Working Through Israel’s Worst-Case Scenarios: Iran, Russia, and N. Korea

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Photo Wikimedia Commons

by Louis Rene Beres, Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue University.

For Israel’s military planners, issues of Iranian nuclearization are increasingly bewildering and many-sided. Even while Israel remains the only regional atomic power, a nuclear war is not out of the question. More precisely, even a still pre-nuclear Iran could bring Israel to the point where Jerusalem’s only strategic options would be intolerable capitulations or nuclear escalations. In effect, the second option would represent an “asymmetrical nuclear war.”

How could such a scenario emerge? In one compelling reply, Iran would target Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor and/or employ radiation dispersal weapons against the Jewish State. Unique escalations could also follow in the wake of an Iranian resort to biological or electromagnetic pulse (EMP) ordnance. 

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In a next-to-worst-case scenario, Israel would be prevented from striking preemptively against designated Iranian targets by Russian and/or North Korean nuclear threats. Prima facie, the worst-case scenario would be a “bolt-from-the-blue” nuclear attack launched by Russia or (more credibly) North Korea. Kim Jung Un’s troops are presently training for military action against Ukraine on behalf of Vladimir Putin. This training is already underway inside Russia.

Where does Jerusalem stand on such potentially existential challenges? Looking toward a steadily expanding conflict with Iran, any “one-off” preemption against certain enemy weapons and infrastructures (an act of “anticipatory self-defense” under international law) could be sorely problematic. At this late stage, any such defensive action would need to be undertaken in increments and during an ongoing war. In 2003, when this writer’s Project Daniel Group presented its early report on Iranian nuclearization to then-Israeli PM Ariel Sharon, Iranian targets were already more daunting than Iraq’s Osiraq reactor had been on June 7, 1981. That was the date of Israel’s “Operation Opera.”

In all of these intersecting and sometimes synergistic interactions, an unprecedented strategic dialectic is revealed. During its escalating war against Iran, Israel could sometimes calculate that it has no choice but to launch multiple and mutually reinforcing preemptive strikes against specific nuclear-related targets. Simultaneously, Russian and/or North Korean threats of support for Iran could lay the groundwork for a multi-state nuclear war, one that could come to involve the United States and/or China. 

In Jerusalem, such a worrisome narrative ought never to be dismissed out of hand. Though it could be tempting to regard such jaw-dropping interventions as “speculative” or “unlikely,” there would be no science-based way to estimate the probabilities of a unique event.  Significantly, for Israel, true probabilities could never be determined ex nihilo, “out of nothing.”

To the extent that they might still be usefully 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 critical three-part distinction, there could be no adequate reason to expect operationally gainful strategic assessments of any such war.  Ensuring existential protections from openly declared Iranian aggressions, Jerusalem should always bear in mind that even the Jewish State’s physical survival can never be “guaranteed.” At some point, even a nuclear weapons state could be left with only militarily purposeless options for revenge.

An unintentional or inadvertent nuclear war between Jerusalem and Teheran could take place not only as the result of misunderstandings or miscalculations between rational leaders, but also as the unintended consequence of mechanical, electrical, or computer malfunction. This should bring to analyzing Israeli minds a further distinction between an unintentional/inadvertent nuclear war and an accidental nuclear war. Though all accidental nuclear wars must be unintentional, not every unintentional nuclear war would need to occur by accident. On one occasion or another, an unintentional or inadvertent nuclear war could be the result of fundamental human misjudgments about enemy intentions. This catastrophic result could be both irremediable and irreversible.

Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971), and is Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue. His twelfth book, Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy, was published in 2016. His other writings have been published in Harvard National Security Journal; Yale Global Online; World Politics (Princeton); Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; Israel Defense; Parameters: Journal of the US Army War College; Special Warfare; Oxford University Press; The Jerusalem Post; Infinity Journal; BESA Perspectives; US News & World Report; The Hill; and The Atlantic.

His Terrorism and Global Security: The Nuclear Threat (Westview, first edition, 1979) was one of the first scholarly books to deal specifically with nuclear