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Russian and/or North Korean threats of support for Iran could lay the groundwork for a multi-state nuclear conflict, one that could come to involve the United States and/or China.
By LOUIS RENÉ BERES NOVEMBER 10, 2024 01:30
RUSSIA’S PRESIDENT Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un attend a state reception in Pyongyang, earlier this year.
(photo credit: SPUTNIK/REUTERS)
The Middle East strategic landscape remains unchanged by the US presidential election. A pre-nuclear Iran could still bring Israel to the point where Jerusalem’s only strategic options would be capitulation or nuclear escalation. By definition, this second option would represent a one-sided or “asymmetrical nuclear war.”
But how could such an unprecedented impasse arise? In one view, Iran would target Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor and/or employ radiation dispersal weapons against Israeli civilians. A limited Israeli nuclear response could also follow in the wake of extensive Iranian resort to biological or electromagnetic pulse (EMP) ordnance. Most worrisome for Jerusalem would be direct interventions by nuclear state allies of Iran. Here, the Jewish State could be deterred from striking preemptively against Iranian targets by Russian and/or North Korean nuclear threats.
Where should Israel do about such ignored but formidable nuclear foes? Looking toward expanding conflict with Iran, any “one-off” preemption against enemy weapons and infrastructures (an act of “anticipatory self-defense” under international law) would be perilous. At this late stage, defensive action against Iranian assets would need to be undertaken in calculated increments and amid ongoing war. As to direct Israeli actions against North Korean assets, these would be ruled out ipso facto.
During intersecting and possibly synergistic interactions, a coherent dialectic would need to guide Israel’s strategic policy. As part of its escalating war against Iran, Israel could sometime calculate that it had no choice but to launch multiple and mutually-reinforcing preemptive strikes against certain specific nuclear-related targets. Simultaneously, Russian and/or North Korean threats of support for Iran could lay the groundwork for a multi-state nuclear conflict, one that could come to involve the United States and/or China.
This concerning narrative ought never to be dismissed out of hand in Jerusalem. To be sure, it could be tempting to regard such jaw-dropping interventions as “speculative” or “unlikely,” but there would remain no science-based way to estimate pertinent odds. True probabilities, Israeli planners should continuously keep in mind, are never determinable for unique (sui generis) events.
There will be multiple and nuanced details. Israel’s “high thinkers” will have to make useful decisions based on long-established logical standards of valid deduction and internal consistency. Though there exists no actual data on a nuclear war, a deductive analytic apparatus could still be constructed. The core object of such an apparatus would be the systematic derivation of logically entailed and policy-relevant conclusions from variously interconnected assumptions. Without such an effort, Israeli strategic decisions would be based on more-or-less disconnected assessments or “common sense.”
There could be no more valueless decision-making standard than “common sense.”
THERE IS more. To the extent that they might be estimated, the risks of an Israel-Iran nuclear war will depend on whether such a conflict would be intentional, unintentional, or accidental. Apart from applying this three-part distinction, there could be no adequate reason to expect any operationally-gainful analytic judgments.
To best ensure existential protections from openly-declared Iranian aggressions, Jerusalem should bear conscientiously in mind that the Jewish State’s physical survival ought never to be taken for granted. At some point of accumulating conflict, even a nuclear weapons state could be left with only militarily irrelevant options. That point would reference residual options for revenge, but not for safety and security.
An unintentional or inadvertent nuclear war between Jerusalem and Tehran could take place not only as the result of misunderstandings or miscalculations between rational leaders, but as the unintended consequence of mechanical, electrical, or computer malfunction. This should bring to mind a further distinction between unintentional/inadvertent nuclear war and accidental nuclear war.
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Though all accidental nuclear wars must be unintentional, not every unintentional nuclear war must be created by accident. On one occasion or another, an unintentional or inadvertent nuclear war could also be the result of fundamental human misjudgments about enemy intentions. This result would be catastrophic.
History matters
An authentic nuclear war has never been fought. There are no possible experts on “conducting” or “winning” a nuclear war. In Jerusalem, this understanding should be considered axiomatic and overriding.
There is another critical axiom. Israel needs “high thinkers” for strategic calculations and calibrations. Who should be the appropriate models for such extraordinary thinkers? One should think here of such figures as Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and assorted others.
Such thinking will need to be initiated and expanded at advanced theoretical levels. This task could never be fulfilled at normal operational levels. For Israel, much more will be needed than capable and industrious professionals.
Refined deductive theory will be indispensable. Without a systematic and theory-based plan in place, Israel would render itself unprepared for an Iranian nuclear conflict that is deliberate, unintentional or accidental. At every stage of its self-propelling competition with Tehran, Jerusalem should remember that the only acceptable rationale for national nuclear weapons and doctrine is stable war management and comprehensive nuclear deterrence.
IMMEDIATELY, ISRAEL should initiate a conspicuous policy shift from “deliberate nuclear ambiguity” to “selective nuclear disclosure.” The driving logic of this shift would not be to restate the obvious (i.e., that Israel is an operational nuclear power), but to remind all would-be aggressors that Jerusalem’s nuclear weapons are usable at every level of possible warfare. Nonetheless, even with optimal prudential planning, Russian and/or North Korean threats to Israel could become overwhelming.
A worst case scenario for Israel would commence with progressively explicit threats from Moscow or Pyongyang about Israeli preemption costs. Israel, aware that it could not reasonably expect to coexist indefinitely with a nuclear Iran, would proceed with its planned preemptions in spite of dire Russian or North Korean warnings. In subsequent response, North Korean military forces would begin to act directly against Israel, thereby seeking to persuade Jerusalem that Iran’s nuclear state surrogates are in a position to dominate all imaginable escalations.
Unless the United States were willing to enter the already-chaotic situation with openly unrestricted support for Israel, Moscow would have no foreseeable difficulties in establishing “escalation dominance.” Correspondingly, well-intentioned supporters of Israel could over-estimate the Jewish State’s relative nuclear capabilities and options, a judgment that Sigmund Freud would likely have called “wish fulfillment.”
In war, even state-of-the-art military operations would have determinable limits. In essence, there is no clear way in which the capabilities and options of a state smaller than America’s Lake Michigan could “win” at competitive risk-taking vis-à-vis Russia or North Korea.
Israel ought always to avoid armed struggle against a vastly superior nuclear adversary. Plausibly, this imperative would not pose problems with regard to a newly-nuclear Iran, but it would present a very serious problem if it concerned an already “mature” North Korean nuclear adversary.
What about the United States? Would newly reelected president Donald J. Trump honor alliance commitments to Israel that could place millions of American citizens in existential vulnerability? Would Trump reliably accept such a law-based commitment under any circumstances? Considering Trump’s history with the Russian president, he would likely do as little as possible to offend Vladimir Putin. This would include “letting him do whatever the hell he wants,” Trump’s published comment on Putin and Ukraine declared February 10, 2024.
With a resolutely pro-Putin Trump back in the White House, Jerusalem will need to take seriously the prospect of American “nonintervention.” This realistic prospect would mean nothing less than witting Trump abandonment of Israel to nuclear harms being threatened by North Korea. Though counterintuitive for those Israelis who gratefully regard President-elect Trump as “pro-Israel,” such an abandonment would still be plausible (and perhaps even expected) were Putin to be involved.
The writer is emeritus professor of international law, Purdue University.
English (US) ·