Dan Steinbock
As President 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. World Nuclear Forces:
Only days ago, President Trump reiterated that Iran will never have nuclear weapons. Yet, according to US intelligence assessments, Iran was up to three years away from being able to produce and deliver a nuclear weapon. While Israel built its case for war, the US didn’t buy it. The problem is that Trump did.
The Israel/US Iran offensive is not about nuclear weapons. It is about still another unwarranted proxy war. It aims at the restoration of the pre-1979 Iran.
Ironically, Iran is a member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which Israel shuns. As shown by The Fall of Israel (2025), the US/Israeli path to the carnage across the Middle East was paved almost 60 years ago.
Yom Kippur 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. The crude atomic bombs “were readied for deployment on trucks that could race to the Egyptian border for detonation 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. Mobilization proved grossly inadequate; for a few days, Israel faced an existential threat.
Even the normally sober Defense Minister Moshe Dayan was rattled enough to later tell Meir that “this is the end of the Third Temple.” It was a reference to the collapse of the state of Israel. But “Temple” was also the code word for nuclear weapons.
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 edge of a nuclear war
The Israelis planned to use the bombs against Egyptian and Syrian targets if Arab forces would advance too far. Leaks suggest that the primary purpose was strategic deterrent; but it also signaled a tentative “Samson Option”; that is, a massive potential Israeli retaliation as a “last resort” option.
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 for help with military supply.
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 1979, followed by another oil crisis.
The twin crises and the postwar economic expansion ended with devastating stagflation, which led to record-high interest rates. As the Keynesian era faded away, monetarism coupled with Reagan’s rearmament drives ensued.
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. However, 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.68 The latter would make it the world’s 4th largest nuclear power, right after Russia, the U.S., and China, and before France, the UK, India and Pakistan.
Most Israelis perceive Iran as the primary nuclear risk. 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, as of yet. Such weapons, were they to exist, would be deeply underground, possibly inaccessible even by a nuclear strike. In such scenarios, large civilian hubs would not be collateral damage, but intended mass targets.
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 injured and without adequate medical care, a devastating loss of municipal infrastructure, long-term disruption of economic, educational, and other essential social activity, and a full breakdown in law and order. These nightmares include thermal burn and radiation patients who would have to suffer their extreme pains without any treatment.
Stated doctrine of “nuclear ambiguity”
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.”
Yet effectively, the Israeli policy is more preemptive by nature.
The country first flirted with the nuclear option at the eve of the 1967 War, concerned that it might lose. Since the early 1960s, Israel has relied on what investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has described as the Samson Option. The term refers to the biblical figure of Samson who pushed apart the pillars of a Philistine temple bringing down the roof. In the process, he killed not just his enemy, the Philistines, but himself as well. It suggests an ultimate deterrence strategy of massive retaliation.
In October 1973, amid the Egyptian-Syrian invasion, Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan mobilized nuclear warheads for possible use, which led to president Nixon’s massive rearmament drive and the rapid deepening of the bilateral military ties – and eventually the symbiotic relationship that President Trump touted in his Sunday White House commentary, right after the US attacks against Iran’s nuclear enclaves.
The Begin Doctrine
In 1981, Israel destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactor Osirak as the Begin government initiated its war on Lebanon. Despite public criticism by the Reagan administration, the U.S. 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.
“We chose this moment: now, not later, because later may be too late, perhaps forever…. Then, this country and this people would have been lost, after the Holocaust. Another Holocaust would have happened in the history of the Jewish people. 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 right-wing Likud party’s offensive view of national security. But it also represented continuity and can be dated to the early 1960s Operation Damocles, Mossad’s covert campaign 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. But subsequently, he confirmed them. One of these hired hands was the legendary Waffen-SS commando Otto Skorzeny, who had served as adviser to Egypt’s President Nasser. There is a straight line from Operation Damocles to Israel’s 1981 attack on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor and the subsequent targeted killings of Iranian nuclear scientists, particularly since 2010 – and up to the present.
The far-right Messianic dream to “nuke Gaza”
A month after the Hamas offensive of October 7, Netanyahu’s heritage minister Amichai Eliyahu suggested that one of Israel’s options in the war against Hamas was to drop a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip. As the story spread internationally, it was quickly disavowed by PM Netanyahu, but he did not fire his minister.
The far-right Eliyahu objected to allowing any humanitarian aid into Gaza, saying, “we wouldn’t hand the Nazis humanitarian aid because there is no such thing as uninvolved civilians in Gaza.”
In a way, Eliyahu got what he wished for. 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.
Furthermore, the weight of the U.S. nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan was estimated at about 15,000 tons of explosives. Even before the Rafah offensive in May 2024, Gaza had been bombed almost five times more than that. Reflecting extraordinary brutality and blind disregard to human life, it was a shocking war crime with no parallel in recent history.
“Peace through strength”
What made it all the more stunning was the Biden-Harris complicity coupled with the hollow assurances that “we are working 24 hours a day for peace” with the whole world watching – the other way.
It is the same “peace through strength” premise that President Trump relied on when US struck three major Iranian sites, joining overtly the Israeli air campaign against nuclear program that it had until then supported covertly.
American diplomacy no longer exists. It has been replaced by diplomatic deception and historically unprecedent lethal force. All gloves are now off. The premise that this reflects “mission accomplished” couldn’t be more off. The carnage hasn’t ended. It has begun
Trump Bombs Iran, Then Demands Iran Agree to End the War
June 21, 2025
Sharon Zhang
After the unprovoked attack, Trump demanded that Iran effectively surrender while continuing to threaten the country.
President Donald Trump announced on Saturday that the U.S. military struck three sites in Iran, in an unprovoked act of aggression. The strikes come after Israel launched its own unprovoked attack on Iran on June 13, leading to an all-out war between the two countries. The U.S. strikes mark a major escalation and threaten to bring further instability to the region.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump said that the U.S. has bombed three nuclear facilities in Iran, at Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan.
The Iranian government’s Atomic Energy Organization confirmed the strikes, saying that they “were attacked in a violent act against international laws, including the Non-Proliferation Treaty, by the enemies of Islamic Iran.” Regional Iranian officials also confirmed the strikes, as Iranian news outlets have reported.
Iran has not directly targeted U.S. bases with an attack thus far in its war with Israel. Still, in his post announcing the strikes, Trump also demanded that Iran effectively surrender.
“NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE!” he wrote. In a follow-up post, he said, “IRAN MUST NOW AGREE TO END THIS WAR.”
The strikes mark the U.S.’s official direct entry into the war, though the U.S. has provided Israel with support in its bombings on Iran and has also helped provide defense for Israel. The attacks come after politicians and war mongers in the U.S. have called for war with Iran for decades.
In a brief address on Saturday night, Trump layered further threats against Iran, saying that the U.S. would continue its strikes if Iran doesn’t “make peace.” He called Iran the “bully of the Middle East” and said the strikes had gone “a long way to erasing this horrible threat to Israel” — the state that, in addition to currently conducting a genocide in Gaza, has been relentlessly attacking and invading countries and territories around it for decades.
“This cannot continue. There will be either peace, or there will be tragedy for Iran far greater than we have witnessed over the last eight days. Remember, there are many targets left,” Trump said.
Numerous lawmakers slammed the strikes, saying that they are unconstitutional as domestic law prohibits the president from launching an unprovoked strike without approval from Congress. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) called for Trump to be impeached.
“The President’s disastrous decision to bomb Iran without authorization is a grave violation of the Constitution and Congressional War Powers. He has impulsively risked launching a war that may ensnare us for generations. It is absolutely and clearly grounds for impeachment,” said Ocasio-Cortez.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres condemned the strikes, and called for de-escalation and diplomacy.
“This is a dangerous escalation in a region already on the edge — and a direct threat to international peace and security. There is a growing risk that this conflict could rapidly get out of control — with catastrophic consequences for civilians, the region, and the world,” Guterres said.
Anti-War Advocates Demand Trump 'Return to Diplomatic Path' After Illegal Strikes on Iran
June 22, 2025
Julia Conley
Anti-nuclear groups and progressives in U.S. Congress were among those condemning President Donald Trump's bombing of three nuclear sites in Iran, which were launched Sunday morning local time and came despite widespread disapproval in the U.S. of the country becoming involved in Israel's recent attacks on the Middle Eastern country.
Trump announced Saturday night in Washington, D.C. that six B-2 bombers had dropped 12 30,000-pound bunker buster bombs on Fordo, Iran's most protected underground uranium enrichment site. Other targets included a plant at Natanz and one near Isfahan.
Iran has repeatedly said its nuclear program is used for peaceful civilian purposes, and U.S. intelligence agencies have assessed that the country has not begun making a nuclear bomb with its enriched uranium. On Sunday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth dodged a question at a press briefing about whether new intelligence showed that Iran had decided to build a nuclear weapon.
Iranian officials were involved in negotiations with the U.S. when Israel began attacking sites across Iran earlier this month, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu making his latest claim that the Iranians "could produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time" if nuclear targets were not obliterated.
The Iranian news agency Tasnim reported that "several people" were injured in the attack on Fordo.
Trump said in recent days that he had not decided whether the U.S. would get directly involved in Israel's war, but flight tracking data showing B-2 bombers crossing the Pacific Ocean on Saturday provoked suspicions that a U.S. attack could be imminent.
Melissa Parke, executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, said the Trump administration was "breaking international law" by entering Israel's assault on Iran.
"Military action against Iran is not the way to resolve concerns over Tehran's nuclear program. Given that U.S. intelligence agencies assess Iran is not pursuing nuclear weapons, this is a senseless and reckless act that could undermine international efforts to prevent the further proliferation of nuclear weapons," said Parke. "The U.S. should have continued to pursue the diplomatic process underway before Israel resorted to the illegal use of force. This does not make the region or the world safer... The U.S. must stop all military action and return to the diplomatic path."
In the U.S. Democratic lawmakers condemned the attack as one that violated the Constitution, which requires congressional authorization for the use of military force—although both Democratic and Republican presidents have unilaterally approved attacks on foreign countries in recent decades.
"President Trump sending U.S. troops to bomb Iran without the consent of Congress is a blatant violation of our Constitution," said Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.). "The American people do not want another forever war. We have seen where decades of endless war in the Middle East gets us—all based on the lie of 'weapons of mass destruction.' We are not falling for it again... Congress must act immediately to exert its war powers and stop this unconstitutional act of war."
Members of Congress have introduced three proposals, including two War Powers Resolutions, to stop the Trump administration from taking military action against Iran without congressional authorization. At least 59 Democrats and one Republican have signed on to the measures.
Top Democratic leaders including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) were not among them as of Saturday, when Trump launched the attack, and both had defended Israel's bombardment of Iran.
Schumer signed on as a co-sponsor of Sen. Tim Kaine's War Powers Resolution after the U.S. bombings were announced and urged an immediate vote on the resolution.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said Trump's "disastrous decision" to unilaterally bomb Iran was "absolutely and clearly grounds for impeachment."
Iran's foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said Sunday that Trump had "betrayed" the country with which his administration had recently been negotiating and had "deceived his own voters."
Iran "reserves all options to defend its security interests and people," said Araghchi at a news conference in Istanbul. "My country has been under attack, under aggression, and we have to respond based on our legitimate right of self-defense."
Before the U.S. attack, Iran had said it would attack U.S. bases in the Middle East if Trump joined Israel's war.
Raed Jarrar, advocacy director for Democracy for the Arab World Now, said Trump's actions "will most likely lead to retaliation from Iran that puts American troops and citizens across the Middle East in harm's way" and called for the passage of a War Powers Resolution "to prohibit further U.S. military involvement, even in the event of retaliation."
"We need deescalation, not more bombs," said Jarrar.
Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said Trump had "fallen into Israel's trap quite easily" as Netanyahu seeks "to make our nation even more complicit than it already is with its genocide in Gaza and its multiple attacks on nations in the region."
"This attack, carried out under pressure from the out-of-control Israeli government, took place despite the longstanding conclusion by our nation's intelligence community that Iran was not seeking nuclear weapons," said Awad. "Just as President [George W.] Bush started a disastrous war in Iraq pushed by war hawks, neoconservatives, and Israeli leaders like Netanyahu, President Trump has attacked Iran based on the same type of false information put forward by those who consistently seek to drag our nation into unnecessary and catastrophic wars."
"We must not engage in any further action against Iran," added Awad, "and should end our government's support for a rogue nation that seeks to dominate the region through a seemingly unending campaign of death, starvation, ethnic cleansing, and destruction."
Jamal Abdi, president of the National Iranian American Council, said the attack was carried out "because Trump and other American leaders still haven't figured out how to tell Netanyahu, 'No.'"
"If Netanyahu lit the negotiating table on fire, Trump just added kerosene to it. Diplomatic channels with Iran will be effectively ended," said Abdi.
"Iran hawks have always been clear: They view the war that Israel started last week not as a one-off, but as a regular occurrence," he added. "They want to keep bombing Iran whenever and wherever they please. It does, indeed, look like it could be a new forever war that the American people don't want and Trump pledged he'd avoid... Trump let slip the dogs of war, and the way ahead seems more perilous than ever. At this dark hour, we must all work together to rebuild a path toward peace."
The Arms Control Association warned that while Iran's nuclear sites sustained damage, "military strikes alone cannot destroy Iran's extensive nuclear knowledge" and would likely strengthen "Tehran's resolve to reconstitute its sensitive nuclear activities, possibly prompting it to consider withdrawing from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and possibly proceeding to weaponization."
"Though the prospect for negotiations on a longer term framework to contain Iran's sensitive nuclear activities have been damaged severely, this remains the best possible long-term path to prevent further nuclear weapons proliferation," said the organization. "Trump needs a plan for deescalation and engagement."
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