A satellite imagery taken on Jan. 30, 2026, shows a new roof over a previously destroyed building at Natanz nuclear site, Iran. Photo: 2026 PLANET LABS PBC/Handout via REUTERS

No matter what US President Donald Trump may call his Iran peace plan, it will be limited in duration and irrelevant to American and Israeli war objectives. At best, following the June 2026 Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), the risks of Iranian nuclear weapons and regional nuclear war will remain unchanged. At worst, Trump’s incoherent diplomatic efforts will enlarge these risks.

In logic and mathematics, probabilities must be based on a determinable frequency of pertinent past events. But because there has never been a nuclear war, the US and Israel will have to rely on continuously-refined deductive analyses.

“Everything is very simple in war,” says Carl von Clausewitz in On War, “but even the simplest thing is very difficult.” In world politics, managing nuclear risk is never a matter for sycophantic politicians or simplifying pundits. It is, rather, an intellectual challenge, one that requires informed scholars of uniquely high caliber.

What more should American and Israeli leaders know about upcoming strategic challenges? The reply:

Capable scholars will need to calculate multiple ways in which to manage escalation processes during a nuclear crisis. Ideally, in meeting this expectation, such calculations could achieve “escalation dominance” without incurring existential risks.

There will be variously intersecting details. For one, this complex military imperative would be unique or sui generis (that is, without historical precedent) and could heighten the chances of both an unintentional and inadvertent nuclear war. Even in a future stand-off with a non-nuclear adversary such as Iran, the United States or Israel could reach a point (suddenly or incrementally) where it would openly threaten or actually use nuclear weapons. In technical terms, this fearsome scenario would represent an “asymmetrical nuclear war.”

In the ongoing case of Iran, a primary struggle of competitive risk-tasking would be tackled most convincingly by measured nuclear threats. Ipso facto, Israel’s deterrence obligations will require prior retreat from “deliberate nuclear ambiguity” and be complicated by Iran-supported aggressions of sub-state proxies (e.g., Shiite militia Hezbollah).

Today, because meeting this obligation could result in an accidental or inadvertent nuclear war, capable American and Israeli strategists should determine pre-crisis the “correct” balance between nuclear risk-taking and nuclear war avoidance.

By definition, such existential determinations would need to be calculated without any predictive benefits of history. Among other things, it would be a grave mistake for analysts and politicians to assume that a nuclear war between states must always reflect deliberate and rational decision-making processes. Currently, the highest risks of a nuclear war involving Russia, India, China, North Korea or Pakistan would seemingly involve computer accident or decisional inadvertence.

With all this in mind, how should a bewildered American president proceed? In protecting the United States (and Israel) from deliberate nuclear attack, American strategists would “normally” have to accept core assumptions of enemy rationality. Still, even if this assumption were reasonable and well-founded, there would remain assorted dangers of an unintentional nuclear war.

Since 1945, the classical balance of power has been transformed, in part, into a “balance of terror.” Prima facie, and to a largely unforeseeable extent, any geo-strategic search for “escalation dominance” by parties to a potentially nuclear conflict would enlarge the risks of an inadvertent nuclear war. These often-underestimated or ignored risks would include nuclear war by accident or by decisional miscalculation.

The “solution” here would not be to wish-away the common search for “escalation dominance” — but to manage all prospectively nuclear crises at their lowest possible levels of destructiveness. Wherever feasible, it would be best to avoid such crises altogether and to maintain prudent “circuit breakers” against strategic hacking and technical malfunction.

Iran is still pre-nuclear, but codified terms of the Islamabad Memorandum effectively allow uranium enrichment and ballistic missile production. Accordingly, Iran will retain its capacity to use radiation dispersal weapons and launch conventional rockets at Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor. Because Tehran maintains close military ties to Pyongyang, it is conceivable that a nuclear North Korea could sometime operate as a strategic “stand-in” for a not-yet-nuclear Iran. Should that happen, Israel would require enhanced strategic support from the United States. Israel could not “win” a nuclear war with North Korea.

What more is vital to a full understanding of Israel-US security interdependencies? Israel’s nuclear posture, whether ambiguous or selectively disclosed, could have especially serious consequences for US security and vice-versa. Currently, Israel has no nuclear adversaries in the region, but even the war-delayed approach of a nuclear Iran could encourage sudden or rapid nuclearization among certain Sunni Arab states or Turkey. Plausibly, non-Arab Pakistan, hailed as a “peacemaker” by US Vice President J.D. Vance in Switzerland on June 21, 2026, could become a direct adversary of the United States and Israel.

There are variously salient clarifications. Pakistan is an already-nuclear Islamic state with close ties to China. Pakistan, like Israel, is not a party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty or NPT. But Pakistan, unlike Israel, has openly opted for a nuclear counterforce or nuclear war fighting strategy. For some reason, this last point was ignored by Vice President Vance at the Swiss summit.

Regarding the continuing prospect of Iranian nuclear weapons, Israel should consider whether and to what extent there could be an expedient role for nuclear threats against a non-nuclear foe. In part, at least, “correct answers” would depend on Jerusalem’s prior transformations of “deliberate nuclear ambiguity” (the “bomb in the basement”) into visible postures of “selective nuclear disclosure.”

A specific question presents itself. What is the probabilistic difference between a deliberate or intentional nuclear war and one that would be unintentional or inadvertent? Though rarely discussed among general publics, unless this core polarity is systematically considered, little operational utility could be predicted about the likelihood of a nuclear conflict.

As there has never been an authentic nuclear war (Hiroshima and Nagasaki don’t “count”), determining relevant probabilities must become a sorely problematic task. In essence, going forward, capable Israeli and American analysts will have to devise cost-effective strategies for calculating (and thus averting) a nuclear war. Whatever the particularities, all relevant calculations will vary (among other things) according to (1) presumed enemy intentions; (2) accident or hacking intrusions; and/or (3) plausibility of decisional miscalculations. When taken together as cumulative categories of nuclear war threat, these three component risks of unintentional nuclear war may also be described as “inadvertent.”

For both Israel and the United States, the North Korean nuclear threat should be kept in plain sight. In dealing with derivative nuclear war risks involving North Korea, no single concept could prove more important than synergy. Unless synergistic interactions are reliably and correctly evaluated, the American president could sometime underestimate the cumulative or total impact of nuclear engagement. The flesh and blood consequences of such underestimations could defy both analytic imaginations and post-war justifications.

For the foreseeable future, nuclear war avoidance will require the United States and Israel to continuously refine and partially coordinate national nuclear deterrence postures. In all imaginable scenarios, the common crisis task in Washington and Jerusalem will be to achieve “escalation dominance” against Iran or other pertinent adversaries without simultaneously enlarging risks of a nuclear war. For Israel and the United States, significant adversaries would be states, sub-states or “hybrid” foes that could be either rational or non-rational in nuclear decision-making processes.

In the final analysis, looking less to “common sense” than to science, planners in Israel and the United States will need to envision all considered strategic policy refinements as an intellectual challenge. In this connection, these planners should understand that no meaningful elements of national security could be provided by an American president’s anti-intellectual reasoning. More than anything else, what will be required for nuclear risk management in  Jerusalem and Washington are logic-focused decision-makers, and courageous national leaders willing to prioritize complex challenges of “mind” over  simplifying concessions of politics.

Presently, at least, this indispensable requirement has not been met.

Prof. Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971) and is the author of many books and scholarly articles dealing with international law, nuclear strategy, nuclear war, and terrorism. In Israel, Prof. Beres was Chair of Project Daniel (PM Sharon). His 12th and latest book is Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; 2nd ed., 2018). Professor Beres was born in Zurich at the end of World War II.