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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.
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Israel to Send Delegation to Qatar for Gaza Ceasefire Talks

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a news conference in Jerusalem, Sept. 2, 2024. Photo: Ohad Zwigenberg/Pool via REUTERS
Israel has decided to send a delegation to Qatar for talks on a possible Gaza hostage and ceasefire deal, an Israeli official said, reviving hopes of a breakthrough in negotiations to end the almost 21-month war.
Palestinian group Hamas said on Friday it had responded to a US-backed Gaza ceasefire proposal in a “positive spirit,” a few days after US President Donald Trump said Israel had agreed “to the necessary conditions to finalize” a 60-day truce.
The Israeli negotiation delegation will fly to Qatar on Sunday, the Israeli official, who declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter, told Reuters.
But in a sign of the potential challenges still facing the two sides, a Palestinian official from a militant group allied with Hamas said concerns remained over humanitarian aid, passage through the Rafah crossing in southern Israel to Egypt and clarity over a timetable for Israeli troop withdrawals.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is due to meet Trump in Washington on Monday, has yet to comment on Trump’s announcement, and in their public statements Hamas and Israel remain far apart.
Netanyahu has repeatedly said Hamas must be disarmed, a position the terrorist group, which is thought to be holding 20 living hostages, has so far refused to discuss.
Israeli media said on Friday that Israel had received and was reviewing Hamas’ response to the ceasefire proposal.
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Tucker Carlson Says to Air Interview with President of Iran

Tucker Carlson speaks on July 18, 2024 during the final day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Photo: Jasper Colt-USA TODAY via Reuters Connect
US conservative talk show host Tucker Carlson said in an online post on Saturday that he had conducted an interview with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, which would air in the next day or two.
Carlson said the interview was conducted remotely through a translator, and would be published as soon as it was edited, which “should be in a day or two.”
Carlson said he had stuck to simple questions in the interview, such as, “What is your goal? Do you seek war with the United States? Do you seek war with Israel?”
“There are all kinds of questions that I didn’t ask the president of Iran, particularly questions to which I knew I could get an not get an honest answer, such as, ‘was your nuclear program totally disabled by the bombing campaign by the US government a week and a half ago?’” he said.
Carlson also said he had made a third request in the past several months to interview Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who will be visiting Washington next week for talks with US President Donald Trump.
Trump said on Friday he would discuss Iran with Netanyahu at the White House on Monday.
Trump said he believed Tehran’s nuclear program had been set back permanently by recent US strikes that followed Israel’s attacks on the country last month, although Iran could restart it at a different location.
Trump also said Iran had not agreed to inspections of its nuclear program or to give up enriching uranium. He said he would not allow Tehran to resume its nuclear program, adding that Iran did want to meet with him.
Pezeshkian said last month Iran does not intend to develop nuclear weapons but will pursue its right to nuclear energy and research.
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Hostage Families Reject Partial Gaza Seal, Demand Release of All Hostages

Demonstrators hold signs and pictures of hostages, as relatives and supporters of Israeli hostages kidnapped during the Oct. 7, 2023 attack by Hamas protest demanding the release of all hostages in Tel Aviv, Israel, Feb. 13, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Itai Ron
i24 News – As Israeli leaders weigh the contours of a possible partial ceasefire deal with Hamas, the families of the 50 hostages still held in Gaza issued an impassioned public statement this weekend, condemning any agreement that would return only some of the abductees.
In a powerful message released Saturday, the Families Forum for the Return of Hostages denounced what they call the “beating system” and “cruel selection process,” which, they say, has left families trapped in unbearable uncertainty for 638 days—not knowing whether to hope for reunion or prepare for mourning.
The group warned that a phased or selective deal—rumored to be under discussion—would deepen their suffering and perpetuate injustice. Among the 50 hostages, 22 are believed to be alive, and 28 are presumed dead.
“Every family deserves answers and closure,” the Forum said. “Whether it is a return to embrace or a grave to mourn over—each is sacred.”
They accused the Israeli government of allowing political considerations to prevent a full agreement that could have brought all hostages—living and fallen—home long ago. “It is forbidden to conform to the dictates of Schindler-style lists,” the statement read, invoking a painful historical parallel.
“All of the abductees could have returned for rehabilitation or burial months ago, had the government chosen to act with courage.”
The call for a comprehensive deal comes just as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prepares for high-stakes talks in Washington and as indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas are expected to resume in Doha within the next 24 hours, according to regional media reports.
Hamas, for its part, issued a statement Friday confirming its readiness to begin immediate negotiations on the implementation of a ceasefire and hostage release framework.
The Forum emphasized that every day in captivity poses a mortal risk to the living hostages, and for the deceased, a danger of being lost forever. “The horror of selection does not spare any of us,” the statement said. “Enough with the separation and categories that deepen the pain of the families.”
In a planned public address near Begin Gate in Tel Aviv, families are gathering Saturday evening to demand that the Israeli government accept a full-release deal—what they describe as the only “moral and Zionist” path forward.
“We will return. We will avenge,” the Forum concluded. “This is the time to complete the mission.”
As of now, the Israeli government has not formally responded to Hamas’s latest statement.
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