Madness, Sanity and Nuclear War in the Middle East
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 2,296, August 7, 2024
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: In world politics, it would seem obvious that sanity is better than madness. Upon reflection, however, the risks of nuclear war could be as high or higher among “sane” adversaries. For Israel, a country smaller than America’s Lake Michigan, a failure to understand this counterintuitive truth could hasten the onset of unprecedented hostilities with Iran. Most ominously, it could mean Israel’s eventually suffering an Iranian nuclear attack.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, Israel’s “Iran nuclear problem” is not principally about enemy leaders who might go mad. The more worrisome existential problem for Israel is sane, rational enemies who experience miscalculation, poor reasoning or mechanical/electrical/computer malfunction. Other nuclear hazards that could coincide with Iranian sanity and rationality include accidental firing, unauthorized launch and coup d’état.
While it is true that decisions made by a mad Iranian nuclear adversary could have catastrophic consequences for Israel (even, indeed, by a mad pre-nuclear Iran), the likelihood of such decisions is lower than what could be expected of a sane and rational Iranian enemy. Because a nuclear war would be a unique event, such a likelihood cannot be expressed numerically or statistically but is still supportable by analytic argument.
Logic-based calculations suggest that the dispersion of nuclear dangers among multiple Iranian decisionmakers would be more perilous for Israel than the threat posed by a single authoritative Iranian leader who is mad or irrational. Here, madness and irrationality would include Iranian decisionmakers driven by jihadist theologies and principles.
In all circumstances, whether the greater danger to Israel is Iranian decisional madness or Iranian decisional sanity, Jerusalem must stay mindful of a possible “black swan” event. This need will be much greater if Iran is allowed to become a nuclear weapons state. Even at this late date, Israel should remain preemption-ready.
For Jerusalem, there are also time-urgent geopolitical considerations. Iran is approaching nuclear weapons capability concurrently with the acceleration by its jihadist proxies – Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, Islamic Jihad and Fatah – of terrorist crimes against Israel. Iran, which is steadily expanding its ties with Russia, China and North Korea, repeatedly declares its genocidal intentions toward Israel. And Israel is a state with no “strategic depth.”
Prima facie, Middle Eastern geopolitics are a system. Potentially related scenarios of superpower conflict may be dense or even opaque, but they remain relevant. Among other things, the continuously changing iterations of “Cold War II” could embrace international conflicts that involve Israel with North Korea, China, India or Pakistan. Such a dangerous embrace could be sudden or incremental.
For Israel to proceed purposefully, some primary and subsidiary distinctions need further clarification. One concerns the vital differences between a deliberate or intentional nuclear war and a nuclear war that is unintentional or inadvertent. Without considering this distinction, little of value can be determined about the likelihood of a nuclear conflict.
The greatest dangers of an unintentional nuclear war are decision-making errors, underestimations or overestimations of enemy intent, or simple miscalculations. As classical military theorist Carl von Clausewitz observed, “Everything is very simple in war, but even the simplest thing is difficult.”
There are other nuances to be considered. With regard to growing nuclear war risks in the Middle East, no concept could prove more clarifying than “synergy”. Synergistic interactions are those wherein the whole of nuclear war risk effects is greater than the sum of its parts. Unless such interactions are accurately assessed and evaluated in time, Israeli leaders could either underestimate or overestimate the cumulative impact of superpower competition on risk-taking. This suggests circumstances in which Russia and the United States (and perhaps China) struggle for escalation dominance in extremis – that is, during high-value crisis situations.
In the United States, allegedly reliable safeguards have been incorporated from the beginning into all operational nuclear command/control decisions. These safeguards do not apply, however, at the presidential level. In 1976, to gather informed policy clarifications regarding madness, irrationality and nuclear war, I reached out to retired General Maxwell D. Taylor, a former Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. General Taylor sent a handwritten reply in which he concluded: “As to those dangers arising from an irrational American president, the only protection is not to elect one.”
In today’s convulsive world order, General Taylor’s succinct 1976 warning takes on even greater meaning. Based on both ascertainable facts and logic-based derivations, it is reasonable to assume that if an American president were to exhibit signs of emotional instability, irrationality or “mad” behavior, he/she could still lawfully order the use of American nuclear weapons. More worrisome, an American, Russian or Chinese president could become emotionally unstable, irrational or delusional, but not conspicuously exhibit such liabilities.
In all matters concerning nuclear war in the Middle East, there exist no histories from which to draw inferences. This is a fortunate absence, of course, but it still stands in the way of rendering reliable conflict predictions. The irony of this situation is obvious and problematic. Still, whatever the science-based obstacles to reliable prediction in this explosive region, Israel should approach the problem as an intellectual rather than a political challenge.
It must always be remembered that a nuclear war in the Middle East could occur as a spillover effect of nuclear war in Europe. To protect Israel’s survival, an American president should avoid strategic postures that neglect potential synergies with Russian, Chinese and/or North Korean postures. North Korea is a nuclear ally of Iran that built a nuclear reactor for Syria – the Al Kibar reactor, which was destroyed by Israel’s Operation Orchard on September 6, 2007. In law, that operation was a permissible act of anticipatory self-defense.
Strategist Herman Kahn wrote in the early 1960s that in the aftermath of a nuclear conflict, “survivors might envy the dead”. This is true whether the catastrophe was intentional or unintentional – in other words, whether it was spawned by base motives or by miscalculation, computer error, hacking, or a weapon system or infrastructure accident. Whatever else can be determined by Israel’s national security decisionmakers, they should understand that nuclear strategy is ultimately a high-stakes struggle between intentionality, uncertainty and calamity. Even if both Israel and a newly nuclear Iran were to undertake “sane” risk-taking measures during a crisis, the cumulative effect could still be mutually unwanted and “mad.”
For Israel, the only successful outcome of protracted military conflict with Iran would be a tangible reduction of Iran’s nuclear war-fighting capabilities and intentions. Optimally, this point will be understood and operationalized while Iran is still pre-nuclear.
Once it is at war with either a nuclear Iran or a pre-nuclear Iran with a willing nuclear proxy (e.g., North Korea), Israel could be mortally wounded by rational decisions made by sane enemy leaders. Even now, though Iran is not yet nuclear, it could use radiation dispersal weapons against the Jewish State and/or launch non-nuclear missiles at Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor.
In world politics, the most significant risks of nuclear war are not those of madness or irrationality. They are the cumulatively catastrophic risks of sane and rational decisions. For Israel, this means the worst-case Iranian nuclear war scenario is not the popular narrative of mad leadership in Tehran, but one of sane adversaries operating in opposition to sane adversaries in Jerusalem.
In this bewildering world order, the accumulated risks of a mutually sane search for escalation dominance could include nuclear war. Israeli leaders should be wary of mad or prospectively mad Iranian leaders, but even more wary of the nuclear consequences posed by sane and rational Iranian decisionmakers.
