Credo quia absurdum, “I believe because it is absurd.”-Tertullian
By definition, an Israel-Iran nuclear exchange is presently impossible.[1] Though Iran is vigorously pursuing a military nuclear capability, it still has a substantial way to go before it can claim competitive nuclear power status. Correspondingly, prudent survival preparations for Israel should take a variety of complex and intersecting forms. Israel’s leaders already understand that (1) nothing short of a massive non-nuclear preemption could summarily stop Tehran’s nuclearization (a nuclear preemption is essentially inconceivable), and (2) if such a defensive first-strike could meet the authoritative tests of “anticipatory self-defense” under international law, it’s overall result would still be catastrophic.[2]
What next for Jerusalem/Tel Aviv? Above all, Israeli strategists should examine the country’s presumptively available security options as an intellectual rather than political task. This imperative remains, prima facie, an overriding and unchanging strategic obligation.
There is more. This cautionary conclusion about planning is compelling because any tactically successful conventional preemption against Iranian weapons and infrastructures would come at more-or-less unacceptable costs. Already, in 2003, when this writer’s Project Daniel Group presented an early report on Iranian nuclearization to then-Israeli PM Ariel Sharon, prospective Iranian targets were more directly threatening to Israel than had been Iraq’s nuclear Osiraq reactor back on June 7, 1981.
To the limited extent that they could be suitably estimated, the plausible risks of an Israel-Iran nuclear war would ultimately depend upon whether such a conflict was intentional, unintentional, or accidental. Apart from applying this critical three-part distinction to their analysis, there could be no good reason to expect any usefully systematic strategic assessments emerging from Tel Aviv (MOD/IDF). Once applied, however, Israeli planners should understand that their complex subject is without any useful precedent.
This uniqueness represents a quality of critical predictive importance. The peremptory rules of logic and mathematics preclude any meaningful assignments of probability in matters that are unprecedented or sui generis. To come up with any meaningful estimations of probability, these predictions would have to be based upon the determinable frequency of relevant past events. Unassailably, there have been no such events. Incontestably, there have been no nuclear wars.[3]
Still, it is essential that competent Israeli strategic analysts do their best to examine all current and future nuclear risks from Iran. To some ascertainable extent, it may be sensible for them to study what is happening between Washington and Pyongyang as a “model” for calculating Israel’s long-term nuclear perils. Looking back, in examining the overheated rhetoric that had emerged from US President Donald J. Trump and North Korean President Kim Jung-Un, neither leader was paying sufficiently close attention to the manifestly grave risks of an unintentional or accidental nuclear war.
Among other things, this means that both Trump and Kim seemed to assume the other leader’s decisional rationality and also the mutual primacy of decisional intention. If no such assumption had existed, it would have made no sense for either president to deliberately strike existential retaliatory fear in the heart of the other. What are the lessons here for Israel vis-à-vis Iran? Should Israel similarly assume a fully rational adversary in Iran? To be sure, any such assumption would be more or less reassuring in Jerusalem, but (far more importantly) would it also be correct?[4]
During his dissembling tenure, Donald J. Trump, then US president, openly praised feigned irrationality as a tangible US security strategy. But such a preference could never be “actionable” without incurring assorted dangers, for America or for Israel. Although neither Israel nor Iran might actually want a war, either or both “players” could still commit grievous errors during competitive searches for “escalation dominance.”[5] The only predictable element here would be the dense scenario’s inherent unpredictability,[6] especially if world system governance continues its tilt from traditional anarchy[7] to chaos.[8]
There is more. An unintentional or inadvertent nuclear war between Israel and Iran could take place not only as the result of misunderstandings or miscalculations between fully rational leaders, but also as the unintended consequence of mechanical, electrical, or computer malfunctions. This includes hacking interference, and should bring to mind a corollary distinction between unintentional/inadvertent nuclear war and an accidental nuclear war. Though all accidental nuclear war must be unintentional, not every unintentional nuclear war would be generated by accident. An unintentional or inadvertent nuclear war could sometime be the result of misjudgments (both fundamental and seemingly trivial) about enemy intentions.
“In war,” says Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz famously in his classic On War, “everything is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.” In fashioning a successful “endgame” to any future nuclear confrontation with Iran, it would be vital for Israel’s leaders to understand that this sort of crisis is about much more than maximizing any “correlation of forces” or missile-interception capabilities. It will be about imaginative intuition and variously antecedent notions of dialectical thinking.
There are many complex details. As a nuclear war has never been fought, what will be needed in Jerusalem/Tel Aviv is more broadly intellectual guidance than Israel could ever reasonably expect from even its most senior military officers. In essence, ipso facto, there are no recognizable experts on fighting a nuclear war, not in Jerusalem, not in Tehran, not anywhere. It was not by accident that the first capable theoreticians of nuclear war and nuclear deterrence in the 1950s were academic mathematicians, physicists and political scientists.
There remains one last point about any still-estimable risks of an Israel-Iran nuclear war. From the standpoint of Jerusalem, the only truly successful outcome could be a crisis or confrontation that ends with a reduction of Iranian nuclear war fighting capabilities andintentions. It would represent a serious mistake for Israel to settle for any bloated boasts of “victory” that are based only upon a one-time avoidance of nuclear war. Israel ought never to be taking existential risks with Iran if the best anticipated outcome could only be status quo ante bellum.
Providing for Israeli national security vis-à-vis a still-nuclearizing Iran ought never to be a visceral or “seat-of-the-pants” obligation. Without any suitably long-term, systematic and thoughtful plan for avoiding a nuclear war with the Islamic Republic in Tehran, a no-holds-barred military conflict could sometime ensue. To prepare optimally for such a more-or-less-unexpected conflict, Israel should remain focused on stable nuclear deterrence,[9] a condition requiring continuously refined analytic distinctions between deliberate, inadvertent and accidental nuclear war.[10] On this essential focus, the greatest dangers will lie in fostering outcomes that neither party would actually favor.
Credo quia absurdum, says the ancient philosopher Tertullian. “I believe because it is absurd.”
[1] An Israel-Iran conflict could be asymmetrically nuclear if Israel were to employ its nuclear weapons in some future confrontation with Iran. Technically, such one-sided employment would not represent an authentic “nuclear war,” but would still express a situation wherein a nuclear weapons capacity proved determinative.
[2] For early accounts by this author of nuclear war effects, see: Louis René Beres, Apocalypse: Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Louis René Beres, Mimicking Sisyphus: America’s Countervailing Nuclear Strategy (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1983); Louis René Beres, Reason and Realpolitik: U.S. Foreign Policy and World Order (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1984); and Louis René Beres, Security or Armageddon: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1986). Most recently, by Professor Beres, see: Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (New York, Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; 2nd ed. 2018). https://paw.princeton.edu/new-books/surviving-amid-chaos-israel%E2%80%99s-nuclear-strategy
[3] This “positive” fact ought not to confer any false security upon pertinent Israeli or Iranian decision-makers. See by this author: Louis René Beres, “Nuclear War Avoidance: Why It Is Time to Start Worrying, Again,” Air and Space Operations Review, Spring 2022, United States Air Force, Pentagon, pp. 69-81.
[4] Expressions of decisional irrationality could take different and overlapping forms. These include a disorderly or inconsistent value system; computational errors in calculating enemy intentions; incapacities to communicate efficiently; random or haphazard influences in the making or transmittal of specific policy decisions; and the internal dissonance generated by any structure of collective decision-making (i.e., assemblies of deciding individuals who lack identical value systems and/or whose organizational arrangements impact their willing capacity to act as a single or unitary decision maker).
[5] A key component of any such search would be “will.” Modern philosophic origins of this diaphanous term lie in the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer, especially The World as Will and Idea (1818). For his own inspiration, Schopenhauer drew freely upon Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Later, Nietzsche drew just as freely and perhaps even more importantly upon Schopenhauer. Goethe was also a core intellectual source for Spanish existentialist Jose Ortega y’Gasset, author of the singularly prophetic work, The Revolt of the Masses (Le Rebelion de las Masas (1930). See, accordingly, Ortega’s very grand essay, “In Search of Goethe from Within” (1932), written for Die Neue Rundschau of Berlin on the occasion of the centenary of Goethe’s death. It is reprinted in Ortega’s anthology, The Dehumanization of Art (1948), and is available from Princeton University Press (1968).
[6] A core concern here would be “surprise attack.” In his seminal writings, strategic theorist Herman Kahn introduced a refined distinction between surprise attack that is more-or-less unexpected and one that arrives “out of the blue.” The former, he counseled, “…is likely to take place during a period of tension that is not so intense that the offender is essentially prepared for nuclear war….” A total surprise attack, however, would be one without any immediately recognizable tension or warning signal. Significantly, this particular subset of surprise attack scenario could be difficult to operationalize for tangible national security policy benefit. See: Herman Kahn, Thinking About the Unthinkable in the 1980s (Simon & Schuster, 1984).
[7] Regarding world system anarchy, international law remains a “vigilante” or “Westphalian” system. See: Treaty of Peace of Munster, Oct. 1648, 1 Consol. T.S. 271; and Treaty of Peace of Osnabruck, Oct. 1648, 1., Consol. T.S. 119, Together, these two treaties comprise the Peace of Westphalia. Nonetheless, in international law, there are always certain core obligations that each state owes to other nations. See, accordingly, by Louis René Beres: https://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/jurist-us-abandons-legal-obligations-syria; and
https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2018/11/louis-beres-khashoggi-murder/
[8]Whether it is described in the Old Testament or any other major sources of ancient Western thought, chaos can be viewed as something positive, even as a source of human betterment. Here, chaos is taken as that which prepares the world for all things, both sacred and profane. As its conspicuous etymology reveals, chaos further represents the yawning gulf or gap wherein nothing is as yet, but where all civilizational opportunity must inevitably originate. Appropriately, the classical German poet Friedrich Hölderlin observed: “There is a desert sacred and chaotic which stands at the roots of the things and which prepares all things.” Even in the pagan ancient world, the Greeks thought of such a desert as logos, which should indicate to us today that it was never presumed to be starkly random or without evident merit.
[9] See early writings by Professor Louis René Beres and General John T. Chain, “Could Israel Safely deter a Nuclear Iran? The Atlantic, August 2012; and Professor Louis René Beres and General John T. Chain, “Israel; and Iran at the Eleventh Hour,” Oxford University Press (OUP Blog), February 23, 2012. General Chain was Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Strategic Air Command (CINCSAC).
[10] Inherently bound up with this condition is the Clausewitzian concept of “friction.” See by this writer at The War Room (Pentagon): Louis René Beres, https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/author/louis-rene-beres/