Breaking the Nuclear Taboo

In addition to the widening of the war on Iran to the whole Middle East and beyond, this conflict risks deliberate use of nuclear weapons.

by Peter Kuznick and Ivana Nikolic Hughes / March 12th, 2026

President Trump has been on quite a roll.

Since just the beginning of the year, he has kidnapped the Venezuela president, threatened to invade Greenland and Colombia, and has in just the last week dragged the U.S.—and seemingly much of the Middle East—into a new war by joining with Israel to attack Iran, something that even the biggest hawks among recent U.S. presidents have managed to avoid. That’s on top of bombing seven countries in 2025.

The 2024 campaign promises of a peace president who will end the forever wars have evaporated, only to be replaced by unrestrained use of military force and a seeming disdain for diplomacy. As the U.S. comedy show Saturday Night Live put it, Trump, along with his UNreplacing Board of Peace, got “bored of peace.”

Breaking international law seems to be a feature, and not a bug, of Trump’s actions, consistent with his admission that he is expressly not guided by international law, norms, traditions, or common decency, but by “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

In addition to hegemonic actions in the conventional military realm, Trump has been escalating when it comes to nuclear weapons. He rejected President Putin’s invitation to extend the New START treaty for another year, making possible an unconstrained nuclear arms race alongside an ongoing modernization race. He has also announced that the U.S. will resume nuclear testing. Even without the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and tensions with China, these actions and threats would be destabilizing and dangerous.

Trump is the mean and out-of-control bully on the global playground. Except that this bully has the sole authority to launch thousands of nuclear warheads.

It would be the ultimate expression of Trump’s unbounded power for him to break the one remaining international taboo—which, despite far too many close calls, has persisted for more than 80 years—detonating a nuclear weapon. There are many indications that, despite the U.S. and Israel’s ability to bomb Iran at will, this war may not be going well for them. But that need not be the pretext for using a nuclear weapon. In Trump’s mind, the more unprovoked, outrageous, and unnecessary something is, the better. Given his fragile ego and rapidly deteriorating mental powers—going off on bizarre rants about poisonous snakes in Peru or the White House drapes—the more unhinged he is, the more he thinks it demonstrates his dominance.

Since the end of the Cold War, many people who pay attention have worried about an accidental or a miscalculated stumble into nuclear war. But with Trump breaking every taboo domestically and internationally, demonstrating that he is above the law and can do as he pleases at every turn, the ultimate taboo waiting to be broken is the nuclear one. This may in fact be part of the reason why Presidents Putin and Xi have muted their response to the attacks on Iran. They know how dangerous Trump is and they don’t want to provoke him.

There are now reports from Air Force veteran Mikey Weinstein, the head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, that his organization has received calls from more than 200 soldiers on over 50 military bases, that “have one damn thing in freaking common…the unrestricted euphoria of their commanders and command chains as to how this new ‘biblically sanctioned’ war is clearly the undeniable sign of the expeditious approach of the fundamentalist Christian ‘end times’ as vividly described in the New Testament book of Revelation.” The commander of one combat unit told non-commissioned officers “that the Iran war is part of God’s plan and that President Donald Trump was ‘anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.’”

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard warned in June that we were “closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before.” We might be a lot closer than even she realized.

Ivana Nikolic Hughes is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and a Senior Lecturer in Chemistry at Columbia University. She is a member of the Scientific Advisory Group to the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Peter Kuznick is Professor of History and Director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University in Washington, D.C. He is the author of numerous books and co-author (with Oliver Stone) of The Untold History of the United States. Read other articles by Peter Kuznick and Ivana Nikolic Hughes.

How Can Iran Avoid a Nuclear Strike from Israel?

by Paul Larudee / March 11th, 2026

Benjamin Netanyahu is losing patience. Israel is being battered by Iran’s missiles and drones, while Israel’s defense shield is nearly depleted, and ineffective even when used. They can continue to attack Iran (although it’s often uncertain which attacks are Israeli and which American) but when it comes to Israeli airspace, they are even using anti-aircraft artillery which at least makes it appear that they are putting up a defense. This is despite the fact that Iran is apparently attacking incrementally, using its older, less advanced stocks of weapons before graduating to its latest, more advanced models, so that Israel will first use up its SAM.

In my February 11, 2026 piece, “Bibi to Don: You can’t use your nukes without starting Armageddon. But we can use ours,” I argued that Israel might preemptively strike Iran with nuclear weapons in the war that at that time had not yet begun. But it did not happen preemptively, and has not yet happened as I write, eleven days into the war. Of course, that does not mean that it will not happen at all. Alon Mizrahi believes that Iran is pursuing a strategy of patient incremental attacks on both the US and Israel (but especially the latter) in order to prevent overreaction by either of them. This would presumably include avoiding a tipping point at which Israel might be tempted to use its nuclear arsenal.

I share his Alon’s perception of Iran’s strategy, but I’m skeptical of its effectiveness in avoiding an Israeli nuclear attack. It’s a reasonable precaution, but it might nevertheless fail to dissuade Netanyahu and his most fanatical advisors. They are not interested in merely surviving the war with a damaged but still functioning Israeli state, and biding their time for another opportunity. No, they prefer to become part of Zionist hagiography like Herzl, Weizman, Ben-Gurion and Dayan, who advanced the Zionist dream in a dramatic and historically memorable ways. It’s why Iran was put on the list of countries to be disabled, as reported by retired General Wesley Clark in 2007 on the Democracy Now news hour. It’s also why they have tried to finish the job three times in the last year, and why they are unlikely to easily let go of their dream.

From their point of view, nuclear weapons are an option. It’s why the risk of the use of Israeli nukes is so high at the present time. With each passing day of the war, the stock of Israeli and US missiles and drones drops more precipitously, favoring Iran.

The option of a US ground invasion is also on the table at the present time, which may delay consideration of Israeli nukes. But how feasible is that option? Unlike the ground invasion of Iraq, which required months of logistics to put together an overwhelming force of 500,000 soldiers, such plans are only beginning to be made now. And Iraq is one fourth the size of Iran with half the population. Let us remember that even with the backing of the US, NATO and Arab oil wealth, Iraq was unable to defeat Iran in the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88, a time when Iran’s revolutionary government was still in its infancy after overthrowing the shah, even though Iraq used chemical weapons, while Iran refused to do so. The chances of a US ground invasion succeeding against an Iranian ground force are doubtful in the extreme. The US failed after twenty years in Afghanistan, with a mere shadow of the military capacity of Iran. The only sensible choice for the US is the one it exercised when it failed to defeat Yemen. Just leave. If Trump is willing to swallow his pride, he might accept that solution.

The third option for the US — the use of nuclear weapons — seems unlikely. The US is a great power, and its use of nuclear weapons skirts the edges of global nuclear war. It’s not worth the risk. But Israel is hardly a great power, and might conclude that it can use its nukes without risking a wider war. Furthermore they may decide that it is the only way left to to achieve their objective.

They would probably be wrong. Even the use of nuclear weapons against Iran would not likely save Israel. By all accounts, Iran’s conventional weapons are sophisticated enough and numerous enough to cause major devastation upon Israel, and they are so deeply embedded that plenty would survive a nuclear attack on the vast Iranian homeland. But that doesn’t mean that Israel won’t resort to nukes anyway

Nevertheless, there’s still one tactic that Iran might be able to use to stop Israel. If Iran can refine enough its 460kg of 60% enriched uranium to around 90% weapons grade, and test even one nuclear device soon enough, that might be enough to end the war and prevent Israel from exercising its nuclear option. How fast can they do that? 60% enriched uranium does not require much further enrichment to reach 90%, and a ground detonation device is very simple to make. My guess is that it could be accomplished in less than two weeks.

This verifies Israel’s decades of warnings about Iran’s nuclear capabilities. The obstacle has never been technical. Rather, Iran has refused on moral and religious grounds. While I am sympathetic with the late Supreme Leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s fatwa (prohibition) against nuclear weapons, possession is not the same as use. In fact, possession can hopefully even prevent use, which might be considered a decidedly moral application. It has certainly worked for countries like the DPRK (North Korea).

The new Supreme Leader, Grand Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, will have to consider his predecessor’s fatwa in this light, and decide whether it deserves a sunset provision in the current circumstances. Either way, it will be a momentous time for him, for Iran, for Israel and for the US.

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Paul Larudee is a retired academic and current administrator of a nonprofit human rights and humanitarian aid organization. Read other articles by Paul.