Under the tutelage of Donald Trump, the United States faces growing risks of a nuclear war. These risks could be manifested incrementally or all at once. They concern both intentional and unintentional conflicts.
World peace requires enforceable world law. However, in announcing a Department of Defense name-change to Department of War on September 5, 2025, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth promised “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.” The message was clear: Better an invigoratingly hot war than a disappointingly lukewarm peace.
Could there be any justification for reaching such a jumbled conclusion? Modern international rules were codified at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, and seventeenth-century anarchy is now morphing into something much more ominous. Such ongoing transformation owes to the increasing complexity of strategic decision-making in world politics. As a dynamic process, this transformation can be understood only with correspondingly complex thought.
The dangers of a nuclear war
The new Netflix movie A House of Dynamite offers a scenario in which the nuclear aggressor is not readily identifiable. In the real world, this scenario is entirely credible. As the number of nuclear powers increases, the plausibility of an “anonymous attacker scenario” must also increase. Even without verifiable expansion of nuclear weapon states, accelerating the arms race by American renewals of nuclear testing would open a Pandora’s box of potentially irremediable harms.
Since the 17th century, global stability has depended on a presumed balance of power. Still, this “balance” has never been anything more than a simplifying fiction. In today’s world of rapidly approaching chaos, longstanding security deficits are being exacerbated. In the Middle East, the strategies of a simplifying American president could have survival consequences for the State of Israel.
Among other things, during periods of competitive risk-taking, “unthinkable” weapons will become more “thinkable.” Most worrisome will be (1) new nuclear powers that operate with deficient systems of command and control; and (2) already-nuclear powers led by variously unstable decision-makers. Regarding Israel, this means a better understanding of nuclear war risks involving Pakistan and North Korea.
BOTH THE United States and Israel face prospects of global chaos. A core aspect of such chaos would be enemy irrationality. If Israel and the United States should come face to face with a jihadist state adversary that has access to nuclear weapons (e.g., Iran backed by North Korea), both countries’ critical deterrence postures could be undermined. These perils will be enlarged by Trump’s declared plan for a resumption of nuclear testing.
Considerations of adversarial irrationality and madness will need further scrutiny in Washington and in Jerusalem. In world politics, irrationality is never the same as madness. An irrational enemy is one that could at some point value intangible goals even more highly than national self-preservation.
For the United States and Israel, a mad adversary could be worse than an irrational one. This mad enemy would display no determinable preference ordering and not be subject to any calculable threats of military deterrence. Here, too, the incumbent president’s limited understanding of nuclear risk calibrations could lead the United States away from urgently-required policy revaluations. Prima facie, a prudent response to rapidly multiplying challenges ought not to be expected from Donald Trump’s Department of War.
For both Washington and Jerusalem, no choice between mad and irrational adversaries will be available. Whether the United States would do better to confront irrationality, madness or both will not be President Trump’s decision to make. On this predictable incapacity, Washington’s only sensible imperative should be to base all principal conflict-related decisions, especially nuclear war avoidance, on solid intellectual foundations.
WHAT SHOULD reasonably be expected concerning the rising risks of nuclear war? In brief, there will be no solutions from competent political authority; no reassuring answers in common sense. It is only by elevating science-based logic above a president who reasons by intuition that the United States and Israel could avoid irremediable harms.
Even though we humans ought to have become more civilized since the 17th century Peace of Westphalia, species survival has never been a linear process. Unless the United States and other states refuse to follow the incoherent policies of a president who has no attention to spare for serious reasoning, a nuclear war could rage until every sturdy flower of culture had been trampled. At that no longer unimaginable stage, millions could perish in paroxysmal quakes of primordial unreason.
There is one final conclusion. Since the seventeenth century, our anarchic world can best be described as a “system.” Events in any one part of this ungovernable world could affect what happens in some or all other parts. When deterioration is marked and begins to spread from one state to another, corollary effects would undermine the presumed infrastructures of balance. When deterioration is rapid and catastrophic, as would be the case following the start of unconventional war or unconventional terrorism, cascading harms would become unmanageable.
More than at any previous time in American history, this is a moment to prefer “tepid legality” to “maximum lethality.” This observation is not meant to minimize the importance of a strong nuclear deterrence posture, but rather to acknowledge that any acceleration of nuclear arms competition would dangerously undermine this posture. Ipso facto, any such weakening would negatively impact the State of Israel.
The writer is an emeritus professor of international law at Purdue University and the author of many books and scholarly articles on international law, nuclear strategy, nuclear war, and terrorism, including Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; second edition, 2018).