Iran-Israel war goes nuclear.

There is more. An unintentional or inadvertent nuclear war between Israel and Iran could take place not only as the result of misunderstandings or miscalculations between fully rational leaders, but also as the unintended consequence of mechanical, electrical, or computer malfunctions. This includes hacking interference, and should bring to mind a corollary distinction between unintentional/inadvertent nuclear war and an accidental nuclear war. Though all accidental nuclear war must be unintentional, not every unintentional nuclear war would be generated by accident. An unintentional or inadvertent nuclear war could sometime be the result of misjudgments (both fundamental and seemingly trivial) about enemy intentions.

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“In war,” says Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz famously in his classic On War, “everything is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.” In fashioning a successful “endgame” to any future nuclear confrontation with Iran, it would be vital for Israel’s leaders to understand that this sort of crisis is about much more than maximizing any “correlation of forces” or missile-interception capabilities. It will be about imaginative intuition and variously antecedent notions of dialectical thinking. There are many complex details. As a nuclear war has never been fought, what will be needed in Jerusalem/Tel Aviv is more broadly intellectual guidance than Israel could ever reasonably expect from even its most senior military officers. In essence, ipso facto, there are no recognizable experts on fighting a nuclear war, not in Jerusalem, not in Tehran, not anywhere. It was not by accident that the first capable theoreticians of nuclear war and nuclear deterrence in the 1950s were academic mathematicians, physicists and political scientists. There remains one last point about any still-estimable risks of an Israel-Iran nuclear war. From the standpoint of Jerusalem, the only truly successful outcome could be a crisis or confrontation that ends with a reduction of Iranian nuclear war fighting capabilities andintentions. It would represent a serious mistake for Israel to settle for any bloated boasts of “victory” that are based only upon a one-time avoidance of nuclear war. Israel ought never to be taking existential risks with Iran if the best anticipated outcome could only be status quo ante bellum.

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Providing for Israeli national security vis-à-vis a still-nuclearizing Iran ought never to be a visceral or “seat-of-the-pants” obligation. Without any suitably long-term, systematic and thoughtful plan for avoiding a nuclear war with the Islamic Republic in Tehran, a no-holds-barred military conflict could sometime ensue. To prepare optimally for such a more-or-less-unexpected conflict, Israel should remain focused on stable nuclear deterrence,[9] a condition requiring continuously refined analytic distinctions between deliberate, inadvertent and accidental nuclear war.[10] On this essential focus, the greatest dangers will lie in fostering outcomes that neither party would actually favor.