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By Dr. Nikolaos Stelgias
The question that haunts every serious analyst of the ongoing US-Israel war on Iran is no longer whether the conflict will escalate — it already has, dramatically — but whether it will cross the ultimate threshold: the use of nuclear weapons. Four weeks into “Operation Epic Fury,” that question has moved from the margins of strategic debate to its very centre.
The trigger for this shift was not a battlefield development but a political admission. A top adviser to Donald Trump — David Sacks — warned publicly that Israel may resort to using nuclear weapons as its war on Iran spirals out of control. Describing a battlefield situation in which Israel's air defenses are being overwhelmed and missile interceptors are running low, Sacks stated bluntly: "If the war continues for weeks or months, Israel could just be destroyed… and then you have to worry about Israel escalating the war by contemplating using a nuclear weapon, which would truly be catastrophic." This is not fringe commentary. It is a rare moment of candor from inside the American political elite.
The Arsenal No One Talks About
For decades, the world has treated Israel’s nuclear arsenal as an awkward secret — something everyone knows exists but few are willing to discuss openly. Israel has never officially acknowledged possessing nuclear weapons, yet it is widely understood among security experts that the country maintains a significant nuclear capability, with estimates suggesting roughly 80 warheads along with delivery systems including aircraft and ballistic missiles. The policy governing this arsenal is known as “nuclear opacity”: Israel neither confirms nor denies the existence of its weapons.
According to the Arms Control Association, Israel has approximately 90 nuclear warheads, with fissile material potentially available for around 200 more. Analysts believe Israel’s nuclear forces are designed for multiple delivery methods, including the Jericho series of ballistic missiles and submarines capable of launching nuclear-armed cruise missiles — providing a second-strike capability.
The Samson Logic
Strategic literature has long discussed what is sometimes referred to as the “Samson Option” — the idea that Israel could resort to nuclear weapons if faced with existential defeat. The logic is clear: if a state genuinely believes its existence is threatened, the pressure to escalate dramatically becomes far greater. The more a state interprets its wars as existential, the lower the psychological barrier to extreme escalation becomes.
This logic is now directly relevant. Iran has managed to strike both military and civilian infrastructure across Israel for two weeks, destroying key radar stations that sustain the US-Israeli security constellation in the area. Iranian planners are pursuing a long war to remove US presence from the region. But winning against such insatiable enemies poses Tehran its own profound security dilemma — a conventional victory could provoke a cornered Israel to turn the war nuclear.
Washington's Nuclear Paradox: The Option No One Names
But the Samson logic is only half the nuclear equation in this war. The United States, of course, possesses the world’s most formidable nuclear arsenal — and yet the question of American nuclear use is almost entirely absent from public debate. This silence is itself revealing. Trump justified Operation Epic Fury in sweeping terms: destroying Iran’s missiles, annihilating its navy, dismantling its proxy network — and above all, ensuring that Iran never obtains a nuclear weapon. “They will never have a nuclear weapon,” he declared. “This regime will soon learn that no one should challenge the strength and might of the United States Armed Forces.”
But the logic of nuclear coercion — using the threat of atomic force to compel a quick enemy surrender — does not fit the stated American posture. Washington is not seeking to nuclearise this conflict. It is seeking to prevent nuclearisation. The four consistent military objectives articulated by US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are: preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, destroying Iran’s navy, eliminating its ballistic missile arsenal, and destroying its capacity to produce more such weapons. These are conventional military aims, not a prelude to atomic escalation.
Yet the contradictions in the Trump administration’s case for war are multiplying. Trump claimed after the June 2025 strikes that Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated” — a claim not backed by US intelligence assessments, which found the strikes set the programme back by months, not years. The administration has since quietly pivoted back to the nuclear threat narrative to justify the current, broader campaign. The result is a war justified by a threat the administration simultaneously claims to have already eliminated.
There is also the deeper strategic irony that analysts are increasingly flagging. While Trump’s strikes will slow Iran’s atomic ambitions in the near term, analysts say the regime — which all signs suggest will survive — will now be even more determined to acquire a nuclear weapon. As Professor Ramesh Thakur of the Australian National University put it bluntly: “For Iran, nuclear weapons are now the only thing that will guarantee regime survival.” The war launched to prevent Iranian nuclearisation may, paradoxically, have made it strategically inevitable.
The Union of Concerned Scientists has warned that other governments observing this conflict — particularly those that may one day face unwanted American “attention” — will be unable to trust diplomatic processes or international institutions, and may choose to pursue security through the rapid development of their own nuclear weapons. The Iran war, in this reading, is not just a bilateral military confrontation. It is a global proliferation accelerant.
As for a nuclear strike to end the war quickly — a scenario sometimes whispered about in strategic circles — the answer is almost certainly no, and for structural rather than moral reasons. The US has no plausible nuclear target set against Iran that would produce a clean, war-ending result. Nuclear use would instantly collapse the Gulf coalition architecture, trigger a Russian and Chinese response, and hand Tehran the ultimate propaganda victory: confirmation that it was right all along to pursue the bomb. Trump has even floated the idea of deploying special forces to seize Iran’s stockpile of 60 percent enriched uranium — a deeply risky ground operation — rather than destroy it from the air, suggesting that Washington’s preferred tools remain conventional, however aggressive.
The nuclear option, for Washington, is neither on the table nor entirely off it. It is, like so much in this war, deliberately undefined — a shadow deterrent in a conflict already full of shadows.
Iran's Nuclear Wild Card
The nuclear dimension is not one-sided. Prior to the June 2025 strikes, Iran had produced approximately 440 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent U-235 — a level that can be quickly enriched to weapons-grade. The IAEA assesses that roughly 200 kilograms remain underground at Esfahan, enough material for approximately five nuclear warheads if enriched further. Tehran has not built the bomb — yet. But the knowledge, the material, and now the political incentive are all present. A successor regime of any political colour will inherit a strategic environment in which the case for nuclear deterrence has been dramatically strengthened, not weakened.
Most analysts still consider nuclear use highly unlikely. Nuclear weapons carry immense humanitarian and environmental consequences, and their use would almost certainly trigger global political and military fallout. A nuclear detonation in a populated area could cause deaths in the hundreds of thousands or even millions, while creating long-term environmental contamination and intergenerational health effects.
Yet “highly unlikely” is not the same as impossible. The architecture of deterrence is being stress-tested in real time. Israel is absorbing unprecedented damage. Iran is fighting for regime survival. The US has shown it will not restrain its ally. And somewhere beneath the Iranian desert, several hundred kilograms of near-weapons-grade uranium sit in canisters the size of scuba tanks, waiting.
The nuclear shadow over this war is not a metaphor. It is a strategic reality that the international community — paralysed and largely silent — has yet to seriously confront.
Illustration: Perplexity