Yves here. Even though Rob Urie is correct to be very worried about the potential for nuclear escalation, he makes a key assumption which I believe leads him to considerably over-estimate the odds of the US (or its Israel attack dog) resorting quickly if at all to that option. Of course, we are led by recklessly stupid people who think using a “tactical” nuke is no biggie.
Yes, it seems to be true that the US cannot destroy all or even most of Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities, underground missile caches and launch silo, and underground factories. Ted Postol has come to the same conclusion as Scott Ritter, cited below.
However, destruction of these facilities is not an objective but a pretext. The objective is regime change. If the Collective West succeeds in that aim, it can simply have its pet new government give access to all these bunkers and let the new masters decide what to do about them.
Indeed, there is a very big argument against destroying these bunkers, even if we could. Iran has a lot of missiles, including hypersonic missiles, a type of weapon the West has yet to put into production. The Collective West is extremely short of missiles. What better way to replenish our kit for the purpose of Project Ukraine and Project Get China than take a big cache from Iran? Recall (and I do not know by what process) that a lot of Syria’s weapons allegedly made their way to Ukraine.
So I am sticking with my early bet: that the real plan is to pound Tehran, as Israel did with Beirut. It was the toll on civilian life and infrastructure that led Hezbollah to back off on its campaign in support of Palestinians. Sure, the US and Israel will also pound on Natanz, Fordow and Isfahan. Even if the Israel plus its NATO friends could destroy them, that would not achieve regime change. Failure to do what is deemed to be sufficient damage could thus justify further attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure.
Another factor to consider in the immediate trajectory is that Western outlets are admitting that Israel is taking body blows from Iran, such as the very-pro Israel Telegraph three days ago in Iran’s high-tech onslaught punches deadly holes in Israel’s air defences. The Washington Post has said that Israel will only be able to intercept Iranian missiles for another 10 to 12 days, not that it is doing all so well even now.
One would think that the evidence that the war has not gone according to US and Israel plans would lead to quick US entry, and not just quick US threat display.
However, US/Israeli self-serving propaganda is leading to official belief in a variant of a familiar narrative, “Iran is just about to run out of missiles. From Larry Johnson:
I am reliably informed by someone with access that Trump and his team believe, based on Israeli intelligence, that Iran is running low on missiles and will soon exhaust their supply. This is utter nonsense. Iran has been building and stockpiling missiles for more than twenty years. These missiles are stored safely underground, out of the reach of Israeli and US bombs.
In other words, the US is likely to be overconfident yet again over what it can achieve via conventional means. I suspect we’ll have to see the US and Israel encounter more cold doses of reality before they decide whether to go the nuclear route.
And a not-quite-as-fast-as-some-fear escalation path increases the odds of Iran play the “closing the Strait of Hormuz” card, which might get Mr. Market to knock some sense into Trump’s head.
By Rob Urie, author of Zen Economics, artist, and musician who publishes The Journal of Belligerent Pontification on Substack
As this essay is being written, military supply ships, aircraft carriers, and refueling aircraft are being sent by the US to West Asia as the US appears ready to formally enter the war that it started with Iran. With nuclear weapons being the only option left for busting Iran’s bunkers (details below), their ‘pragmatic’ use for bunker busting would cross every nuclear red-line that an increasingly resistant world has put forward. Once the nuclear line is crossed, it is a matter of days or weeks until human life on the planet ends. The escalation logic is inexorable.
Despite press assurances in the West that the attack on Iran is an Israeli affair, the fingerprints of the US can be found all over the plot. As the initial attack was ongoing, the US Navy attempted to shoot down Iranian missiles as Iraq, under the control of the US, closed its airspace to Iranian fighter jets. Donald Trump’s claim that ‘he knew everything’ is because the US is uniquely responsible for the attack. At this point, claims that ‘it was Israel’ are quaint.
Graph: Over recent decades, Israel has been the largest recipient of US foreign aid by a significant measure, with most of it aid being used to buy weapons and materiel. Lest this remains a mystery, the US gives Israel money to buy weapons from the US, and Israel does so. In other words, the US launders payments to private military producers by running them through Isreal. Source: Council on Foreign Relations.
Scott Ritter offered that the US has already deployed its largest conventional bunker buster, the thirty-ton air-fuel bomb, which failed in Yemen against less deeply buried bunkers. This leaves the US with nuclear weapons as the only escalatory step available. However, nuclear weapons represent a boundary which once crossed, can’t be uncrossed. The Russians have promised no first strike. But they have also warned that once the boundary is crossed, they will respond in kind.
Remarkably, the list of nations in West Asia that have been unilaterally attacked by the US since 2003 matches both the list of nations in line for US regime change operations leaked by retired US General Wesley Clark in 2003, as well as most of the nations that form the Zionist fantasy of Greater Israel. Given that Donald Trump was not in the government in 2003, the current US policy was set in motion twenty-two years ago.
This last point requires further explanation. The reason why Donald Trump’s foreign policy so closely resembles Joe Biden’s foreign policy is because presidents don’t decide US foreign policy. Consider, the attacks on both Iran and Russia were conceived and put into action at some time prior to the present. The scuttlebutt in the establishment press keeps landing on eighteen months ago. Joe Biden was president eighteen months ago, not Trump.
Logically, the Western attack on Iran required 1) a will to attack and 2) the capacity to attack. Neither alone would motivate the act. Will without capacity lacks capacity. And capacity without will lacks will. Israel possesses will but not capacity. And the US supplies the capacity with full understanding of what it will be used for. This makes the US a participant in Israel’s actions. American prosecutors regularly prosecute those who provide criminals with the weapons they use in their crimes.
Ominously, it was the US that cancelled the sixth meeting between the West and Russia to discuss peace in Ukraine. The cancellation followed a reported enthusiastic phone call from V. Putin to Donald Trump. Mr. Putin undoubtedly detected a mismatch between what Mr. Trump is saying and the facts as they can be determined. More to the point, the Western effort to assassinate Mr. Putin while attacking Russian nuclear assets looks very much like the current Western effort to decapitate the Iranian regime with its attack on Iran.
Despite the tone of the phone exchange, Mr. Putin is reported to have offered to mediate between Israel and Iran, and Mr. Trump is reported to have been open to the suggestion. That this is taking place as the US is moving military personnel and equipment into place in what is increasingly looking like the launch of an American war across West Asia, suggests that Mr. Trump is saying one thing while doing another.
According to the informed speculation in the US, the initial attack on Iran was intended to produce a result akin to the dissolution of Syria. Decapitation strikes were supposed to break Iran’s will to fight as US bombs destroyed what is alleged to be Iran’s ‘nuclear program.’ With the decapitation effort ongoing, the West hasn’t yet been thwarted. But Iranian missiles landing in Tel Aviv wasn’t supposed to happen. As it currently stands, Iran can land hypersonic missiles inside Israel at will.
The pretense that Donald Trump is being sandbagged by neocons into prosecuting wars that he doesn’t want is wearing thin. His ‘tweets,’ or whatever one calls the technology this week, that proclaimed his role in the airstrikes launched against Iran, suggest that he is in junior high school, a boy, likely American, and is desperate for recognition from his fellow humans. What they didn’t suggest is that he understands the power that he wields to destroy human existence.
Where this lands with respect to Iran is that Russia has lots of business with Iran, it has a soft defense agreement with Iran, and unless the Russians have suddenly ‘gone American,’ Russia understands that the US is coming for Russia if it (US) prevails in Iran. Mr. Trump has demonstrated that he is a willing foot soldier in the Western imperial project. The strategic inflexibility that this program implies will end the world.
To the US – Israeli claim that Iran must end its nuclear weapons program, the US intelligence services have repeatedly stated that such a program does not exist, Meanwhile, Israel is known to possess 75 – 300 nuclear weapons that have never been declared, and are therefore illegal. The point is that the US has no ideological or moral qualms regarding the possession of nuclear weapons. Differences emerge over who it is that possesses them.
With the wars in Ukraine and West Asia now merging, the economic basis of the conflict is being revealed. The US is trying to destroy BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). Iran joined BRICS in 2024, and isn’t represented in the acronym. Three of the BRICS nations possess nuclear weapons— Russia, India and China. An economic bloc (BRICS is a soft bloc) that possesses nuclear weapons makes it a geopolitical bloc.
Ritter also identified a complication in the Iranian predicament when he pointed out that Iran’s policy of near-enrichment violated thresholds that the US will not tolerate. However, under existing nuclear agreements, Iran appears to be within its rights to possess the enrichment program that the US is objecting to. Nevertheless, and despite the fact that Iranian negotiators had already agreed to the Western level of enrichment, US proxy Israel attacked Iran without warning or provocation.
Ritter’s point is important. But given that Iran is already in compliance under existing agreements, it devolves to might makes right, which is an operational principle, not a legal principle. With Israel’s illegal cache of undeclared nuclear weapons, the US conspicuously couldn’t care less about nuclear proliferation, else its primary target would be Israel. With might-makes-right as its operating principle, the rest of the world can comply with the US or destroy the US. What it cannot do is to negotiate for peace.
In history, the first time that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned that Iran would have a nuclear weapon ‘within a matter of days’ was thirty years ago. He has been wrong for thirty years. All of the US intelligence services agree that Iran 1) has no nuclear weapon and that 2) Iran has no program to develop nuclear weapons. Mr. Netanyahu, like Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine, is in power because of his skill at doing the bidding of the US. In the present case, he is simply lying.
Ugly American Lindsey Graham, with 82 of his ugly American brethren and sistren in tow, Senators all, is now demanding the complete destruction of Iran. Why? Iran has no nuclear weapons and it has no nuclear weapons development program. If Mr. Graham truly disagrees, why doesn’t he hash this out with the intelligence agencies? Between them, the bet here is that the intelligence agencies have collected and considered the evidence, whereas Mr. Graham hasn’t.
For those who recall George W. Bush’s ‘Iraq WMD’ fraud, this is well-trodden territory. Mr. Trump’s innovation is to forgo seeking cover from the difficult-to-pin-down ‘international community.’ Implied is that the North – South divide has redefined the relevant boundaries. In attacking Iran, and through it, BRICS, the Western pretense of fealty to ‘the rules-based order’ has given way to the West being the premier rogue international actor.
With the CIA the likely lead in the permanent government’s move to accelerate WWIII in West Asia, Donald Trump seems to have made his peace with the agency. For the American people, this is truly unfortunate. While he revoked security clearances for the rogue elements who directly interfered with his 2020 electoral prospects, he left the operational core unmolested. This is why Genocide Joe is followed by Genocide Don. Carnival barkers for empire, all.
That the tactic of using military drones that had been hidden in anticipation of future use took place mere weeks apart in both Russia and Iran, considered in conjunction with decapitation efforts against both regimes, suggests that a singular geopolitical strategy / actor unites the efforts. That Russia has had an agreement with Iran to build between two and eight nuclear reactors for civilian nuclear purposes complicates the geopolitics.
Image: Donald Trump and Miriam Adelson. Ms. Adelson contributed $150 million to Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign in return for favorable treatment of Israel. Debate has raged over whether Trump would honor the commitment. The answer is in. With military equipment being rushed to West Asia, the Zionist genocide remains intact. To be clear, this refers to genocide by Zionists, not genocide against Zionists. Photo source: Middle East Eye.
Donald Trump’s subterfuge by publicly pronouncing ongoing negotiations with Iran as preparations for attacking it were underway will likely turn out to have been too-clever-by-half. The race in future negotiations with the US will be over which party screws the other first. The logical end of this, where communication becomes a matter of competing lie-bots. is particularly unconstructive given the prevalence of nuclear weapons. The limited utility of fake negotiations— they only work once, suggests that maybe real negotiations would have been the better strategy.
That Miriam Adelson paid Donald Trump $100 million to attack Iran, and that Mr. Trump is dutifully doing so, illuminates a brave new way-of-doing-business for the US. Joe Biden performed this same service for only about 4% ($4 million in campaign contributions) of Mr. Trump’s take. Possibly the US wishes to set up a ‘marketplace’ for launching wars for foreign interests. This could be DEI for politicians, bringing equity to the commission of genocide.
As unpleasant as doing so may be under the circumstances, the point must once again be made that Donald Trump’s actions with respect to Israel and Iran date to decisions made by the permanent government of the US in the 1990s – early 2000s. While it would be heartwarming to imagine that Adelson wasted her money on a deal that had already been made, Donald Trump either was never in on the deal, or he lied to his MAGA devotees about wanting peace.
With little ability to affect US foreign policy in the near term, the American people have some decisions to make. Donald Trump and his advisors have been astonishingly reckless with respect to nuclear weapons to date. The Western attack on Russian nuclear assets would have ended humanity were Russia guided by less steady hands. Should Trump use nukes in Iran, no human will get a good night’s sleep for the remainder of human existence.
There is no electoral solution to the problem of Trump, just as there was no electoral solution to the problem of Biden. The permanent government in the US is impervious to electoral outcomes. Donald Trump may have imagined that by firing Federal workers through DOGE, the permanent government would be diminished. But the workers he fired weren’t, with a few exceptions, making policy. The result is that Trump is acting the puppet while believing himself to be the puppeteer.
If they care about living for more than the next few hours, Mr. Trump’s foreign policy handlers should warn him against using nuclear weapons in Iran. While in his lizard brain, Trump may believe that using nuclear weapons will increase the size of his penis (peace through strength) , what doing so would in fact accomplish is to turn it into stardust. Everyone who controls nuclear weapons has the same power that Trump has. Why we need to learn this lesson the hard way is a bit of a mystery.
I just wonder if this war with Iran is Trump’s attempt to secure a legacy. Peace negotiations in Ukraine aren’t proceeding as quickly expected, and tariffs alone won’t onshore industry to America. So maybe fixing the issue with regime change in Iran is something Trump wants to be remembered for.
Most of the “Non White World” is hoping for “US Regime Change”.
Something to think about .
That deranged message from Huckabee was the tell. Trump desperately wants a Democratic party-esque smart war or something like the first three weeks of Iraq. He is ranting about awesome power, and yeah, the ability to send missiles and destroy a building hundreds of kilometers away is the power of the gods. Iran can do that too. Then he has surrounded himself with baubles of past glory. He desperately wants to be a statue on horseback eating a big mac.
Besides legacy, he’s running into the flaw all deeply orientalist institutions have. They can’t see the other as equal or comprehend when they reach near peer status. My gut is the Pentagon who would be blamed first is the only institutional opposition.
Trump’s big plan is to build a business empire throughout the ME for himself and his sons and son in law. For this he needs a friendly and functioning Israel (to give him depopulated Gaza) and a cowed and theoretically friendly Arab world. It’s all grotesquely amoral and what I find astonishing is that he is allowed to start phone companies and other money making pitches while serving as president. The corruption is so utterly up front.
The fact that nobody seems to be objecting to this no doubt reflects the corruption of our ruling class in general. Cue Michael Hudson.
No healthy society could make someone like Trump president and the fact that he is in this position is likely is due to his opponents, the Dems, also being a party of grifters at this point. The frog is boiled.
Attacking Iran will fail and the longer it goes on the less there will be left of an Israel to support. Whereas if he simply told Israel to stop then the Iranians would stop as well. This war has already been lost. Someone should tell Trump.
I call it war porn. The over machismo that we are all powerful and other countries will quake in their boots seeing our manhood. According to our propagandists we have superior weapons of all stripes (we know in reality we have defective, poorly performing, over-priced machines designed to fight two wars ago), we claim to have superior intelligence on everything (other than we basically keep getting everything wrong). The MSM is telling us, because they’re supposed to, that the Irani government is ready to collapse.
Based on all this, I can’t tell you how many people I know are living in a altered reality that if we drop one bunker busting bomb Iran’s nuclear program is effectively done and a pro-US government will magically appear. Have they learned no lessons.
What in some ways confuses me, or makes me wonder, is what the Saudis are saying to Trump? They must be aware that Iran as a nuisance is way better than utter chaos.
Very good.
Totally irrational policy.
The only way to reverse this is in the UK, France and the USA, not Iran etc.
Time to pierce the Proxy Veil?
Yves. S: And a not-quite-as-fast-as-some-fear escalation path increases the odds of Iran play the “closing the Strait of Hormuz” card, which might get Mr. Market to knock some sense into Trump’s head.
Which of course is precisely the argument that those advisers who are competing to take the most extreme position on crushing Tehran (and other enemies of the West) and winning this war now will be using on Trump and other pols to advocate for a nuclear strike/strikes against Iran ASAP to settle things.
That said, I’d guess the odds favor the scenario where, as you say, the US/Israel don’t escalate to nukes quickly.
But then again, I’m an optimist, and these are astonishingly stupid people, and psychopaths/seekers of power are, anyway, usually short-term thinkers by definition.
Given Trump’s stupidity and recklessness, and the fact that Dr. Strangelove lives on at the heart of the US deep state, this bleak assessment of the prospects for our immediate future is all too plausible, as Ritter and others have warned, Yves’s hopeful assumptions of rationality on our part aside. It was dumb luck we avoided all-out nuclear war in 1962, when we had leaders with a measure of sanity on both sides. All the sane and intelligent leaders are on the other side now. Once we take our nuclear genie out of the bottle, there may be no going back, as up the escalation ladder we go. It will give new meaning to Trump’s “winning”. Pity there will be so few outside the bunkers to share in the triumph.
Well, back in 2016 he did say we’d get tired of winning: perhaps this is what he meant.
This statement seems to dangle the possibility of decisions on the part of average US citizens that does not exist. To wit,
I agree completely with Rob’s assessment of the situation as it has developed, so to my limited understanding there is no political solution to this deep-seated problem. We cannot vote our way out of it. There was zero recognition by the state of the largest nation-wide demonstration in history (from what I’ve read) — a total vote of non-confidence — but perhaps it is naïve to have expected one. The house of government itself is rotten, a host almost completely consumed by a parasitic organism. The infected ‘deep state’ and its funders will likely respond violently to any attempts at extirpation. So what do we do? A national strike? What other strategies are available? I hope I’m not violating NC site policies by asking these types of open-ended questions (for which I have no answers), but I have a real sense of doom here.
I’m not sure that regime change and the end of Iran’s nuclear programme are separate objectives: indeed, one can be seen as a by-product of the other. I think it’s clear that two things are true for Iran, (1) it has the capability to move relatively quickly to an operational nuclear capability but (2) it has not yet made a decision to do so. This puts Iran in the same category as about half-a-dozen other states in the world that have a dormant nuclear capability. For Israel and the US, an Iran which was bloodied and humbled and gave up its nuclear programme would be the best outcome, and certainly better than an inconclusive war with tremendous destruction on both sides that might or might not physically destroy the components of the programme. This could well leave something similar to the current regime in control, but no longer with nuclear aspirations.
This may be what the Israelis are trying to do though obviously destroying actual components of the programme or bringing down the regime would be welcome if either could be accomplished. I suspect that they have drawn the wrong conclusions from the defeat of Hezbollah. With Hezbollah they managed to win not by wiping out its forces (it still has sizeable forces available) nor by destroying most of its arsenal, but by destroying its command and control system and killing large numbers of key leaders and commanders. The knowledge that this could only have been done if the organisation were thoroughly penetrated by the Israelis was another body-blow. Then Hezbollah threw in the towel and stopped bombarding Israel. In addition, non-Shia Lebanese opinion was highly critical of Hezbollah for drafting the country into an unnecessary war at the behest of Iran (which forbad Hezbollah to use its most advanced weaponry), and the Shia community itself was angry because it had borne the brunt of the destruction, especially in the South. (Beirut, in fact, was largely untouched;: I was there a couple of weeks after the bombing, and the damage in the Shia suburbs near the airport was not visible from the road.)
None of this is likely to be true for Iran. All accounts suggest that even the anti-government forces are rallying round, and the Iranians can continue to bombard Israel longer than the Israelis can destroy their missiles. Relatively quickly this will become clear, and it’s hard to know what will happen when the Israelis realise they have miscalculated. Getting the US involved is not in itself a military solution: it just escalates the problem. Even if, somehow, US capabilities could destroy Iran’s nuclear programme, Iran could destroy Israel, and I don’t think anyone in Washington would see that as a fair swap.
I don’t think there is any chance of using nuclear weapons, not least because the only ones the US could deploy quickly would be free-fall gravity bombs launched by aircraft flying very near to their targets. Even leaving aside the tremendous political consequences, the aircraft would have to survive the Iranian AD system, and would have to be based in a neighbouring country, to which nuclear weapons would have to be moved. That’s not something you can conceal, and it takes a lot of time and effort. (It would be too dangerous to base them in Israel). Nuclear weapons no matter how exciting, are a distraction from the wider issues, and I think it’s unfortunate that people are obsessed with them. There was no danger of nuclear armageddon after the Ukrainian attack on Russian nuclear-capable aircraft, and I said so at the time. Now, the incident is slipping out of the popular memory.
There are many who dispute your claim, that Iran could move to an operational nuclear weapons program quickly, starting with the US intelligence community. Let me turn the mike over to Larry Wilkerson, who knows a thing or two about this topic. This is from a machine-generated transcript which I tidied up but did not check closely v. what Wilkerson said, so forgive any small glitches. From Dialogue Works:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiYieN38leo
Yes, and I have made the same points myself, that a functioning nuclear weapon is very different from a critical mass of uranium. Everything goes at the speed of the slowest, and the most difficult problem is probably the physical construction of the warhead. Some commenters here have suggested that Iran is more advanced than the CIA estimate (such estimates are always cautious and hedged around with caveats) but if you measure the time from taking a political decision to having a working weapon, then three years may well be reasonable.
But that doesn’t really change the argument; There’s a lot of evidence that Netanyahu felt pressed to act now, before US-Iranian talks could achieve anything, and the exact timescale of nuclear development doesn’t really change the question. I don’t think anyone has ever suggested that Iran would have the capability tomorrow.
“the only ones the US could deploy quickly would be free-fall gravity bombs launched by aircraft flying very near to their targets.”
What about submarine-launched nuclear missiles? Are the vessels carrying them too far in the Indian or Pacific oceans, or even in European waters?
“The knowledge that this could only have been done if the organisation were thoroughly penetrated by the Israelis was another body-blow.”
At least from the initial stages of the Israeli offensive, it looks as if Iran is also thoroughly infested by Israeli covert agents — hell, they even set up quite a number of makeshift factories of drones with entire stores of spare parts, as well as remote-controlled missile launchpads.
The errors of reasoning and bad faith argumentation are operating on a spectacular dimension in your comment.
Just a few problems. There is no evidence of an Iran, or an Iranian regime with ‘nuclear aspirations’. Iran was party to the JCPOA, from which the United States withdrew unilaterally in 2018. A pretty unanimous view, outside the neo-con crazies, regarded JCPOA as a viable path a denuclearized Iran. Yet another path would be a denuclearized Middle East. A conference of 2019 for the establishment of a nuclear weapons free Middle East, had Iran as party. Israel, non-signatory to the NPT and a state that operates outside the purview of international law, was absent. Iran has used every opportunity to prove it has no intention of acquiring a nuclear weapon — to rational observers anyway — who are conspicuously missing in the collective West. In retrospect, this willingness to be party to international law, norms and conventions on the part of Iran has proven to be a critical mistake, because the United States and Israel routinely pi$$ on those things.
Wilkerson has observed, given past behaviour of outlaw states like the US, a democratic Iran would be even more willing to acquire nuclear weapons, than the Islamic Rebpulic, with its religious compunctions.
That’s a straight-up apologia for regime change operation. While we are at it, one is long overdue in Washington, Tel Aviv and London.
No one brings up the subject of nuclear war because it’s ‘exciting’ but because the risks are terrifically high, real and terrifying. However, gaslighting people by risk diminishment would be right in character for an apologist of western supremacy.
‘Getting the US involved is not in itself a military solution: it just escalates the problem.’
Getting the US involved was always the plan. Consider. The Israelis do not have the specialized bombs or the capability of destroying those underground nuclear sites. And yet they launched this war saying that that was their aim. So they bombed some nuclear sites in Iran when, much to their amazement, they realized that they could not hit those underground facilities. And it was then that Netanyahu pleaded for the US to take part in this war with the needed capabilities. Having, behind the scenes, Trump’s agreement to come into this war, Netanyahu then switched demands so now it was regime change in Iran. Let us not forget that there are no people capable of taking power in Iran and it is certainly not going to be the Shah’s son nor the MLK. But if you want to know the Israeli/US aim for Iran, just look at Syria. Certainly the Iranians know this which is why they are not backing down.
Unfortunately, I don’t believe this is correct. The USA has air-launched cruise missiles and submarine-launched cruise missiles which can carry nuclear warheads, not to mention ICBMs. The whole point of nuclear deterrence is that these weapons are in a constant state of readiness.
Under the INF treaty the warheads were removed from cruise missiles, but Trump withdrew from the INF in 2018.
Trump-Bibi mind meld going nuclear is as immoral and illogical as the decapitation attempt last week. Actually much more!
There is sound logic to a “no first use” doctrine!
If Trump – Bibi open that box it will give others the idea!
Suppose Kim Jung Un decides B-2 at Anderson in Guam, or F-22 on Okinawa are like fictitious Iranian nukes…..?
That said in 1990 I served in a logistics headquarters while US executed “on the fly” deployment plans to go “liberate” Kuwait.
A lot of busy staff people and a lot of packing and palletizing….. ordering ships and aircraft to carry things and people.
Computers are much faster today, if the info is good.
Once you use a bunker buster, you remove the mystique and reduce future options.
If said bunker buster doesn’t bust that bunker, or deep underground lair, then what next?
The threat and ominous music only go so far.
The bunker busters do not bust bunkers by themselves. You need to fly big planes over the target, and then back.