AS PRESIDENT Donald Trump ordered the US to attack three major Iranian nuclear sites, a misguided concept of Israel’s national security morphed into an even more twisted view of US national security.
Ironically, Iran is a member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which Israel shuns. As shown by my The Fall of Israel (2025), the US/Israeli path to the carnage across the Middle East was paved almost 60 years ago.
Officially, Israel has a long-standing policy of nuclear ambiguity. While it has used psychological warfare leaks to signal its disproportionate nuclear deterrence, it neither officially confirms nor denies that it possesses nuclear weapons.
In public, the standard statement has been that “Israel will not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East.”
Effectively, the Israeli policy has been more preemptive by nature.
At the edge of a nuclear war
Israel first crossed the nuclear threshold on the eve of the Six-Day War in May 1967, when Prime Minister Levi Eshkol secretly ordered the nuclear reactor scientists in Dimona to assemble two crude nuclear devices, “in the event Arab forces overwhelmed Israeli defenses.”
At the eve of Yom Kippur in 1973, despite advance intelligence about the impending attack, Prime Minister Golda Meir decided not to launch a pre-emptive strike, fearing the U.S. response could prove adverse as it had in 1956.
On the night of October 8, Meir and her kitchen cabinet had thirteen 20-kiloton atomic bombs assembled. Their destructive potential was higher than that of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima, with an explosive yield of the equivalent of about 15 kilotons of dynamite.
At the time, the implications of the devastating aftermath of even tactical nuclear strikes were not well-known.
As the Soviets began to resupply Arab forces, particularly Syria, Meir requested Nixon’s help with military supplies. After the full nuclear alert, Israelis began to load the warheads into waiting planes. Cognizant of the potential implications, Nixon ordered a full-scale strategic airlift operation to deliver weapons and supplies to Israel. By the time the aid arrived, Israel was gaining the upper hand in the war.
After those days on a nuclear edge, nothing would ever remain the same in the Middle East. American military aid to Israel contributed to the 1973 OPEC embargo against the United States, which was lifted in March 1974, and subsequently to the overthrow of the Shah in Iran in 1979, followed by another oil crisis.
Nuclear stockpiles
The conventional estimate is that Israel’s nuclear stockpile comprises some 90 nuclear warheads, which makes the tiny country the world’s 9th largest nuclear power. But unofficial estimates vary. The conventional estimate is at the lower end of a possible range that some analysts suggest could be as high as 200, up to 400 nuclear weapons. That would make the country the world’s 4th largest nuclear power, right after the US, Russia and China, before France, the UK, India, and Pakistan.
World Nuclear Forces
Source: SIPRI, author, January 2024
Israel has a broad range of nuclear weapons, while Iran may have enriched enough nuclear material to build them, but is thought not to have done so. Such weapons, were they to exist, would be deeply underground, possibly inaccessible.
According to some projections, nuclear weapon detonations in Iran’s densely populated cities would likely result in millions of dead, with tens of millions of.
These nightmares include thermal burn and radiation patients who would have to suffer their extreme pains without any treatment.
From “nuclear ambiguity” to Begin Doctrine
In 1981, Israel destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactor Osirak as Menachem Begin’s right-wing Likud government initiated its war in Lebanon. Despite public criticism by the Reagan administration, the US and Israel signed a strategic memorandum of understanding and began to deepen bilateral ties in defense.
The Osirak attack gave rise to the Begin nuclear doctrine, which allows no “hostile” regional state to possess nuclear military capability. Begin described the strike as an act of “anticipatory self-defense at its best.” He framed it as a long-term national commitment. “Never again, never again! … We shall not allow any enemy to develop weapons of mass destruction turned against us.”
In a sense, the Begin doctrine reflected the Likud party’s offensive view of national security. But it also represented continuity and can be dated to the early 1960s Operation Damocles. This was Mossad’s covert campaign seeking to assassinate Nazi Germany’s rocket scientists working for Egypt to develop bombs using radioactive waste.
The legendary head of Mossad Isser Harel recruited former Nazis to provide intelligence on Arab countries. When I met Harel in the mid-1970s, he denied all such stories. Subsequently, he confirmed them. There is a straight line from Operation Damocles to the targeted killings of Iranian nuclear scientists, up to the present.
Gaza, a shocking war crime
After October 7, 2023, a member of the Netanyahu cabinet’s far-right suggested “nuking Gaza.” By late April 2024, Israel had dropped more than 70,000 tons of bombs over Gaza, surpassing the bombing of Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined during World War II. That amounts to more than 30 kilograms of explosives per individual on mainly women and children.
Reflecting extraordinary brutality and blind disregard for human life, it is a shocking war crime with no parallel in recent history.
What made it all the more stunning was the Biden-Harris administration’s complicity, coupled with the hollow assurances that “we are working 24 hours a day for peace,” with the whole world watching – the other way.
After President Trump’s strikes at the three major Iranian nuclear sites, American diplomacy no longer exists. All gloves are now off.
The premise that the Iran attacks reflect a “mission accomplished” couldn’t be more off. The carnage hasn’t ended. It has begun.
The author of The Fall of Israel (2025), Dr. Dan Steinbock is an internationally-renowned visionary of the multipolar world and the founder of Difference Group. He has served at the India, China and America Institute (USA), Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net
This is a highly abbreviated version of the original published by Informed Comment on June 22, 2025
