With the Trump administration announcing plans for a revised nuclear strategy that emphasizes the potential use of shorter-range tactical nuclear weapons, this strategy will move American nuclear war “firebreaks” to more closely resemble Moscow’s already-worrisome nuclear thresholds. At the same time, Russia is aiding Iran in the development of an independent supersonic cruise missile technology; and President Trump has had nothing critical to say about President Vladimir Putin.
What is nuclear “firebreak theory” and how might divergent superpower definitions affect each state’s national security? Though such questions are rarely broadened beyond the United States and Russia, asymmetrical definitions of nuclear firebreak could also impact the security of other states in world politics. This is the case whether or not these “ordinary” states are superpower allies.
For further examination, multiple and overlapping implications will warrant disciplined scholarship. In the following assessment, queries will be focused on the state of Israel. The objective of these queries will be to decipher plausible connections between US/Russian theories of nuclear escalation and Israeli theories of nuclear deterrence. Here, pertinent connections could originate with effects of a selected firebreak theory on enemy state calculations (e.g., Iran, Turkey, Pakistan) or with such effects on Israeli military calculations. Whatever the origin, there would be foreseeable and unforeseeable interactions, some of which could immediately become synergistic. By definition, this means that the (1) “whole” firebreak theory result would exceed the sum of its “parts;” and that (2) the cause-and-effect dynamic would represent a continuous feedback loop.
Defining Nuclear Firebreaks
To begin, it will be necessary to define “nuclear firebreak” in operational terms. Prima facie, clarifying the precise meaning of nuclear firebreak (aka “nuclear threshold”) is pre-requisite to rational risk-taking postures. As all states coexist in an anarchic world system – i.e., the decentralized system first formalized at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 – any rational state must seek “escalation dominance” during evident security crises. Presumptively, because they would be conducted in that corrosive “state of nature” wherein all states must continuously dwell, such searches would be indispensable.
There is more. For “superpowers” (i.e., Russia and the US), a determinative security factor will be the glaring asymmetry in national nuclear doctrine. More specifically, as the two original superpowers maintain sharply divergent orientations toward “escalation dominance,” Washington could sometime conclude that Moscow was more willing to use theatre/tactical nuclear forces than might first have seemed plausible. Moreover, this dissembling conclusion could be sudden or incremental.
In extremis, Vladimir Putin’s expressed doctrine on theater nuclear forces could effectively lower his country’s operational threshold for nuclear weapons use. Though nothing scientific could be affirmed about such unprecedented matters (“sui generis” matters, in formal scientific terms), estimating probabilities could still prove gainful. For nuclear strategists and policy-makers, there would be variously associated obligations. At a minimum, for example, their estimated calculations of probability would always need to be dialectical.
When examined from the standpoint of deterrent threat credibility, Putin’s theatre/tactical nuclear forces are apt to appear more persuasive than his strategic nuclear forces. Among other things, this is because the retaliatory use of shorter-range/lower-yield nuclear forces would seem less “unthinkable” than initiating a strategic exchange. Significantly, such reasoning would be neither new nor contrived. Rather, it would remain consistent with almost four generations of self-reflective and self-refining strategic theory. It would remain focused not just on enemy threat capabilities (including comparisons of conventional and nuclear force destructiveness), but also on enemy intentions.
In world politics, nothing is more practical than good theory. Accordingly, for any meaningful assessments of US and Russian nuclear doctrine, adversarial capabilities and intentions should be examined in the widest array of their conceivable intersections. Some of the most problematic possibilities could be synergistic. This complicating development would render useful estimations more difficult to ascertain.
Superpower Differences on Firebreak Theory
Now, a truly basic question needs to be addressed: How did humanity manage to create such a bewildering strategic universe? During the Soviet Union’s last years, Moscow incorporated basic elements of nuclear “first use” doctrine into its codified strategic posture. Presently, it appears that such incorporation is continuing and that President Putin is actively re-committing to Soviet-era nuclear doctrine.
Simultaneously, United States “firebreak theory” rejects Russian assumptions that a first-use of theatre nuclear weapons would not necessarily breach a critical escalatory threshold. Ipso facto, Putin’s recommitment to Soviet-era strategic thinking could at some point become radically destabilizing. In a worst-case scenario, this ongoing recommitment would trigger a more-or-less symmetrical nuclear war.
In understanding these uniquely challenging matters, history will warrant a conspicuous pride of place. From 1949 onward, traditional Soviet nuclear doctrine minimized the singularly straightforward and seemingly prudent “firebreak” that distinguished between conventional weapons and nuclear weapons. In general, earlier Russian military doctrine assumed few escalatory differences between theater nuclear forces and high-consequence conventional forces. Included as conventional weapons in this original doctrine were both chemical forces and biological forces.
Historically, concerning military firebreak distinctions, the United States has held a different view. Always, for Washington, strategic doctrine has identified the true escalatory “firebreak” as one that distinguishes between conventional weapons and nuclear weapons of any sort. In contrast, Russian doctrine and posture have asserted that an escalation from non-nuclear weapons to theater nuclear weapons need not signal an existential or otherwise unacceptable threat to the United States. Per this assertion, such escalation would merely introduce one more warfighting option into an existing continuum of armaments. Ominously, this “seamless” Russian stance seemingly ignores any correlative apprehensions that could arise in Washington.
Going forward, the United States and its NATO allies should recognize such core doctrinal differences between Washington and Moscow, and also identify this recognition as an intellectual (not political) task. In the context of any future US-Russia competition for “escalation dominance,” the primary battlefield will be a cognitive landscape decipherable only by broadly capable thinkers. Figuring out this dense landscape should never be left to politicians or designated military specialists.
In consequence of their expected assessments, Russian and American strategists will find themselves confronted by accumulating challenges of bewildering complexity. In the most imaginable venues of prospective nuclear confrontation, both latent and already-visible hazards will be exacerbated by long-standing asymmetries of nuclear doctrine and by the corresponding interactions of asymmetrical nuclear doctrine. In addition, whether foreseen or unforeseen, such interactions could rapidly become synergistic.
There is more. Force-multiplying interactions would be ones wherein the recognizable “whole” of any designable armed conflict would be greater than the expected sum of its “parts.” These prospects concern not just arcane or minor points of academic deliberation, but (at least potentially) the elemental foundations of civilizational survival.
Implication of Superpower Firebreak Theories for Israel and the Middle East
To extend these investigations to Israel and the Middle East, all reasoning will apply beyond Russian and American “self” concerns. Prospectively, the states most likely to act on behalf of Iran against Israel would be Russia and/or North Korea. If Russia were ever willing to act as Iran’s nuclear surrogate (here, Iran would still be “pre-nuclear”), direct escalatory moves involving Moscow and Washington could ensue. There are no circumstances under which any direct Israeli first-moves against Russia or North Korea could be rational or cost-effective. This same assessment applies to both Pakistan and China.
To recapitulate, in all such existential security matters, relevant analyses would be speculative. At the same time, sans nuanced and dialectical analyses, there could be no way for Israel to make operational sense of doctrinal asymmetries. More particularly, certain useful Israeli assessments will need to focus on presumed escalation differences between Vladimir Putin’s “firebreak theory” and that of U.S. president Donald J. Trump. For Jerusalem, the point will not be to better understand these differences per se, but to extrapolate their generic implications for the Middle East.
An antecedent question presents itself: Does Trump’s nuclear threshold posture remain unchanged from traditional escalation doctrine; that is, does it continue to affirm the primacy of any escalation to nuclear engagement? Or does Trump’s escalation threshold more closely resemble the traditional Russian theory that “small” nuclear weapons (i.e., tactical or theater ordnance) need not necessarily signal intent to initiate a full-scale or no-holds-barred nuclear war?
To this point, American and Russian nuclear escalation doctrines have remained asymmetrical. But now, the implications of continuing such a crucial difference in orientation to firebreak theory could “spill-over” to Israel-Iran belligerent calculations. At some point, though glaringly counter-intuitive, a nuclear war could take place even while Iran remained non-nuclear.
Recently, with the United States plainly in mind, the Russian president declared significant “enhancements” to his country’s nuclear escalation doctrine. Now, there are additional reasons to worry about a nuclear war stemming from Russia’s ongoing aggression against Ukraine. Most worrisome is that Moscow could react more forcefully against the United States and/or Ukraine because of Volodymyr Zelensky’s widened gamut of missile-firing authority and because Vladimir Putin’s reaction could include Russian enlargements of theater nuclear forces. Inter alia, any such Russian enlargements would likely lower Russia’s discernible threshold of nuclear weapons use.
Nuclear Firebreak Theories and Imperatives of “Mind”
It’s time for a preliminary or intermediate summary: Everywhere on earth, nuclear war avoidance should be approached by national leaders as an inherently intellectual problem. For the United States, any such obligatory avoidance would reference a challenge that needs to be confronted in line with current strategic circumstances. During this relentlessly anti-intellectual “Time of Trump,” an era of American military incoherence, suggestions of scientific assessment and legal obligation are routinely brushed aside by the White House. All too frequently, these lethal dismissals are accompanied by policies of proud indifference to challenges of “mind.”
What could happen next? How might such retrograde American attitudes impact Israel? Most specifically, how could well-reasoned answers impact Israel’s escalation exposures to a nuclear war?
Today, prima facie, US national security problems are being framed by an incapable American president in gratuitously rancorous terms. Regarding plausible concerns of a nuclear war triggered by Russia’s grievously criminal behaviors in Ukraine, these frameworks are founded on militarily senseless appeals to a leader’s visceral preferences. They are not founded on what is most urgently needed. Among a growing assortment of evident deficits, the haphazardly constructed American security policies of Donald Trump are not being fashioned with any concern for the complex challenges of “escalation dominance.”
But let us assume that even the incumbent American president could at some point find himself in a “nuclear firebreak” crisis with Vladimir Putin. Should Washington seek to persuade Moscow of America’s willingness to “go nuclear” according to Russian-defined policy thresholds or should the United States proceed “asymmetrically” according to its own declared firebreak? And how might Washington’s decision affect wider considerations of world politics, especially Israel’s national security?
For the United States and its Israeli ally, it’s high time for fewer clichés and more intellection. Regarding their indispensable responsibilities for world peace and global stabilization (these goals can never be achieved by ordinary politicians of any ideological stripe), capable strategic thinkers will need to focus on two always-pertinent and closely-interrelated criteria of military danger: probability and disutility. This first dimension concerns issues of presumed likelihood. The second deals with matters of presumed suffering.
Nuclear Escalations and Future Wars
In principle, at least, “Cold War II” represents a comprehensive systemic context within which contemporary world politics could be meaningfully categorized and systematically evaluated. Current “Great Power” dispositions to war, however ascertained, offer more-or-less auspicious analytic backgrounds for still-wider nuclear interactions. How could this opaque context be suitably tempered or decently modified?
One core difficulty will express unprecedented irony. In a future war between Russia and NATO, US President Trump could conceivably urge American support for the aggressor (Putin) rather than the victim (Zelensky). In late summer 2026, US and NATO officials even stated that Putin may launch attacks against Poland or the Baltic states to create a face-saving off-ramp from the irrational war against Ukraine.
In all these matters, only right questions could lead to right answers. Planning ahead, what explanatory theories and scenarios could best guide the United States and (correlatively) Israel in foreseeable interactions with North Korea, China, Iran, Pakistan and/or Russia? Before answering this question with adequate conceptual clarity, “correct” answers will depend on a more closely-considered awareness of relevant intersections and expected overlaps.
Going forward with an informed understanding of Russian leadership escalation firebreaks, US strategic decision-makers will have to consider one overarching assumption: This is the always-troubling expectation of adversarial irrationality. Depending on the outcome of any such consideration, determined judgments will be vastly variable and variably urgent.
A primary “order of business” for both American and Israeli strategic planners will be reaching accurate conclusions about a specified adversary’s ordering of preferences. By definition, only those adversaries who would value national survival more highly than any other preference or combination of preferences would be acting rationally. Could this category include Putin’s Russia? What about other prospective adversaries? What about China, North Korea, Pakistan and a more-nearly nuclear Iran? And what would be the impact of asymmetrical nuclear firebreaks accepted by the world’s two superpowers?
For scholars and policy-makers, additional basic questions will need to be considered. First, what are the operational meanings of relevant terminologies and/or vocabularies? In the formal study of international relations and military strategy, decisional irrationality is never the same as madness. Nonetheless, certain residual warnings about madness ought still to warrant serious US and Israeli policy consideration. This is because both “ordinary” irrationality and full-scale madness could exert comparable effects on an adversary state’s national security decision-making processes.
There is nothing here for the intellectually faint-hearted. This is not an issue about “attitude” (the analytically empty term Trump uses to describe what is allegedly most important to securing diplomatic “deals”), but science-based “preparations.”
For the United States and (derivatively or correlatively) for Israel, anticipating these ascertainable effects could display existential importance. In such considerations, word selection could have tangible implications. In normal strategic parlance, “irrationality” identifies a decisional foundation wherein national self-preservation is not summa, i.e., not the highest or ultimate preference. This “idiosyncratic” preference ordering could have significant policy impacts in Jerusalem as well as Washington.
There is more. An irrational decision-maker in Moscow need not be determinably “mad” to become troubling for strategic policy planners in the United States and Israel. Such an adversary would need “only” to be more prominently concerned about discernible preferences or values than its own collective self-preservation. Normally, though any such national behavior would be unexpected and counter-intuitive, it would not be unprecedented or inconceivable. Moreover, identifying the specific criteria or decipherable correlates of such preferred alternatives could prove dauntingly subjective.
Whether different decision-making adversaries were deemed irrational or “mad,” US and Israeli military planners would still have to input generally similar intra-crisis calculations. The analytic premise would likely be advanced that a particular adversary “in play” might not be deterred from launching a military attack by threats of retaliatory destruction even where such threats would be credible and massive. Such failure of US and/or Israeli military deterrence could include both conventional and nuclear retaliatory threats.
In fashioning nuclear strategy vis-à-vis nuclear and not-yet-nuclear adversaries, US and Israeli military planners will have to include a mechanism to determine whether the pertinent foe would more likely be rationalor irrational. Operationally, this means calculating whether this enemy would value its collective survival (whether as a sovereign state or organized terror group) more highly than any other preference or combination of preferences. Always, this early judgment would need to be based on defensibly sound analytic and intellectual principles. This judgment should never be affected by what particular analysts might “want to believe.”
Inadvertent Nuclear War versus Accidental Nuclear War
Most concerning should be avoiding a nuclear war caused by miscalculation. In striving for “escalation dominance,” competitive nuclear powers caught up with bewildering complexities in extremis atomicum could find themselves embroiled in an inadvertent nuclear exchange. Ominously, any such catastrophic outcome could arise suddenly and irremediably, and even though neither side had wanted such a war.
One problem, in this regard, would be asymmetrical views on what constituted the critical nuclear threshold or firebreak. If the Russian side believed the critical threshold was between theatre and strategic nuclear weapons and the American or Israeli side believed this threshold was between conventional and nuclear weapons of any size or range, there would arise certain mutual and extraordinarily large decisional risks. These risks would surface without any historical precedent.
In facing off against each other, even under optimal assumptions of mutual rationality, American and Russian presidents would have to concern themselves with all possible miscalculations, errors in information, unauthorized uses of strategic weapons, mechanical or computer malfunctions and assorted nuances of cyber-defense/cyber-war. Even if Putin were judged to be entirely rational, Europe could descend rapidly into some form or other of nuclear conflagration. If this prospect of an unprecedented chaos were not sobering enough, it would also be reasonable to expect that the erasure of a once-universal nuclear taboo would heighten the likelihood of nuclear risk-taking in other parts of the globe, especially the Middle East (Israel, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, etc.).
There is more. Even a still non-nuclear Iran would have access to radiation dispersal weapons and to conventional rockets for use against Israel’s nuclear reactor at Dimona. An Israeli nuclear war with a not-yet-nuclear Iran could arise if already- nuclear North Korea, a close ally of Iran, were willing to act as Tehran’s military surrogate against Israel. Such willingness, in turn, would be impacted by variously presumed expectations of Russia and/or China.
Figuring all this out represents a survival-determining challenge for Jerusalem. In mid-November 2024, Vladimir Putin announced that an already-nuclear state willing to transfer nuclear weapons to an enemy of Russia (i.e., from the United States to Ukraine) would be regarded as a “co-belligerent” of Russia’s foe. This announcement declared that a “state of war” would exist with the United States as well as with Ukraine and that this condition of belligerency would allow Moscow to employ nuclear weapons as needed. Ominously, such employment would be consistent with recently-underscored Russian firebreak theory.
For Israel, there is conspicuous irony and opportunity wrapped up in Moscow’s forceful declaration. If Russia is entitled to use nuclear weapons against non–nuclear Ukraine because that adversary (allegedly) has a cooperating nuclear ally in Washington, Israel could be similarly entitled to use nuclear weapons against Iran. Among other things, this is because the Iranian adversary has a nuclear enabling ally in Pyongyang. In this scenario, Vladimir Putin’s change in national nuclear doctrine vis-à-vis the United States and NATO would be “turned on its head” and used against Iran if that Islamic regime were to accept nuclear military assistance from North Korea. For Jerusalem, the overriding rationale of any nuclear weapons use should be deterrence ex ante, not revenge ex post.
What about the Trump-brokered “Abraham Agreements?” There was never any convincing reason to believe that these politically contrived accords could reduce the tangible risks of a nuclear war in the Middle East. On the contrary, the intended effect of these agreements to weaken Shiite Iran is already backfiring in certain unforeseen and force-multiplying ways. Moreover, Israel never had any credible reasons to worry about entering into war with Bahrain, Morocco or the United Arab Emirates.
Bottom line: For Israel, the Abraham Agreements “put an end” to nonexistent hazards. Simultaneously, they enlarged Sunni national hopes (e.g., Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia) to join the “nuclear club.” Credo quia absurdum, said Roman philosopher Tertullian: “I believe because it is absurd.” Under no circumstances did “Abraham” create any meaningful national security benefits for Israel.
Going forward, one joint US-Israel obligation will be to assess whether a nuanced posture of “pretended irrationality” could enhance Jerusalem’s nuclear deterrence posture. On several earlier occasions, it should be recalled, Donald Trump openly praised the untested premises of such a posture. Ipso facto, such presidential praise was never warranted on intellectual grounds.
US and Israeli enemies continue to include both state and sub-state foes, whether considered singly or in their multiple forms of possible collaboration. Such forms could be “hybridized” in different ways between state and sub-state adversaries. In dealing with Washington, each recognizable class of enemies could sometime choose to feign irrationality.
This could represent a potentially clever strategy to “get a jump” on the United States or Israel in any still-expected or already-ongoing competition for “escalation dominance.” Naturally, any such calculated pretense could fail, perhaps calamitously. Cautionary strategic behavior based on serious conceptual thinking should always be the US and Israeli “order of the day.” Indeed, nothing ought to be more important or more obvious.
Rationality, Irrationality and Chaos
There is more. On occasion, enemies of Israel or the United States could “decide,” wittingly or unwittingly, to be irrational. In such circumstances, it would become incumbent on strategic planners to capably assess which basic form of irrationality – pretended or authentic – was actually “in play.” Thereafter, these planners would need to respond with a dialectically-orchestrated and optimally counterpoised set of plausible reactions.
By definition, any instance of enemy irrationality would value certain specific preferences (e.g., presumed religious obligations or personal and/or regime safety) more highly than collective national survival. For the moment, for America and potentially Israel, the prospect of facing an irrational nuclear adversary is most worrisome with regard to Russia’s war in Ukraine. Apropos of such apprehensions, it is unlikely they could ever be suitably reduced by formal treaties or any other traditional law-based agreements.
For the United States and Israel, it would be worth remembering seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes’ classic warning in Leviathan: “Covenants, without the sword, are but words….” If the enduring problem of global anarchy were not daunting enough for strategists and decision-makers in Washington or Jerusalem, it is now further complicated by the effects of any consequent chaos.
Further conceptual clarifications remain in order. As a start, chaos is not the same as anarchy. Chaos is more than anarchy. We have all lived with anarchy or the absence of global central government since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, but we have yet to descend into any full-blown chaos.
Even in the midst of anarchy (unlike chaos), there can be law. Since the 17th century, international law has functioned according to an always-unpredictable “balance of power.” For an American president who would be conversant with the Constitution, international law could be made manifest as an integral part of United States law. Accordingly, when the incumbent president actively undermines international law, he is acting contrary to both normative systems, national (domestic/municipal) and international. The fact that these that systems are overlapping and inter-penetrating now goes widely unacknowledged.
Managing Risks of a Nuclear War
How should the American president proceed to manage potential nuclear war risks over Ukraine, a decision with potential and derivative consequences for Israel? If Vladimir Putin were ever to escalate military options in the Ukraine war to include tactical/theatre nuclear forces, the United States “firebreak” interpretation of this escalation could be starkly different from what Russia had expected. Though Moscow would not likely view this regional escalation as existentially threatening to the United States, Washington (US presidential “idiosyncrasies” notwithstanding) could calculate otherwise. In short order, there could then take place an American escalation to more sequentially destructive military involvements. Ultimately, this could include strategic nuclear weapons.
How likely is such a catastrophic misinterpretation and outcome? As the scenario is sui generis, it is impossible to answer any such question scientifically. Accordingly, any suggestion of predictability by political or military “experts” should be taken as plainly contrived and instantly dismissible.
In regard to crisis decision-making, the American side would need to consider how its nuclear weapons could be leveraged in any plausible nuclear war scenario, optimally by non-use. More specifically, a rational answer could likely never include the operational use of such weapons. The only relevant questions for a US president’s strategic planners should concern the calculable extent to which an asymmetrical US threat of nuclear escalation (from theater/tactical to strategic nuclear weapons) could be simultaneously credible and prudent.
All this implies a primary obligation for the United States and also Israel to focus on incremental enhancements to nuclear deterrence posture and the development of a wide range of nuanced nuclear retaliatory options. The rationale of any such development would be the counter-intuitive understanding that credibility of nuclear threats could vary inversely with perceived levels of destructiveness. In certain foreseeable circumstances, this means that successful nuclear deterrence could depend on nuclear weapons that are ascertainably low-yield or “small.”
Sometimes, in fashioning a national nuclear deterrence posture, counter-intuitive strategic insight would be “on the mark,” Earlier, when Donald Trump reminded his North Korean counterpart that though both had a “nuclear button,” his button was “bigger,” the American president displayed near-total unawareness of disciplined nuclear deterrence. In certain nuclear crisis circumstances, however unique, threat-based credibility could vary inversely with threat-related harms. At this moment in history, such an understanding could also be indispensable to Israel’s future wars, wars for national survival in which an adversary would still be non-nuclear, but wherein nuclear threats could still prove purposeful.
There is more. A US president or Israeli prime minister should always bear in mind that any national nuclear posture ought to remain focused on war prevention, not punishment. In all still-identifiable circumstances, using a portion of its available nuclear forces for vengeance rather than deterrence would miss the most overriding point; i.e., to fully optimize national security obligations.
Nuclear Deterrence and Selective Nuclear Disclosure
Israel, like the United States, will have to rely on a broadly multi-faceted doctrine of nuclear deterrence. In turn, like its already-nuclear Israeli ally, specific elements of this “simple but difficult” doctrine (see von Clausewitz On War), should immediately be rendered less “ambiguous.” This complex and finely nuanced modification will require an even more determined focus on prospectively rational and irrational enemies, and include both national and sub-national foes. This means eschewing any “seat-of-the-pants” attraction to each and every new strategic development or eruption, and (instead) to derive or extrapolate all specific policy reactions from pre-fashioned and comprehensive strategic nuclear doctrine.
There remains at least one critical observation. It is improbable but not inconceivable that certain of America’s and Israel’s principal enemies would sometime be neither rational nor irrational, but mad. While irrational decision-makers could already pose special problems for nuclear deterrence – by definition, because these decision-makers would not value collective survival more highly than any other preference or combination of preferences – they might still be susceptible to alternate forms of dissuasion.
As with rational leaderships, these decision-makers could still maintain a fixed, determinable and “transitive” hierarchy of preferences. This means, at least in principle, that “merely” irrational enemies could be successfully deterred. This point warrants further analytic study, especially when even more sweeping Russian aggressions could become de rigeur.
By definition, mad or “crazy” adversaries would have no calculable hierarchy of preferences and not be subject to any strategy of American or Israeli nuclear deterrence. Although it would likely be worse to face a mad nuclear enemy than “just” an irrational one, neither Washington nor Jerusalem would have any real choice in defining enemy preferences. Like it or not, the US and Israel will need to maintain, perhaps indefinitely, a “three track” system of nuclear deterrence and defense, one track each for identifiable adversaries that are presumptively (1) rational (2) irrational or (3) mad.
This will not be a task for narrowly political or intellectually adverse strategic decision-makers. Among other things, it will require exhaustive assessment of plausible synergies, some of them dissemblingly subjective or “idiosyncratic.” For the most plausibly unpredictable third track, special plans would be needed for potentially indispensable preemptions and for variously overlapping efforts at ballistic missile defense.
Law and Strategy: The Essential Reconciliation
From the standpoint of international law, it is always necessary to distinguish “preemptive” attacks from “preventive” ones. Preemption is a military strategy of striking first in the expectation that the only foreseeable alternative is to be struck first oneself. A preemptive attack, therefore, is launched by a state that believes enemy forces are about to attack. A preventive attack, on the other hand, is not launched out of any concern for “imminent” hostilities, but on account of reasonable fears concerning longer-term deteriorations in military balance.
In a preemptive attack, the length of time by which the enemy’s action is anticipated is presumptively very short. In a preventive strike, the anticipated interval is considerably longer. A related problem here for the United States, Israel and certain other states is not only the practical difficulty of determining “imminence,” but also that delaying a defensive strike until imminence is more precisely ascertainable could produce or hasten existential harms.
A resort to “anticipatory self-defense” could be nuclear or non-nuclear and be directed at either a nuclear or non-nuclear adversary. Any such resort involving nuclear weapons on one or several sides would prove catastrophic. It follows that core decisions to launch high-lethality preemptions should rest on intellectual and law-based foundations.
There are further nuances. America and Israel are not automatically made safer by having only rational adversaries. Even fully rational enemy leaderships could commit errors in calculation that would lead them toward nuclear confrontation and/or nuclear/biological war. Also, there are related command and control issues that could impel a rational adversary or combination of rational adversaries (both state and sub-state) to embark on risky nuclear behaviors. Even the most pleasingly “optimistic” assessments of enemy leadership decision-making could never reliably preclude manifestly catastrophic outcomes.
An Orderly Summation
In the end, differences between Russian and American views on nuclear “firebreak” theory may not prove policy-determinative in destabilizing parts of the world, but they will nonetheless warrant analytic attention in Jerusalem as well as Washington. As the Russians are conspicuously re-cycling Soviet-era doctrine on tactical nuclear weapons, updated iterations of nuclear threshold will need to be constantly fashioned and meaningfully reassessed. Among other things, such prospective strategic examinations should focus on the deterrence implications of lower yields and shorter ranges in adversarial military planning.
If Putin should sometime prove willing to cross the conventional-tactical nuclear firebreak on the assumption that such a move would not invite any reciprocal cycle of nuclear escalation with the United States, the American president could face a genuinely tragic choice: total capitulation or nuclear war. Though it would be best for the United States to avoid ever having to reach such a fateful decisional moment, there could still be no guarantees of “mutual assured prudence” between Washington and Moscow. In essence, the growing perils of asymmetrical nuclear doctrine will need to be countered incrementally, intellectually and without narrowly political interference.
Looking ahead, American and Israeli security will hinge on fostering vital “perceptions of credibility,” Regarding Russia’s nuclear doctrine, only dedicated analytic minds could suitably distance Planet Earth from World War III. Taken together with Russia’s illegal war against Ukraine, Vladimir Putin’s crisis escalation posture blurs critical conceptual lines between conventional and nuclear conflict and creates potentially existential hazards for the United States and Israel. The only rational response from Washington and Jerusalem should be to understand these hazards as unsustainable and to plan appropriately for their efficient minimization or complete removal.
For the United States and Israel, the threat posed by asymmetrical nuclear firebreaks could impact the likelihood of both deliberate and inadvertent nuclear war. The central situation of asymmetrical nuclear firebreak theory cannot be remediated by international treaty or unilateral fiat, but it still deserves a place of subject matter primacy in competent strategic planning. For Jerusalem, inter alia, this means an accelerated obligation to convince its Russian-backed adversary in Tehran that any use of North Korea as a nuclear surrogate could invite an Israeli nuclear reprisal. Ironically, Jerusalem would find compelling support for such a policy position in Vladimir Putin’s basic nuclear stance vis-à-vis the United States. By this stance, Putin has declared that any nuclear-state ally of Ukraine that allows its nuclear assets to be used against Russian territory would be considered by Moscow as Ukraine’s co-belligerent.
Whatever the results of the Fall 2026 elections in Israel, that country’s prime minister should pay enhanced heed to the implications of nuclear firebreak theory. Special points of concern should be the Mecca Pact between Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan; the incremental transformation of Syria into a Turkish proxy; incoherent US presidential threats against Oman; Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia; US-Saudi strikes on pro-Iran militants in Iraq and the optimal deployment of next-generation submarines from Germany.
Finally, though rarely mentioned as an enemy of Israel, already-nuclear Pakistan deployed troops to Saudi Arabia in March 2026 to blunt missiles and drones launched from Iran. Even if Jerusalem succeeds in keeping Iran non-nuclear, Islamabad will still loom as a potential nuclear threat to Israel and its chosen firebreak theory (more or less derived from identifiable superpower firebreak theories) could then become all-important. In this connection, though primarily to equalize its tangible ordnance disadvantages vis-à-vis nuclear India, Pakistan has already accepted a nuclear warfighting concept of nuclear deterrence.
For Israel, Iran is not the only source of nuclear war concerns. There are credible scenarios in which a “defeated” Iran would hasten and enlarge latent nuclear threats from other adversaries. To best identify, decipher and manage these prospective threats, strategic thinkers in Jerusalem should pay special attention to US and Russian nuclear firebreak theories and the assorted ways in which these theories could impact Israel’s national survival.
In the final analysis, these ways include (1) military threats originating among Israel’s state and sub-state enemies, and (2) Israeli military threats directed at the country’s state and sub-state foes. Regarding the second category of nuclear firebreak impact, relevant threats would factor in presumed adversarial orientations and be examples of either preventive or preemptive war. From the standpoint of authoritative international law, only a preemptive war could qualify as a lawful expression of “anticipatory self-defense.”
