is facing mounting backlash after past antisemitic social media posts went viral, sparking outrage among the local Jewish community and public officials.
Professor Luca Nivarra, who teaches in the Faculty of Law at the University of Palermo in Sicily, has come under scrutiny after several of his social media posts went viral, spreading antisemitic and hateful content.
“I don’t want to meddle in matters that don’t concern me directly, but, having very few tools at our disposal to oppose the Palestinian Holocaust, a signal, however modest, could be to unfriend your Jewish ‘friends’ on Facebook, even the ‘good’ ones, who declare themselves disgusted by what the Israeli government and the IDF are doing,” Nivarra wrote in one of his posts.
“They lie, and with their lies, they help cover up the horror: it’s a small, tiny thing, but let’s start making them feel alone, face to face with the monstrosity to which they are complicit,” he continued.
On Tuesday, the university issued a public statement distancing itself from Nivarra’s antisemitic remarks. Despite mounting public outrage, Nivarra has not faced any disciplinary action yet.
Massimo Midiri, Dean of the University of Palermo, condemned such hateful rhetoric, calling it “a personal and culturally dangerous initiative, far removed from our academic principles.”
“Nivarra’s statements risk fueling the very dynamics he claims to oppose. Complex issues like the Middle East conflict require dialogue and critical engagement, not exclusion or ideological censorship,” Midiri said in a statement.
Italy’s Minister of University and Research, Anna Maria Bernini, also denounced Nivarra’s remarks, saying they “not only offend the Jewish people but also all who uphold the values of respect and civil coexistence.”
“Conflicts are overcome through dialogue, not isolation and it is only through this path that an authentic journey toward peace can be built, an objective to which Italy and the international community continue to dedicate their efforts,” the Italian diplomat wrote in a post on X.
This is not the first time Nivarra has made public antisemitic statements and spread anti-Jewish hateful rhetoric. In his previous Facebook posts, he also wrote that “there are no good Israelis” and that “Israeli society is morally rotten.”
Nivarra also compared the Israeli Defense Forces’ defensive campaign against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas to the actions of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann during the Holocaust.
“The only difference between Adolf Eichmann and the IDF is that Eichmann defended himself by saying he was following orders, while Israeli soldiers happily do what they do,” he wrote in another social media post.
Since his posts went viral, Nivarra has faced mounting criticism on social media, but he has denied any accusations of antisemitism.
“You can call me an anti-Semite when I am not one at all. There is an insurmountable distance between me and the perpetrators of these horrors,” he wrote on his Facebook page.
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‘Six Million Not Enough’: Minneapolis School Shooter Scrawled Antisemitic, Anti-Israel Messages on Guns
Law enforcement officers set up barriers after a shooting at Annunciation Church, which is also home to an elementary school, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, US, Aug. 27, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ben Brewer
The lone suspect in Wednesday’s mass shooting at a Catholic school in Minneapolis, Minnesota, scrawled antisemitic and anti-Israel messages across his weapons and allegedly shared his desire to kill “filthy Zionist Jews” in a notebook before unleashing a barrage of gunfire on students and parishioners.
Law enforcement officials identified the shooter as Robin Westman, 23, who died by suicide at the scene. According to police, Westman opened fire during morning Mass in the school’s adjoining church, killing two children (aged 8 and 10) and injuring 17 others.
Witnesses said the church erupted in chaos as stained-glass windows shattered and gunfire ripped through pews filled with children. Teachers and staff rushed to shield students, with some ushering them outside the building.
The shooting is being investigated as both a domestic terrorism case and a hate crime against Catholics, according to FBI Director Kash Patel.
However, the assailant also appeared to endorse antisemitic conspiracies and express a desire to kill Jews and Israelis.
Researchers at the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reported they found videos believed to be from Westman showing firearms and ammunition magazines marked with the antisemitic messages. Investigators are also reviewing the now-deleted YouTube channel allegedly linked to Westman that featured disturbing videos uploaded before the attack.
“Israel must fall and “Burn Israel” were among the writings on the weapons, as seen in the video. In addition, the messages on the guns included “6 million wasn’t enough” — an apparent reference to the 6 million Jews killed during the Holocaust, and “Burn HIAS” — an apparent reference to a Jewish organization which helps settle refugees.
Westman also allegedly wrote “kill Donald Trump” on a gun magazine as well as anti-black and anti-Latino racist messaging.
The videos also included images of a notebook with writing in the Cyrillic alphabet.
“If I will carry out a racially motivated attack, it would be most likely against filthy Zionist jews,” the notebook said, according to a translation by the New York Post. Westman also allegedly wrote slogans such as “Free Palestine.”
Images of the content has been widely circulated on social media.
Robin Westman, the suspected shooter in today’s mass shooting at the Annunciation Catholic Church and School in Minneapolis, Minnesota, appears to have had a YouTube Channel named “Robin W” which has since been deleted, that contained several video consisting of guns, a manifesto… pic.twitter.com/B3JJUOIGJp
— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) August 27, 2025
Shocking antisemitic messages spotted on the Minneapolis shooter’s gun including:
– “Israel must fall,”
– “Burn Israel”
– “6 million wasn’t enough.”
– “ Burn HIAS (originally a Jewish resettlement org for refugees)Via our colleague @RealSaavedra pic.twitter.com/NFUnkRNlDs
— StopAntisemitism (@StopAntisemites) August 27, 2025
An analysis of the shooter’s apparent manifesto by the ADL found no singular political motive. The assailant “scrawled numerous references and symbols on their weapons linked to a broad range of mass attackers, mimicking the 2019 Christchurch, 2022 Buffalo, and 2025 Antioch shooters, among others, who marked their weapons before launching their attacks,” the ADL wrote.
“The references found on the attacker’s weapons do not suggest a deep knowledge of white supremacy. Instead, the references point to a broader fixation on mass violence,” the group concluded.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, who is Jewish, spoke with raw emotion after visiting the scene. “There are no words that can capture the horror and the evil of this unspeakable act,” he said.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said the students “were met with evil and horror and death.”
“We often come to these and say these unspeakable tragedies or there’s no words for this. There shouldn’t be words for these types of incidents because they should not happen and there’s no words that are going to ease the pain of the families today,” Walz added.
The suspect was reportedly a transgender woman who changed her name from Robert to Robin in 2020. Westman’s mother worked as a secretary at Annunciation until 2021, according to news reports, and authorities are still examining whether that connection influenced the target.
The tragedy adds to a growing list of school and faith-based shootings in the United States this year. Experts warn that antisemitic conspiracy theories, spread widely online, can inspire such violent attacks.
The tragedy came a week after the ADL released a new report highlighting how extremist online spaces are fueling not only school shootings but also a broader rise in antisemitism across the US. According to the report, many websites containing violent and gruesome material have pulled young people into white supremacist propaganda and conspiracy theories, inspiring them to commit deadly attacks.