Wait, Why Is Israel Allowed to Have Nukes?

Among U.S. politicians, there’s one consistent narrative you’ll hear repeated over and over. Iran, the story goes, must not be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon. Iran is unstable and untrustworthy; Iran is theocratic; Iran is evil. Supposedly serious adults, like Senator Ted Cruz, will use the words “the bad guys” to describe the country, like three-year-olds playing with action figures. And because Iranians are “the bad guys,” it’s supposedly legitimate to attack and kill them in order to prevent them from ever getting that terrifying nuke.

Donald Trump is considering that very move now, posting in all-caps that “IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!” and threatening to assassinate Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. On Twitter, JD Vance echoes Trump, threatening “action to end Iranian enrichment.”

But it’s not just Republicans. Trump and Vance have been egged on by their ostensible enemy, Democratic minority leader Chuck Schumer, who recently condemned the president for attempting nuclear negotiations, calling him a “chicken” who would “let Iran get away with everything.” John Fetterman, the most bellicose member of the Democratic caucus, just comes out and says it: “I really hope the president finally does bomb and destroy the Iranians.” Both of them have repeated the “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon” mantra to justify beating the drum for war.

But there’s a sword of Damocles hanging over this whole situation, one nobody wants to acknowledge. If the possibility that Iran might get a nuclear weapon is so scary, why do none of our leaders seem to be worried about Israel, which already has a secretive nuclear arsenal of its own, and is acting more violently unstable by the day?

According to estimates by the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, published recently in the New York Times, Israel has “at least 90 [nuclear] warheads and enough fissile material to produce up to hundreds more.” President Jimmy Carter, who was in a position to know, said in 2014 that he believed the number is closer to “300 or more, nobody knows exactly how many.” In either case, this is more nukes than another country we’re routinely told to be terrified of: North Korea, which the Center estimates possesses “20 to 30  possibly assembled warheads.”

These Israeli warheads can be delivered in a variety of ways, including by U.S.-made fighter jets, by German-made “Dolphin” submarines, and by a variety of missiles—including the Jericho 3, an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) that came online in 2011. Describing the early tests of this missile, Isaac Ben-Israel—who was both a scientist, a retired IDF general, and a member of the Knesset at the time—said in 2008 that “everybody can do the math and understand… that we can reach with a rocket engine to every point in the world.” If that’s not a thinly veiled threat, nothing is.

Of course, we don’t know exactly how many nuclear warheads Israel has, because Israeli leaders refuse to publicly admit they have any. The whole military program is kept in near-total secrecy, under a policy called “strategic ambiguity,” meaning the existence of the bombs is neither confirmed nor denied. Historians believe Israel first got a nuclear weapon in 1967, after secretly refining plutonium at the Dimona facility and running a “full deception campaign” to convince U.S. inspectors the purpose of the reactors there was civilian rather than military. (Ironically, this is exactly the kind of deception Israel now accuses Iran of practicing.)

It’s also strongly suspected that Israel tested a nuclear weapon off the coast of South Africa in 1979, in partnership with that country’s apartheid government. It’s called the Vela incident, after the spy satellite that spotted the nuclear flash. But “strategic ambiguity” means there’s little international oversight or accountability involved with any of this, and much of it takes place in violation of international law.

Like North Korea and a small handful of other nations, Israel has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), despite United Nations resolutions that it should do so. It has signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, but likely broke it with the South African incident. And most importantly, its leaders refuse to allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to access Dimona, so we have no way of knowing what’s going on in there.

Under U.S. law, Israel’s rogue nuclear program means that the United States should not be supplying it with military aid of any kind. The law in question is the International Security Assistance and Arms Export Control Act of 1976, and its language is unambiguous. But for more than 50 years now, U.S. leaders have been willing to ignore their own laws and accept this uneasy state of affairs.

A 1993 report by the congressional Office of Technology Assessment, titled “Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction: Assessing the Risks,” sums up the rationale well: “would the United States be willing to sacrifice its relationship with Israel—and possibly risk Israeli national survival—to pressure that state to give up a nuclear arsenal it believes essential to its security?”

For successive administrations, the answer has been no. It would be easier, and cause fewer problems, to just let the issue be. For their part, heads of state from Yitzhak Rabin to Benjamin Netanyahu have pledged that Israel would not “be the first to introduce nuclear weapons” in the Middle East. Even that is another example of the “strategic ambiguity” at work, because “introduce” can be taken to mean Israel would not create weapons it already has (a lie,) or to mean it won’t use or publicly acknowledge them.

But the underlying assumption for U.S. policymakers—tinged, it has to be said, with Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism—has been that Israelis are responsible stewards of the bomb, in a way that Egyptians or Jordanians, or most of all Iranians, would not be. The problem is, when we look at Israel’s actions and not its words, there’s a strong case to doubt that assessment—and the situation has gotten dramatically worse in the last few years.

For example, one of the most common reasons given for why Iran “CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!” is that, having got them, Iran might share its nuclear weapons with the various militant groups it has alliances with across the Middle East, like Hezbollah. This isn’t a completely baseless concern. Nuclear proliferation is a very real threat, and nobody wants uranium or plutonium getting into the hands of terrorists. But once again, Israel is guilty of the very offense its supporters lay at Iran’s door.

As a Guardian investigation revealed in 2010, Israeli officials didn’t just conduct a likely nuclear test with apartheid South Africa back in the 1970s. They also tried to sell nuclear weapons to apartheid South Africa. As Ta-Nehisi Coates and others have written, the two regimes had a natural affinity, since Israel, too, is an apartheid state; in their official publications, South African officials would write that both nations were “situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples.”

For years, Israel defied international arms embargoes to trade conventional arms with South Africa. And in the documents uncovered by the Guardian, it’s revealed that Shimon Peres—then Israel’s defense minister, and later its president—offered to sell an early model of the Jericho missile to South Africa in 1975.

In response, Lieutenant General R.F. Armstrong stipulated he would only accept if the missiles were “armed with nuclear warheads.” Peres agreed, reportedly saying that “the correct payload was available in three sizes,” only for the deal to fall apart because of the high cost. But the relationship wasn’t a complete bust: as the Guardian reports, “South Africa also provided much of the yellowcake uranium that Israel required to develop its weapons.”

Does this sound like the behavior of a nation that can be trusted to act responsibly with the most lethal weapons ever created?

If not, don’t worry. It gets much worse. Since the October 7 attacks and Israel’s brutal collective punishment of Gaza, Netanyahu and his Likud government have become more and more erratic, unpredictable, and belligerent with every passing month. There’s really no other term for it: they’re operating like a dangerous rogue state.

By itself, the assault on Gaza—which has included countless war crimes, and is now recognized by major human rights groups as a genocide—is enough to show Israel no longer cares about human rights or international law, if it ever did. Netanyahu himself now has a warrant for his arrest from the International Criminal Court, but rather than show any contrition for the more than 55,700 dead Palestinians on his ledger, he’s ranted that “No one will stop us—not the Hague.” That’s the kind of thing Slobodan Milošević would have said at the height of the Bosnian genocide, and it’s at least as bad as anything the Ayatollah has ever come out with.

But beyond Gaza, Netanyahu has taken this moment to attack and threaten his neighbors, too. There was the terror attack with the exploding pagers in Lebanon and Syria, which was illegal under international law and had horrifying collateral damage, including at least two dead children. (The attack has since become an inspiration for anti-Muslim terrorism generally, including an anonymous assassination threat which told New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani to “check your beeper” this week.)

There was the April 2024 bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus, also illegal under international law according to UN experts. There was the December 2024 assault against Syria, which barely made a blip in the U.S. press, but included “480 strikes across the country over the past two days, hitting most of Syria’s strategic weapon stockpiles” and “destroyed the Syrian fleet overnight.” Israel also took this opportunity to seize territory within southern Syria, and promises to occupy it “indefinitely.” Again, this is something international law takes a dim view on.

Worst of all, Israeli leaders have begun making direct nuclear threats.

As Seymour Hersh documents in his book of the same name, Israeli nuclear policy includes something called the “Samson Option.” It’s named after the biblical story of Samson, a hero with incredible strength who was captured by Philistines, but single-handedly yanked out the pillars of the building where he was chained up, killing both himself and his captors. In the modern world, the Samson Option refers to the idea that, if they ever perceive an “imminent, existential threat” to the country’s existence, Israeli leaders may deploy their nuclear weapons widely and indiscriminately, lashing out with “deliberate, disproportionate nuclear strikes against non-military targets, such as cities.”

It’s a more extreme form of the already horrifying idea of “mutually assured destruction,” in which only one party possesses nuclear weapons and only its opponents’ destruction is assured. There are historical reasons for this; like so much in Israeli politics, the doctrine is informed by the “never again” mentality of early Israeli leaders for whom the Holocaust was a not-too-distant memory. But in today’s world, it’s the possibility of Israeli nuclear strikes that’s the real threat—to the Middle East, to the wider world, and even to Israel itself.

In September 2023, in the same breath as he promised to “do everything in my power to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons,” Benjamin Netanyahu also said that “above all, Iran must face a credible nuclear threat.” He immediately walked the comment back, but the damage was done. He’d admitted what everyone paying attention already knew: that the very “nuclear threat” Israeli leaders claim to fear from Iran is one they direct at Iran on a regular basis. Other members of his Likud Party have gone further. Shortly after the October 7 attacks, a Likud member of the Knesset named Revital Gotliv urged Netanyahu to use a nuclear weapon on Gaza, posting online:

Jericho missile! Jericho missile! A strategic alert, before we consider introducing our forces. A doomsday weapon! This is my opinion[…] Israel must use everything in its arsenal. 

Another post from Gotliv soon followed:

Only an explosion that shakes the Middle East will restore this country’s dignity, strength, and security! It’s time to kiss doomsday.

Now, you could write this off as the rantings of a lone extremist, especially in the wake of a genuinely traumatic event like October 7. But what Gotliv’s saying here is in perfect accordance with the longstanding concept of the Samson Option. You perceive an existential threat—rightly or wrongly—and you lash out with everything in your arsenal. And Gotliv isn’t alone. In a November 2023 radio interview, Amichai Eliyahu—a member of the far-right Otzma Yehudit party, and a minister in Netanyahu’s government—also endorsed the idea of using a nuclear weapon on Gaza:

INTERVIEWER: Your expectation is that tomorrow morning we’d drop what amounts to some kind of a nuclear bomb on all of Gaza, flattening them, eliminating everybody there.

ELIYAHU: That’s one way.

Shortly thereafter, Netanyahu suspended Eliyahu from his ministerial duties—but, notably, did not fire him or ask him to resign. In 2024, Eliyahu doubled down on his statement, saying that “even in the Hague they know my position.” Despite this, he’s still the country’s Heritage Minister, and both he and Gotliv are still MKs in good standing. Taken together, this shows that, far from being an unthinkable last resort, the idea of using a nuclear weapon is just becoming an acceptable part of the political discourse in Israel, especially on the right.

And then there’s Netanyahu himself, who was increasingly corrupt and autocratic even before the Gaza genocide. Before October 7, his biggest political priority was to force sweeping structural changes to the Israeli government, which would strip power from the judiciary and concentrate it in the hands of the ruling Likud Party. Even writers like the Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, who’s certainly no radical critic of Israel, called his actions an “attack on democracy” that could create “an undemocratic Israel, a de facto autocracy.” (For Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, of course, autocracy is nothing new.)

There’s also the fact—widely reported in the Israeli press, but almost completely ignored in the U.S.—that Netanyahu personally backed Hamas for years, in order to undermine the Palestinian Authority, keep the West Bank and Gaza divided, and prevent a unified Palestinian state from ever emerging.

And since 2019, he’s been under indictment for three separate cases of corruption. As even the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman, another firmly pro-Israel writer, admits, many of his decisions are driven by a simple calculus: “he must stay in power to stay out of prison.”

One way of staying in power is by prolonging the mass murder of the Palestinian people. Another way is by launching attacks on Iran, extending Israel’s seemingly never-ending state of crisis even further. If he’s really lucky, and if Donald Trump is particularly stupid and reckless, Netanyahu may even be able to lure the United States in to attack Iran for him.

It’s usually a mistake to focus too much on Netanyahu as an individual, because Israel’s violence against Palestinians and others long predates him, and wouldn’t be solved just by removing him from office. But when we’re talking about nuclear weapons, he’s the man with his finger on the red button, and that’s not an encouraging thought. We already know he’ll commit war crimes and boast about it; how much further would he be willing to go?

Even a single nuclear bomb, dropped on a city in Gaza or Yemen or Iran, would be a horror. Hiroshima would be nothing by comparison, because modern nuclear weapons are capable of doing many times the damage. Hundreds of thousands of people would turn instantly to ash; many more would get cancer, radiation poisoning, and other debilitating health conditions in the weeks and months that followed. The air and water would be poisonous for years. But a so-called “regional” nuclear war would be devastating to the rest of the world too, far beyond the Middle East.

As the Nobel Prize-winning group International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War warns, “a nuclear war using as few as 100 weapons anywhere in the world would disrupt the global climate and agricultural production so severely that the lives of more than two billion people would be in jeopardy from mass starvation,” mainly because it would create enormous clouds of smoke and soot, send temperatures plummeting, and kill everyone’s crops. In other words, Israel—more so than North Korea, Iran, or any of the official “bad” countries—now possesses the ability to plunge great chunks of the world’s population into nuclear winter.

And in either scenario, a single bomb or many, Israel would not escape unscathed. Being in the near neighborhood of a nuclear blast, its people would also get cancer and radiation poisoning and dead crops and starvation, just like the people in whatever unhappy country received the strike. In the story of Samson, Samson dies too.

This nightmare scenario has to be prevented, and that means changing the political narrative. When we think about threats to humanity’s collective safety, nuclear weapons are near the top of the list, rivaled only by climate change and pandemic disease. But it’s not only North Korea’s nuclear weapons, or Pakistan’s, or Russia’s, or even the possibility that Iran might one day get them that we have to consider. Israel’s arsenal is also a threat. As we’ve seen, it’s actually one of the more worrying threats. For the Middle East and the wider world to truly be secure, Israel’s nuclear stockpile needs to be reduced and ultimately eliminated, just like all the others.

Fortunately, there are ways of doing that. For its part, Iranian officials have consistently said that what they want is a nuclear weapon free zone (NWFZ) covering the entire Middle East. In other words, the moment Israel denuclearizes, Iran would also abandon any ambitions for a nuclear bomb. So the main reason the supposed Iranian nuclear threat exists, and U.S. politicians are now debating whether or not to bomb Iran, is because the threat of Israeli nukes already exists. (For more on this, see the relevant chapter in The Myth of American Idealism.)

A nuclear weapon free zone is not a theoretical concept; both Africa and South America are already covered by NWFZs, and it works quite well. (There are no nuclear weapons in Africa or South America.) Israeli leaders could even use denuclearization as a bargaining chip, trading a reduction of X number of warheads for concessions from Iran or any of their other regional antagonists.

This would require changing U.S. politics first. For decades, across both Democratic and Republican administrations, the United States has consistently backed Israel with financial and military aid in all its conflicts, only occasionally using its vast leverage to stop Israeli leaders from doing something really disastrous. It’s always been an untenable situation, but in the era of the Gaza genocide, it’s indefensible.

If it really wants peace, the United States ought to position itself as a neutral diplomatic broker—neither an ally, nor necessarily an opponent, of Israel, Iran, or any other country in the region. Only then can it strike deals that benefit everyone and lead to actual peace and stability, which the Israel alliance has categorically failed to bring about.

Again, this isn’t theoretical. It’s precisely the stance China, a more sensible superpower in many ways, has taken in the Middle East. As a result, China was able to broker a historic normalization deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia in 2023. There’s no reason, other than the influence of myopic and war-hungry politicians like JD Vance or Chuck Schumer, that the United States can’t do the same.

Bizarrely, it’s the fringe elements of the Republican Party who seem to realize where things stand better than many of their Democratic counterparts. This week, national intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard took to Twitter with a video where she excoriated a “political elite and warmongers” who are “carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers,” and warned that the world is “on the brink of nuclear annihilation.” She seemed to be criticizing other factions within the Trump administration for their eagerness to strike Iran—perhaps even Donald Trump himself—and Trump reportedly became “incensed” and “expressed his disapproval to her personally” soon afterward. But Gabbard was entirely correct. So is Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, a libertarian whose ideas about other subjects are mostly horrible, but whose foreign policy positions are strangely good. Massie has introduced a War Powers Resolution in an effort to prevent the U.S. attacking Iran, which currently has 39 co-sponsors from both parties. And of all people, the disgraced former Representative Matt Gaetz has proposed Israeli denuclearization—or as conservative pundit Benny Johnson sums it up, “a dual disarmament deal, brokered by Trump, sealed with a Nobel Peace Prize.” Gaetz is loathsome in too many ways to count, and to anyone familiar with Trump’s record of bombing civilians in Yemen, the suggestion of giving him a Nobel is distasteful. But like Gabbard, Gaetz is right about this one issue. If President Deals could really pull such a thing off, he’d arguably deserve that Peace Prize more than Barack Obama or Henry Kissinger deserved theirs. At the very least, it’s better than what John Fetterman has in mind.

Right now, the United States is trying to defend a double standard, in which Israel can have all the nuclear weapons it wants—and talk threateningly about using them—but nobody else in the Middle East is allowed to make even tentative steps toward acquiring any. We’re now on the brink of a catastrophic war with Iran, all from trying to enforce that double standard. It’s not a sustainable situation. There are only two coherent stances: either Iran has just as much right to a nuclear weapon as Israel does, or neither country should have one. Of the two, the latter is obviously the safer option for everyone involved. There are practical and political obstacles to a nuclear-free Middle East, and they’re significant. But the consequences of not reaching one could be apocalyptic.

Source: Current Affairs

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