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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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Sen. Rick Scott Donates Salary to US Holocaust Memorial Museum
US Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) on Capitol Hill in Washington, US, Dec. 7, 2022. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
US Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) announced on Wednesday that he will donate a portion of his Senate salary to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, underscoring what he called the urgent need to combat antisemitism at home and abroad as threats to Jewish communities escalate.
Scott, who has given part of his congressional salary since joining the Senate in 2019, said his gift was motivated by the growing dangers facing Jewish people and the importance of ensuring younger generations understand the Holocaust.
“Ann and I are proud to support the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Years ago, Ann and I brought our daughters to the Auschwitz memorial and museum in Poland because it was so important to us that they learned about the Holocaust and understood the horrors that occurred,” he said in a statement.
“It’s so important that every generation understands the atrocities of the Holocaust, and the museum does an incredible job teaching those lessons to millions of people every year. By sharing the stories of those who survived and those who were murdered, providing critical resources to educators, and reminding each of us what it means when we say ‘Never Again,’ it is a vital institution,” he added.
Scott also recounted taking his daughters years ago to Auschwitz in Poland, describing the visit as an effort to show them the catastrophic consequences of unchecked hatred against Jews.
The senator tied his donation to the approaching second anniversary of the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of southern Israel, the deadliest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Palestinian terrorists killed 1,200 people and kidnapped 251 hostages during the onslaught.
“As we approach the second anniversary of Oct. 7, Ann and I are proud to support the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s meaningful work defending the truth of the Holocaust and their important efforts to teach its relevance for today,” Scott said.
Scott’s office did not disclose the specific amount of the donation.
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Texas State University Silent on Status of Professor Who Incited Violent Attack on Jews at Public Library
West Asheville Library in North Carolina. Photo: Screenshot/buncombecounty.org.
Texas State University is refusing to disclose whether it still currently employs a far-left professor who was filmed inciting a riotous assault on three pro-Israel individuals who peacefully spectated an anti-Israel presentation that was held in June 2024 at the West Asheville Library in North Carolina.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, two of the victims, David Moritz and Monica Buckley, are Jewish, and one is cancer patient Bob Campbell, an 80-year-old military veteran. Their assailants kicked, punched, and dragged them out of the event, titled “Strategic Lessons From the Palestinian Resistance,” after Texas State University assistant professor of philosophy Idris Atsu Robinson spotted them in the audience and invited the 60-80 anti-Israel partisans in attendance to decide their fates.
At one point during harrowing footage taken of the incident, Robinson suggested that the encounter could lead to “murder.” At no point did he deescalate the situation and even seemed to find humor in igniting the passions of a mob.
Responding to an Algemeiner inquiry on Thursday, a Texas State media relations official declined to comment on Robinson’s employment status, saying the university “does not discuss personnel matters.”
The university has been asked before to account for its handling of Robinson.
In June, the StandWithUs Saidoff Legal Department, a pro-Israel nonprofit that seeks to combat antisemitism, notified the school of Robinson’s conduct and rhetoric. According to StandWithUs, “university sources” confirmed that he will not be teaching during the fall semester of the 2025-2026 academic year. However, the university would not comment on the matter “due to the confidential nature of personnel matters,” making it unclear whether Robinson is still employed by Texas State and will teach there in the future.
StandWithUs says Texas State should state Robinson’s employment status, share findings amassed during an internal investigation of him, and produce any previous complaints which accused him of wrongdoing.
“It is critical that universities protect Jewish and Zionist students by refusing to provide a classroom platform to faculty members unlawfully promoting antisemitic hate and violence,” Michael Scheinman, Saidoff Legal Department assistant director of campus and community affairs, told The Algemeiner on Wednesday. “Schools that do not act and fail to implement strong safeguards risk exposing their students to the same hatred and violence suffered by the victims of this attack.”
He added, “StandWithUS Saidoff Legal continues to support the victims of this horrendous hate incident by coordinating with law enforcement, helping to identify masked perpetrators, and urging Texas State University to condemn the antisemitic conduct that contributed to this violence.”
By his own words, Robinson took immense pride in what transpired in Asheville, North Carolina last year. Commenting on the matter the next day while being interviewed on a podcast produced by the organizers of the event, he argued for “popular riots” and “divine violence,” saying explicitly that “terrorists” reserve the right to “take the life of the oppressor.”
“My arms are chewed up,” Campbell, a Navy veteran, told The Algemeiner during an interview which followed the assault. He added that medical staff at a local US Veterans Affairs facility identified “severe contusions” on his body.
“What really upset me — I was [lying] on the floor, and this big guy was on top of me,” Campbell recalled. “The librarian came to the door, looked me right in the eye, turned around and walked back and didn’t do a damn thing. Didn’t call the police.”
The activists proved equally merciless to the other victims, putting Moritz in a headlock and heaving Buckley outside and ordering her not to free herself from their grip.
Expressions of anti-Zionism are escalating to violence more frequently, as previously reported by The Algemeiner.
Earlier this month, Eden Deckerhoff — a female student at Florida State University (FSU) — allegedly assaulted a Jewish male classmate at the Leach Student Recreation Center after noticing his wearing apparel issued by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
“F—k Israel, Free Palestine. Put it [the video] on Barstool FSU. I really don’t give a f—k,” the woman said before shoving the man, according to video taken by the victim. “You’re an ignorant son of a b—h.” Deckerhoff has since been charged with misdemeanor battery.
According to the Tallahassee Democrat, Deckerhoff has denied assaulting the student when questioned by investigators, telling them, “No I did not shove him at all; I never put my hands on him.” However, law enforcement charged her with misdemeanor battery and described the incident in court documents as seen in viral footage of the incident, acknowledging that Deckerhoff “appears to touch [the man’s] left shoulder.” Despite her denial, the Democrat noted, she has offered to apologize.
In June, a gunman murdered two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, DC, while they exited an event at the Capital Jewish Museum hosted by a major Jewish organization. The suspect charged for the double murder, 31-year-old Elias Rodriguez from Chicago, yelled “Free Palestine” while being arrested by police after the shooting, according to video of the incident. The FBI affidavit supporting the criminal charges against Rodriguez stated that he told law enforcement he “did it for Gaza.”
Less than two weeks later, a man firebombed a crowd of people who were participating in a demonstration to raise awareness of the Israeli hostages who remain imprisoned by Hamas in Gaza. A victim of the attack, Karen Diamond, 82, later died, having sustained severe, fatal injuries.
Another antisemitic incident motivated by anti-Zionism occurred in San Francisco, where an assailant identified by law enforcement as Juan Diaz-Rivas and others allegedly beat up a Jewish victim in the middle of the night. Diaz-Rivas and his friends approached the victim while shouting “F—k the Jews, Free Palestine,” according to local prosecutors.
“[O]ne of them punched the victim, who fell to the ground, hit his head and lost consciousness,” the San Francisco district attorney’s office said in a statement. “Allegedly, Mr. Diaz-Rivas and others in the group continued to punch and kick the victim while he was down. A worker at a nearby business heard the altercation and antisemitic language and attempted to intervene. While trying to help the victim, he was kicked and punched.”
According to the latest data released by the FBI, antisemitic hate crimes in the US have been tallying to break all previous statistical records. In 2024, even as hate crimes decreased overall, those perpetrated against Jews increased by 5.8 percent in 2024 to 1,938, the largest total recorded in over 30 years of the FBI’s counting them. Jewish American groups have noted that this surge, which included 178 assaults, is being experienced by a demographic group which constitutes just 2 percent of the US population.
A striking 69 percent of all religion-based hate crimes that were reported to the FBI in 2024 targeted Jews, with 2,041 out of 2,942 total such incidents being antisemitic in nature. Muslims were targeted the next highest amount as the victims of 256 offenses, or about 9 percent of the total.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Europeans Launch UN Sanctions Process Against Iran, Drawing Tehran’s Ire
Satellite image shows buildings at Isfahan Nuclear Technology Center, before Israel launched an attack on Iran targeting nuclear facilities, in Isfahan, Iran, May 17, 2025. Photo: Planet Labs PBC via REUTERS
Britain, France, and Germany on Thursday launched a 30-day process to reimpose UN sanctions on Iran over its disputed nuclear program, a step likely to stoke tensions two months after Israel and the United States bombed Iran.
A senior Iranian official quickly accused the three European powers of harming diplomacy and vowed that Tehran would not bow to pressure over the move by the E3 to launch the so-called “snapback mechanism.”
The three powers feared they would otherwise lose the prerogative in mid-October to restore sanctions on Tehran that were lifted under a 2015 nuclear accord with world powers.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said the decision did not signal the end of diplomacy. His German counterpart Johann Wadephul urged Iran to now fully cooperate with the UN nuclear watchdog agency and commit to direct talks with the United States over the next month.
A senior Iranian official told Reuters the decision was “illegal and regrettable” but left the door open for engagement.
“The move is an action against diplomacy, not a chance for it. Diplomacy with Europe will continue,” the official said, adding: “Iran will not concede under pressure.”
The UN Security Council is due to meet behind closed doors on Friday at the request of the E3 to discuss the snapback move against the Islamic Republic, diplomats said.
Iran and the E3 have held several rounds of talks since Israel and the US bombed its nuclear installations in mid-June, aiming to agree to defer the snapback mechanism. But the E3 deemed that talks in Geneva on Tuesday did not yield sufficient signals of readiness for a new deal from Iran.
The E3 acted on Thursday over accusations that Iran has violated the 2015 deal that aimed to prevent it developing a nuclear weapons capability in return for a lifting of international sanctions. The E3, along with Russia, China, and the United States, were party to that accord.
US President Donald Trump pulled Washington out of that accord in 2018 during his first term, calling the deal one-sided in Iran‘s favor, and it unraveled in ensuing years as Iran abandoned limits set on its enrichment of uranium.
Trump’s second administration held fruitless indirect negotiations earlier this year with Tehran.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio welcomed the E3 move and said Washington remained available for direct engagement with Iran “in furtherance of a peaceful, enduring resolution to the Iran nuclear issue.”
An Iranian source said Tehran would do so only “if Washington guarantees there will be no [military] strikes during the talks.”
The E3 said they hoped Iran would engage by the end of September to allay concerns about its nuclear agenda sufficiently for them to defer concrete action.
“The E3 are committed to using every diplomatic tool available to ensure Iran never develops a nuclear weapon,” including the snapback mechanism, they said in a letter sent to the UN Security Council and seen by Reuters.
“The E3’s commitment to a diplomatic solution nonetheless remains steadfast.”
Iran has previously warned of a “harsh response” if sanctions are reinstated, and the Iranian official said it was reviewing its options, including withdrawing from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The E3 had offered to extend the snapback for as much as six months to enable serious negotiations if Iran restored access for UN nuclear inspectors – who would also seek to account for Iran‘s large stock of enriched uranium whose status has been unknown since the June war – and engages in talks with the U.S.
Calling the E3 decision inevitable, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said it was an “important step in the diplomatic campaign to counter the Iranian regime’s nuclear ambitions.”
GROWING FRUSTRATION IN IRAN
The UN process takes 30 days before sanctions that would hit Iran‘s financial, banking, hydrocarbons, and defense sectors are restored.
Russia and China, strategic partners of Iran, finalized a draft Security Council resolution on Thursday that would extend the 2015 nuclear deal for six months and urge all parties to immediately resume negotiations.
But they have not yet asked for a vote.
“The world is at crossroads,” Russia’s deputy UN Ambassador Dmitry Polyanskiy told reporters. “One option is peace, diplomacy, goodwill … Another option is a kind of diplomacy at the barrel of the gun.”
The specter of renewed sanctions is stirring frustration in Iran, where economic anxiety is rising and political divisions are deepening, three insiders close to the government said.
Iranian leaders are split over how to respond — with anti-Western hardliners urging defiance and confrontation, while moderates advocate diplomacy.
Iran has been enriching uranium to up to 60 percent fissile purity, a short step from the roughly 90 percent of bomb-grade, and had enough material enriched to that level, if refined further, for six nuclear weapons, before the airstrikes by Israel started on June 13, according to the IAEA, the UN nuclear watchdog.
Actually manufacturing a weapon would take more time, however, and the IAEA has said that while it cannot guarantee Tehran‘s nuclear program is entirely peaceful, it has no credible indication of a coordinated weapons project.
The West says the advancement of Iran‘s nuclear program goes beyond civilian needs, while Tehran says it wants nuclear energy only for peaceful purposes.