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Vladimir Putin Has Threatened to Use Nuclear Weapons; What Would This Mean for Israel?

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un visit the Vostochny Сosmodrome in the far eastern Amur region, Russia, Sept. 13, 2023. Photo: Sputnik/Mikhail Metzel/Kremlin via REUTERS

Soon, Israel will need to make critical decisions on launching preemptive strikes against Iran. Such non-nuclear defensive actions — expressions of anticipatory self-defense” under international law — would take calculated account of certain pro-Iran interventions. The point of such more-or-less plausible enemy state interventions would be to (1) deter Israel from making good on its residual preemption options; or (2) engage Israel in direct warfare if Jerusalem should choose to proceed with these options.

What would be the specific country sources of such pro-Iran interventions? Most reasonably, the states acting on behalf of Iran would be Russia and/or North Korea. If Russia were to act as Iran’s witting nuclear surrogate (because Iran would still be “pre-nuclear”), direct escalatory moves involving Moscow and Washington could ensue. There are no foreseeable circumstances under which direct Israeli moves against Russia would be rational or cost-effective.

Prima facie, all relevant analyses would be speculative. In strict scientific terms, nothing meaningful could be said concerning the authentic probabilities of unique events. This is because science-based estimations of probability must always depend on the determinable frequency of pertinent past events. Where there are no such events to draw upon, estimations must be less than scientific.

All potentially relevant scenarios involving Israel, Iran, Russia, and/or the United States would be unprecedented (sui generis)At the same time, both Israel and its American ally will need to fashion “best possible” estimations based on applicable elements of deductive reasoning. More particularly, useful Israeli assessments will need to focus on presumed escalation differences between Vladimir Putin’s “firebreak theory” and that of incoming US president Donald Trump.

Will Trump’s nuclear posture threshold remain unchanged from current doctrine; that is, will it continue to affirm the primacy of any escalation to nuclear engagement? Or will this escalation threshold more closely resemble the Russian theory that “small” nuclear weapons (i.e., tactical or theater ordnance) do not necessarily signal intent to initiate a full-blown nuclear war?

American and Russian nuclear escalation doctrines have always been asymmetrical; the implications of continuing such crucial difference could “spill-over” to Israel-Iran nuclear war calculations for the Middle East. Though counter-intuitive, a nuclear war could take place even while Iran remained pre-nuclear. And this risk has recently been heightened by Vladimir Putin’s nuclear policy “upgrades.”

With the United States in mind, the Russian president declared significant “enhancements” to his country’s nuclear doctrine. There are now additional reasons to worry about nuclear war stemming from Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. Most worrisome is that (1) Moscow would react more forcefully against the United States and/or Ukraine because of President Joe Biden’s widened gamut of missile-firing authority to Volodymyr Zelensky; (2) Vladimir Putin’s reaction would include prompt Russian enlargements of theater nuclear forces; and (3) these Russian enlargements would lower Russia’s tangible threshold of nuclear weapons use.

Such lowering would apply at both doctrinal and operational levels. Although nothing theoretic could be determined about competitive risk-taking in extremis, probabilities concerning Moscow and Washington would still need to be estimated. This includes examining derivative warfare scenarios between Israel and Iran, deductive narratives in which Jerusalem would rely on US nuclear deterrence to protect against Russian-backed North Korean forces. In the parlance of traditional nuclear strategy, this would signify Israeli reliance on “extended nuclear deterrence.” North Korea is a nuclear Iranian ally with a documented history of actual warfighting against Israel. 

Facing an intellectual problem

Nuclear war avoidance should always be approached by pertinent national leaders as a preeminently intellectual problem.

What happens next? How might these developments impact Israel? What should be expected from “Trump II?” Most specifically, how would the answers impact Israel’s precarious war with Iran?

During “Trump I,” major US national security problems were framed by an unprepared American president in needlessly rancorous terms. Today, armed with greater regard for applicable intellectual factors, American planners and policy-makers should look more systematically at what might lie ahead. What will happen next in Vladimir Putin’s determinedly cruel war against Ukraine? How can the United States best prepare for nuclear war avoidance? Playing Putin’s “nuclear firebreak” game, should Washington seek to persuade Moscow of America’s willingness to “go nuclear” according to Russian-defined policy thresholds, or should the United States proceed “asymmetrically” with its own preferred firebreak? How would Washington’s decision affect Israel’s national security?

In facing off against each other, even under optimal assumptions of mutual rationality, American and Russian presidents would have to concern themselves with all possible miscalculations, errors in information, unauthorized uses of strategic weapons, mechanical or computer malfunctions and assorted nuances of cyber-defense/cyber-war.

A still pre-nuclear Iran would still have access to radiation dispersal weapons and to conventional rockets for use against Israel’s nuclear reactor at Dimona. An Israeli nuclear war with a not-yet-nuclear Iran could arise if already- nuclear North Korea, a close ally of Iran, were willing to act as Tehran’s military surrogate against Israel. Such willingness, in turn, would be impacted by the presumed expectations of Russia and/or China.

Figuring all this out represents a survival-determining challenge for Jerusalem.

Pretended irrationality as nuclear strategy

Going forward, a joint US-Israel obligation will be to assess whether a nuanced posture of “pretended irrationality” could enhance nuclear deterrence posture. On several earlier occasions, it should be recalled, then US President Donald Trump openly praised the untested premises of such a posture. But was such presidential praise warranted on intellectual grounds?

In reply, US and Israeli enemies continue to include both state and sub-state foes, whether considered singly or in multiple forms of possible collaboration. Such forms could be “hybridized” in different ways between state and sub-state adversaries.

In principle, this could represent a potentially clever strategy to “get a jump” on the United States or Israel in any still-expected or already-ongoing competition for “escalation dominance.”

Nuclear weapons as instruments of war prevention, not punishment

A US president or Israeli prime minister should always bear in mind that any national nuclear posture ought to remain focused on war prevention rather than punishment. In all identifiable circumstances, using a portion of its available nuclear forces for vengeance rather than deterrence would miss the most essential point: that is, to fully optimize national security obligations.

Any American or Israeli nuclear weapons use based on narrowly corrosive notions of revenge, even if only as a residual or default option, would be glaringly irrational. Among other things, this would be a good time for both US and Israeli nuclear crisis planners to re-read Clausewitz regarding primacy of the “political object.” Absent such an object, there could be no meaningful standard of escalation rationality.

There remains one penultimate but critical observation.  It is improbable, but not inconceivable, that certain of America’s and Israel’s principal enemies would sometime be neither rational nor irrational, but mad. While irrational decision-makers could already pose special problems for nuclear deterrence — by definition, because these decision-makers would not value collective survival more highly than any other preference or combination of preferences — they might still be rendered susceptible to alternate forms of dissuasion.

Resembling rational leaderships, these decision-makers could still maintain a fixed, determinable, and “transitive” hierarchy of preferences. This means, at least in principle, that “merely” irrational enemies could sometimes be successfully deterred.

International law

From the standpoint of international law, it is always necessary to distinguish preemptive attacks from “preventive ones.” Preemption is a military strategy of striking first in the expectation that the only foreseeable alternative is to be struck first oneself.  A preemptive attack is launched by a state that believes enemy forces are about to attack.  A preventive attack, on the other hand, is not launched out of any concern about “imminent” hostilities, but rather for fear of some longer-term deterioration in prevailing military balance.

In a preemptive attack, the length of time by which the enemy’s action is anticipated is presumptively very short; in a preventive strike, the anticipated interval is considerably longer. A related problem here for the United States and Israel is not only the practical difficulty of accurately determining “imminence,” but also that delaying a defensive strike until imminence was more precisely ascertainable could prove existential. A resort to “anticipatory self-defense” could be nuclear or non-nuclear and could be directed at either a nuclear or non-nuclear adversary. Plainly, any such resort involving nuclear weapons on one or several sides would prove catastrophic.

America and Israel are not automatically made safer by having only rational adversaries. Even fully rational enemy leaderships could commit serious errors in calculation that would lead them toward nuclear confrontation and/or a nuclear/biological war. There are also certain related command and control issues that could impel a perfectly rational adversary or combination of rational adversaries (both state and sub-state) to embark upon variously risky nuclear behaviors. It follows that even the most pleasingly “optimistic” assessments of enemy leadership decision-making could not reliably preclude catastrophic outcomes.

For the United States and Israel, issues of calibrated nuclear deterrence remain fundamentally intellectual challenges, issues requiring meticulous analytic preparation rather than any particular leadership “attitude.” Such planning ought never become just another contest of “mind over matter” — that is, just a vainly overvalued inventory of comparative weaponry or identifiable “order of battle.”  war.

In both Ukraine and portions of the Middle East, the historical conditions of nature bequeathed at the Peace of Westphalia (1648) could soon come to resemble the primordial barbarism of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Long before Golding, Thomas Hobbes, the seventeenth-century English philosopher, warned insightfully in Leviathan (Chapter XIII) that in any such circumstances of human disorder there must exist “continual fear, and danger of violent death….”

Perceptions of credibility

If Putin should sometime prove willing to cross the conventional-tactical nuclear firebreak on the assumption that such a move would not invite any reciprocal cycle of nuclear escalation with the United States, the American president could face an overwhelmingly tragic choice: total capitulation or nuclear war. Though it would be best for the United States to avoid ever having to reach such a fateful decisional moment, there could still be no guarantees of “mutual assured prudence” between Washington and Moscow. It follows that growing perils of asymmetrical nuclear doctrine should be countered incrementally and intellectually.

Looking ahead at “Cold War II,” American and Israeli security will hinge on fostering vital “perceptions of credibility,” Regarding Russia’s changing nuclear doctrine, only dedicated analytic minds could ever distance Planet Earth from World War III. Taken together with Russia’s war against Ukraine, Vladimir Putin’s strategic doctrine blurs essential conceptual lines between conventional and nuclear conflict and creates existential hazards for both the United States and Israel. The solely rational response from Washington and Jerusalem should be to understand these unsustainable hazards and to plan appropriately for their most efficient minimization or removal.

For the United States and Israel, the threat posed by asymmetrical nuclear firebreaks could impact the likelihood of both deliberate and inadvertent nuclear war.

These are daunting intellectual issues. Sorting out the most urgent ones, Israel could soon find itself confronting North Korean military assets that threaten on behalf of a pre-nuclear Iran. Whether or not these proxy weapons and forces were under the overall direction of Moscow, asymmetries in nuclear escalation doctrine between Russia and the United States would be material to pertinent event outcomes. Left unanticipated or unmodified, they could sometime prove determinative.

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; The Atlantic; Israel Defense; Jewish Website; The New York Times; Israel National News; The Jerusalem Post; The Hill and other sites. A different version of this article appeared in JewishWebsight.

The post Vladimir Putin Has Threatened to Use Nuclear Weapons; What Would This Mean for Israel? first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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US House Members Ask Marco Rubio to Bar Turkey From Rejoining F-35 Program

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio attends a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, DC, US, April 10, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Nathan Howard

A bipartisan coalition of more than 40 US lawmakers is pressing Secretary of State Marco Rubio to prevent Turkey from rejoining the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, citing ongoing national security concerns and violations of US law.

Members of Congress on Thursday warned that lifting existing sanctions or readmitting Turkey to the US F-35 fifth-generation fighter program would “jeopardize the integrity of F-35 systems” and risk exposing sensitive US military technology to Russia. The letter pointed to Ankara’s 2017 purchase of the Russian S-400 surface-to-air missile system, despite repeated US warnings, as the central reason Turkey was expelled from the multibillion-dollar fighter jet program in 2019.

“The S-400 poses a direct threat to US aircraft, including the F-16 and F-35,” the lawmakers wrote. “If operated alongside these platforms, it risks exposing sensitive military technology to Russian intelligence.”

The group of signatories, spanning both parties, stressed that Turkey still possesses the Russian weapons systems and has shown “no willingness to comply with US law.” They urged Rubio and the Trump administration to uphold the Countering American Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) and maintain Ankara’s exclusion from the F-35 program until the S-400s are fully removed.

The letter comes after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan claimed during a NATO summit in June that Ankara and Washington have begun discussing Turkey’s readmission into the program.

Lawmakers argued that reversing course now would undermine both US credibility and allied confidence in American defense commitments. They also warned it could disrupt development of the next-generation fighter jet announced by the administration earlier this year.

“This is not a partisan issue,” the letter emphasized. “We must continue to hold allies and adversaries alike accountable when their actions threaten US interests.”

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US Lawmakers Urge Treasury to Investigate Whether Irish Bill Targeting Israel Violates Anti-Boycott Law

A pro-Hamas demonstration in Ireland led by nationalist party Sinn Fein. Photo: Reuters/Clodagh Kilcoyne

A group of US lawmakers is calling on the Treasury Department to investigate and potentially penalize Ireland over proposed legislation targeting Israeli goods, warning that the move could trigger sanctions under longstanding US anti-boycott laws.

In a letter sent on Thursday to US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, 16 Republican members of Congress expressed “serious concerns” about Ireland’s recent legislative push to ban trade with territories under Israeli administration, including the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights.

The letter, spearheaded by Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-NY), called for the US to “send a clear signal” that any attempts to economically isolate Israel will “carry consequences.”

The Irish measure, introduced by Foreign Affairs and Trade Minister Simon Harris, seeks to prohibit the import of goods and services originating from what the legislation refers to as “occupied Palestinian territories,” including Israeli communities in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Supporters say the bill aligns with international law and human rights principles, while opponents, including the signatories of the letter, characterize it as a direct extension of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks to isolate Israel as a step toward the destruction of the world’s lone Jewish state.

Some US lawmakers have also described the Irish bill as an example of “antisemitic hate” that could risk hurting relations between Dublin and Washington.

“Such policies not only promote economic discrimination but also create legal uncertainty for US companies operating in Ireland,” the lawmakers wrote in this week’s letter, urging Bessent to determine whether Ireland’s actions qualify as participation in an “unsanctioned international boycott” under Section 999 of the Internal Revenue Code, also known as the Ribicoff Amendment.

Under that statute, the Treasury Department is required to maintain a list of countries that pressure companies to comply with international boycotts not sanctioned by the US. Inclusion on the list carries tax-reporting burdens and possible penalties for American firms and individuals doing business in those nations.

“If the criteria are met, Ireland should be added to the boycott list,” the letter said, arguing that such a step would help protect US companies from legal exposure and reaffirm American opposition to economic efforts aimed at isolating Israel.

Legal experts have argued that if the Irish bill becomes law, it could chase American capital out of the country while also hurting companies that do business with Ireland. Under US law, it is illegal for American companies to participate in boycotts of Israel backed by foreign governments. Several US states have also gone beyond federal restrictions to pass separate measures that bar companies from receiving state contracts if they boycott Israel.

Ireland has been one of the fiercest critics of Israel on the international stage since the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, amid the ensuing war in Gaza, leading the Jewish state to shutter its embassy in Dublin.

Last year, Ireland officially recognized a Palestinian state, a decision that Israel described as a “reward for terrorism.”

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US Families File Lawsuit Accusing UNRWA of Supporting Hamas, Hezbollah

A truck, marked with United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) logo, crosses into Egypt from Gaza, at the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip, during a temporary truce between Hamas and Israel, in Rafah, Egypt, Nov. 27, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Amr Abdallah Dalsh

American families of victims of Hamas and Hezbollah attacks have filed a lawsuit against the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, accusing the organization of violating US antiterrorism laws by providing material support to the Islamist terror groups behind the deadly assaults.

Last week, more than 200 families filed a lawsuit in a Washington, DC district court accusing the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) of violating US antiterrorism laws by providing funding and support to Hamas and Hezbollah, both designated as foreign terrorist organizations.

The lawsuit alleges that UNRWA employs staff with direct ties to the Iran-backed terror group, including individuals allegedly involved in carrying out attacks against the Jewish state.

However, UNRWA has firmly denied the allegations, labeling them as “baseless” and condemning the lawsuit as “meritless, absurd, dangerous, and morally reprehensible.”

According to the organization, the lawsuit is part of a wider campaign of “misinformation and lawfare” targeting its work in the Gaza Strip, where it says Palestinians are enduring “mass, deliberate and forced starvation.”

The UN agency reports that more than 150,000 donors across the United States have supported its programs providing food, medical aid, education, and trauma assistance in the war-torn enclave amid the ongoing conflict.

In a press release, UNRWA USA affirmed that it will continue its humanitarian efforts despite facing legal challenges aimed at undermining its work.

“Starvation does not pause for politics. Neither will we,” the statement read.

Last year, Israeli security documents revealed that of UNRWA’s 13,000 employees in Gaza, 440 were actively involved in Hamas’s military operations, with 2,000 registered as Hamas operatives.

According to these documents, at least nine UNRWA employees took part directly in the terror group’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel.

Israeli officials also uncovered a large Hamas data center beneath UNRWA headquarters, with cables running through the facility above, and found that Hamas also stored weapons in other UNRWA sites.

The UN agency has also aligned with Hamas in efforts against the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), an Israeli and US-backed program that delivers aid directly to Palestinians, blocking Hamas from diverting supplies for terror activities and selling them at inflated prices.

These Israeli intelligence documents also revealed that a senior Hamas leader, killed in an Israeli strike in September 2024, had served as the head of the UNRWA teachers’ union in Lebanon, where Lebanon is based,

UNRWA’s education programs have been found by IMPACT-se, an international organization that monitors global education, to contribute to the radicalization of younger generations of Palestinians.

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