“It is through death that there is time….” Emmanuel Levinas, God, Death and Time (1976)
The threat is not mysterious. In the final analysis, it is an existential threat, one pertinent to our entire planet. If this threat is not met with well-reasoned and timely counter-measures, all other threats will become moot.
A nuclear war – any nuclear war – would resemble an incurable disease. All serious “therapies,” therefore, must lie in prevention. On appropriate methodologies, dedicated thinkers will require core focus on science-based[1] analyses. Under no circumstances should a survival-centered species place its fate in the hands of political leaders. This stark imperative applies as much to citizens of the United States as to those of Russia, China or North Korea.
Nuclear war is not a contrived peril. Taken in its entirety, humankind faces literally unique responsibilities. To meet these responsibilities, carefully designated thinkers will need to augment dispassionate calculations with realistic imagination. Among other things, these thinkers should accept a primary subject-matter distinction. It would concern variously tangible differences between an intentional nuclear war and a nuclear war that is inadvertent.
Should this essential distinction be overlooked or undervalued, the United States and other major countries would impair their capacities to best identify national security choices. All too suddenly, such an impairment could become intolerable or irremediable. This is the case whether the impairment pertained to a single country, to several countries or to all countries.
During any pre-conflict analyses of nuclear war, multiple impediments to gainful calculation would accumulate. Because there has never been an authentic nuclear war (Hiroshima and Nagasaki don’t “count”), verifiable probabilities of such a war would be inaccessible. In logic and mathematics, true probabilities must stem from the discernible frequency of relevant past events. Ipso facto, where there have been no such events – that is, where risk-taking crisis situations were unprecedented – nothing could be extrapolated with predictive reliability.
There is more. For engaged strategic thinkers, there will be seemingly self-contradictory calculations. Not every oxymoron must be unreasonable. In world politics, good news can sometimes be bad news. Though humankind is fortunate to have avoided a nuclear conflict thus far, such good news also signifies something “bad.” In scientific terms, scholars could predict little or nothing about the likelihood of a nuclear war.
In the United States, capable scholars will need to decipher optimal strategies for averting nuclear conflict and for minimizing the harms of any such conflict that could not be prevented.[2] This confounding calculation would vary according to presumedenemy intentions and the presumed prospects of accident, hacking intrusion or decisional miscalculation. Linguistically, when considered together as overlapping categories of a cumulative “whole,” the risks of an unintentional nuclear war would best be described as “inadvertent.”
Precise language will be imperative. Any instance of accidental nuclear war would be inadvertent, but not every inadvertent nuclear war would be the result of an accident. Conceptually, all such examples would represent complex elements of a single overriding security problem; i.e., preventing a nuclear “final epidemic.”[3]
Generally, these are not matters for disposition by educated laypersons or even military professionals. Nuclear war prevention ought never to be approached by security thinkers and planners as a preeminently political or tactical issue. Informed by serious historical understandings and by consciously-refined analytic capacities, US strategists should continuously prepare for a large variety of intersecting factors. Even under the best conditions of modern science, this variety would appear multi-dimensional and daunting, but it should never be considered insoluble.
The principal hazards of nuclear war avoidance calculations can be understood only in light of conceivable intersections between them. All such critical intersections would be more-or-less plausible, a conclusion based on various expectations of “informal logic” (not actual history) and on the knowledge that mutually-reinforcing intersections could become “synergistic.” Close attention to anticipated nuclear synergies – intersections in which “whole” conflict outcomes would be greater than the simple sum of identifiable “parts” – would be de rigueur.
In dealing with nuclear war risks involving North Korea, Russia, China or Pakistan,[4] no concept could prove more important than synergy. Unless synergistic interactions were correctly anticipated, the United States could underestimate the total impact of any considered nuclear engagement. The flesh and blood consequences of such underestimations could defy both dispassionate analytic imaginations and any post-war justifications.[5] Worrisome examples of such underestimations should highlight Russia, whose grievous aggression against Ukraine could at some point escalate beyond manageable operational controls.
These issues and scenarios have been longstanding concerns for the present writer. I have been publishing about complex nuclear war issues for over fifty years. After four years of doctoral study at Princeton in the late 1960s, long an intellectual center of American nuclear strategic thought (recall Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer), I began to consider adding a modest personal contribution to a newly-evolving nuclear literature. By the late 1970s, I was cautiously preparing a new manuscript on US nuclear strategy. At that early stage of a still-emerging strategic discipline, I was especially interested in US presidential authority to order the use of American nuclear weapons.
From day one, I was assured in official (DoD) circles that reliable safeguards had been incorporated into all operational nuclear command/control decisions, but that these safeguards could not be applied at the presidential level. To a young scholar searching optimistically for nuclear war avoidance opportunities, this ironic disjunction didn’t make any sense. What next? I was inquiring, after all, on “primal” Princeton grounds of Einstein and Oppenheimer.
It was high time for gathering suitable explanations. I reached out to retired General Maxwell D. Taylor, a former Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. In rapid response to my query, General Taylor sent a comprehensive handwritten reply. Dated 14 March 1976, the distinguished General’s letter concluded ominously:”As to those dangers arising from an irrational American president, the only protection is not to elect one.”
Until 2016 and “Trump I,” I had never given extended thought to this response. Today, during “Trump II,” General Taylor’s 1976 warning takes on more conspicuously urgent meanings. Based on pertinent facts and logical derivations (called “entailments” in philosophy of science), Americans should reasonably assume that if this current president were ever to exhibit accessible signs of emotional instability, irrationality or delusional behavior, he could still order the use of American nuclear weapons. He could do this officially, legally and without any reasonable expectations of nuclear chain-of-command “disobedience.”[6]
There is more. Any US president could become emotionally unstable, irrational or delusional, but not plainly exhibit such liabilities. What would happen then? A corollary question should also be brought to mind:What precise stance should be assumed by the National Command Authority (Secretary of Defense, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and several others) if it should ever decide to oppose an “inappropriate” or “irrational” presidential order to launch nuclear weapons?
Could the National Command Authority (NCA) “save the day,” informally, by acting in an impromptu or creatively ad hoc fashion? Or should indispensable preparatory steps already have been taken earlier? Should there already be in place certain explicit and effective statutory measures to (1) assess the ordering president’s reason and judgment; and (2) countermand the presumptively inappropriate or wrongful order?
Under US law, Article 1 (Congressional) war-declaring expectations of theConstitution aside, any presidential order to use nuclear weapons, whether issued by an apparently irrational president or by an otherwise incapacitated one, would have to be obeyed. Ironically, to act otherwise in such dire circumstances would be illegal. In essence, any chain-of-command disobedience would be impermissible on its face.[7]
In principle, US President Donald Trump could order the first use of American nuclear weapons even if this country were not under nuclear attack. Further strategic and legal[8] distinctions would need to be made between a nuclear “first use” and a nuclear “first strike.” These would not be trivially nuanced distinctions. On the contrary, they would be readily determinable and massively consequential.
While there exists a clear and substantive difference between the two options, it is a difference that candidate Donald Trump fully failed to understand during the 2016 presidential debates and again, during the 2024 campaign. Should we now take for granted that he has become more reassuringly familiar with the bewildering expectations of national nuclear doctrine and strategy? Regarding a president who has said “the moon is part of Mars” and “nuclear weapons could be used against hurricanes,” such enhanced familiarity is anything but self-evident.
What happens next? A fully coherent and comprehensive answer will be needed in reply to the following question:
If faced with any presidential order to use nuclear weapons, and not offered sufficiently appropriate corroborative evidence of any actually impending existential threat, would the National Command Authority be: (1) be willing to disobey,[9] and (2) be capable of enforcing such expressions of disobedience?
In such unprecedented war circumstances, all binding decisions could have to be made in a compressively time-urgent matter of minutes, not hours or days. As regards as any useful policy guidance from the past, there could be no scientifically valid way to assess true probabilities of possible outcomes. This is because all scientific judgments of probability – whatever the salient issue or subject – must be based on the determinable frequency ofpertinent past events.
In matters of nuclear war, there would be no such events. This is a fortunate absence, of course, but one that could stand in the way of reliable national security decision-making. The irony is both obvious and problematic. Whatever the scientific obstacles, the optimal time to prepare for such vital US national security contingencies is now.[10]
Regarding Iran, though that country remains non–nuclear after suffering defeat by Israel in June’s 12-day war, future crises with Israel and/or the United States could draw in North Korea as a nuclear proxy. Faced with manifold uncertainties about Kim Jung Un’s willingness to push the escalatory envelope, Washington could find itself confronted with grave choices between variously dissembling capitulations and chaotic nuclear warfighting.[11] Vastly more dangerous choices would arise if Vladimir Putin ever decided to act directly on behalf of Tehran.
To avoid being placed in such a limited-choice strategic dilemma, US President Donald J. Trump should understand that displaying a larger national nuclear force need not bestow any tangible bargaining advantages. On the contrary, especially if ostentatious, such display could generate unwarranted American overconfidence and related forms of decisional miscalculation. In such unfamiliar, many-sided and sui generis matters, size would matter. Counter-intuitively, size could actually vary inversely with national influence and power.
In searching for “escalation dominance” during crises, the United States, its allies and its adversaries could find themselves caught up in unique circumstances. To navigate such perplexities of world politics, even an inadvertent decisional outcome could include nuclear war. Here, whatever the cause, there could be no meaningful “winner.”
There is more. In the paroxysmal aftermath of an unintended nuclear conflict, an American president who had earlier downplayed “preparation” in strategic negotiations (“attitude is more important than preparation” said Donald J. Trump on several occasions) could question an adversary’s presumed strategic calculations. By then, however, it would be too late. As survivors of a once-preventable nuclear conflagration, the stunned American leader might ask himself in vain: Were we ever properly schooled in such mind-taxing and esoteric problem solving?
The only promising “therapies” for nuclear war should be sought in science-based strategies of “disease avoidance.” Ultimately, however, macrocosm would follow microcosm. This means herculean intellectual efforts are already needed to keep separate the pathologies of individual human beings from the diseases of individual states.
The likelihood that such efforts could succeed is not predictable by logic or mathematics (because they would be without historical precedent[12]), but there is still no other rational course. To focus instead on traditional hopes of nuclear arms control or disarmament could never succeed.We should recall, in these matters, that in the continuously inglorious history of humankind, every major weapon system manufactured was subsequently used.
What’s left to assess in this inherently brittle genre? At this point, promising opportunities lie only in determined elevations of mind over matter. In any final reckoning, nuclear war avoidance will need to be regarded as an intellectual problem,[13] one that could never be solved by politicians, business tycoons,[14] oligarchs or pundits.
Just as the Manhattan Project required staggering intellectual capacities to create “The Bomb,” saving humankind from the bomb’s creation now calls for extraordinary applications of “mind.” Any still viable chances to prevent a nuclear war must emerge from perspectives that soar far above the dynamics of ordinary politics or adrenalized commerce. Clocks can be clarifying and even predictive, but still not point correctly to “better times.”
In the prevention of nuclear war, ideas of “time” should be layered together with certain ideas of death. At the most obvious level, the chronological dimension of nuclear war avoidance is one of “clock-time.” The true proximity of a “final epidemic” is already an issue of “how much time do we have left.”
During the summer of 2025, the United States and Russia escalated nuclear threats to Cold War levels. At the end of July, Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, publicly reminded US President Donald Trump of Moscow’s “dead hand” system of automatic nuclear retaliation. In essence, this system optimizes “time” in furtherance of credible nuclear deterrence.
Reciprocally, on the very next day, Trump announced an order to move two American nuclear submarines close to the Russian border. Though less than automatic, this triad-related threat (sea-based forces represent one-third of America’s nuclear force components) mirrored the Russian example of time-centered nuclear deterrence.
At less obvious but potentially more determinative levels, existential nuclear risks could be impacted by a variably subjective metaphysics of time. Where analysts and thinkers would concern themselves with “felt time,” the chronological dimension would become substantially more challenging. Here, predictive reliability could be strengthened by acknowledging that individual human decision-makers do not respond identically to the invented measures of clocks.[15] As a “timely” example, jihadi adversaries of the United States and Israel, both sovereign state and sub-state enemies, make a clear distinction between “profane time” (same as clock-time) and “sacred time.” For the jihadists, understanding and operationalizing this distinction means nothing less than being presumptively able to achieve “power over death.”
Its “time” to sum up our examination of nuclear war avoidance. Before human civilization could truly benefit from technologies of artificial intelligence (AI), there would first need to be suitable transformations of human intelligence (HI). Only “HI” could (1) put an end to falsely promised benefits of belligerent nationalism (in today’s United States, “America First”)[16] and (2) move toward what French Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin calls (The Phenomenon of Man, 1955) “planetization.”[17] These will be difficult ideas to master, but expecting species survival without first understanding human “oneness”[18] would be delusionary.
What has “oneness” to do with our subject? The answer: It is because we humans remain fragmented as a species that death twists and transforms time. To prevent the “final epidemic” of a nuclear war, thinkers and scholars will first need to identify reasonable paths to Teilhard de Chardin’s organic planetary unity. Only when this task has been undertaken on a conceptual and theoretical level could we ever expect any pragmatic reductions of nuclear war risk.
The core “enemy” of humankind is not nuclear weapons, but a consuming unwillingness to confront nuclear war as a primal challenge of death and time. To be sure, this will sound distressingly visionary, but in such existential matters, nothing could be more practical than good theory. As we ought now recall philosopher Karl Popper[19] (citing German poet Novalis): “Theory is a net. Only those who cast, can catch.”
[1] “Science,” says philosopher Jose Ortega y’Gasset in Man and Crisis (1958) “by which I mean the entire body of knowledge about things, whether corporeal or spiritual, is as much a work of imagination as it is of observation…The latter is not possible without the former.”
[2] Regarding Israeli strategies by this author, see: Louis René Beres: https://besacenter.org/navigating-chaos-israel-nuclear-ambiguity-and-the-samson-option/
[3] This term was used as title of an important early book dealing with nuclear war dangers: Ruth Abrams and Susan Cullen, The Final Epidemic: Physicians and Scientists on Nuclear War (1981). The well-respected contributors to this sobering anthology were associated with two prominent scientific/medical organizations of the time: Physicians for Social Responsibility and International Physicians Against Nuclear War. The present writer, Louis Rene Beres, was an active member of these groups at both Princeton and Purdue. For authoritative early accounts by this author of nuclear war effects, see: Louis René Beres, Apocalypse: Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Louis René Beres, Mimicking Sisyphus: America’s Countervailing Nuclear Strategy (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1983); Louis René Beres, Reason and Realpolitik: U.S. Foreign Policy and World Order (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1984); and Louis René Beres, Security or Armageddon: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1986). Most recently, by Professor Beres, see: Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (New York, Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; 2nd ed. 2018).
[4] Pakistan is an already-nuclear Islamic state that could sometime act as nuclear proxy for Iran. This means that an Israel-Iran nuclear war could take place even while the latter remained non-nuclear. Significantly, Pakistan has a declared first-use nuclear policy, and considers its tactical nuclear ordnance to be operationally useable. Pakistan’s nuclear weapons were created with specifically India in mind, and the likelihood of an India-Pakistan nuclear war is presumptively greater than a nuclear conflict between Pakistan (acting as Iranian surrogate) and Israel. See: https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2025/04/pakistans-first-use-nuclear-policy-in-conflicts-with-india/ See also, by this writer: https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1318&context=auilr
[5] See earlier, by this author, Louis René Beres, at Harvard National Security Journal, Harvard Law School: https://harvardnsj.org/2015/06/core-synergies-in-israels-strategic-planning-when-the-adversarial-whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts/)
[6] From the standpoint of authoritative Nuremberg obligations, disobedience of unlawful orders could be both legal and law-enforcing. Significantly, as these obligations are incorporated into the laws of the United States, disobeying an unlawful order by an American president would support US law as well as international law.
[7] Nonetheless, international law is a part of United States law, and the authoritative Nuremberg Judgments clarify that chain-of-command disobedience can be indispensably law-enforcing. See AGREEMENT FOR THE PROSECUTION AND PUNISHMENT OF THE MAJOR WAR CRIMINALS OF THE EUROPEAN AXIS POWERS AND CHARTER OF THE INTERNATIONAL MILITARY TRIBUNAL. Done at London, August 8, 1945. Entered into force, August 8, 1945. For the United States, Sept. 10, 1945. 59 Stat. 1544, 82 U.N.T.S. 279. The principles of international law recognized by the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and the judgment of the Tribunal were affirmed by the U.N. General Assembly as AFFIRMATION OF THE PRINCIPLES OF INTERNATIONAL LAW RECOGNIZED BY THE CHARTER OF THE NUREMBERG TRIBUNAL. Adopted by the U.N. General Assembly, Dec. 11, 1946. U.N.G.A. Res. 95 (I), U.N. Doc. A/236 (1946), at 1144. This AFFIRMATION OF THE PRINCIPLES OF INTERNATIONAL LAW RECOGNIZED BY THE CHARTER OF THE NUREMBERG TRIBUNAL (1946) was followed by General Assembly Resolution 177 (II), adopted November 21, 1947, directing the U.N. International Law Commission to “(a) Formulate the principles of international law recognized in the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and in the judgment of the Tribunal, and (b) Prepare a draft code of offenses against the peace and security of mankind….” (See U.N. Doc. A/519, p. 112). The principles formulated are known as the PRINCIPLES OF INTERNATIONAL LAW RECOGNIZED IN THE CHARTER AND JUDGMENT OF THE NUREMBERG TRIBUNAL. Report of the International Law Commission, 2nd session, 1950, U.N. G.A.O.R. 5th session, Supp. No. 12, A/1316, p. 11.
[8] As corollary, under international law, the formal question of whether or not a “state of war” actually exists between states is generally ambiguous. Traditionally, it was held that a declaration of war was necessary before any true state of war could be said to exist. Hugo Grotius divided wars into declared wars, which were legal, and undeclared wars, which were not. (See Hugo Grotius, The Law of War and Peace, Bk. III, Chapters. III, IV, and XI.) By the start of the twentieth century, the position that war obtains only after a conclusive declaration of war by one of the parties was codified by Hague Convention III. This treaty stipulated that hostilities must never commence without a “previous and explicit warning” in the form of a declaration of war or an ultimatum. (See Hague Convention III Relative to the Opening of Hostilities, 1907, 3 NRGT, 3 series, 437, article 1.) Currently, declarations of war may be tantamount to admissions of international criminality, because of the express criminalization of aggression by authoritative international law, and it could therefore represent a clear jurisprudential absurdity to tie any true state of war to formal and prior declarations of belligerency. It follows that a state of war may now exist without any formal declarations, but only if there exists an actual armed conflict between two or more states, and/or at least one of these affected states considers itself “at war.”
[9] Such willingness, it needs to be explained, would be consistent with Nuremberg obligations to resist crimes of state. The Nuremberg Principles (1946) are part of the law of the United States.
[10] See by this author, Louis René Beres, at Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: https://thebulletin.org/biography/louis-rene-beres/
[11] This raises the concept of “escalation dominance.” See, by this author, Louis René Beres, at The War Room, US Army War College, Pentagon: https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/nuclear-decision-making-and-nuclear-war-an-urgent-american-problem/
[12] There could still be gainful hypotheses. A hypothesis can be called “scientific” where it is expected to yield deductive consequences that are testable in principle. A classic example would be Newton’s demonstration that Kepler’s early finding in Astronomia Nova (The New Astronomy) on planetary motion and elliptical planetary orbit was mathematically deducible from the law of universal gravitation.
[13] The Founding Fathers of the United States were authenticintellectuals. As best explained by distinguished American historian Richard Hofstadter: “The Founding Fathers were sages, scientists, men of broad cultivation, many of them apt in classical learning, who used their wide reading in history, politics and law to solve the exigent problems of their time.” See Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), p. 145.
[14]Friedrich Nietzsche warns prophetically in Zarathustra: “Never seek the higher man [higher person] at the marketplace.”
[15] See by this author, Louis René Beres, at Journal of Value Inquiry (1974): https://philpapers.org/rec/BERTCA-3
[16] In his modern classic, Being and Time (1953), Martin Heidegger laments what he calls (in German) das Mann, or “The They.” Drawing fruitfully upon earlier seminal insights of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Jung and Freud, Heidegger’s “The They” represents the ever-present herd, crowd, horde or mass, an “untruth” (the term favored by Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard) that can all-too-quickly suffocate needed intellectual growth. Regarding Heidegger’s always-threatening “The They,” the crowning human untruth lies in (1) “herd” acceptance of immortality at institutional and personal levels; and in (2) herd encouragement of the notion that personal power over death is sometimes derivative from nation-states. History reveals that this can become an insidious notion. Presently, this notion can be associated with membership in such sub-state terror groups as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah and Hezbollah.
[17] Chardin coined a new term to denote the vital sphere of intellect occasioned by “planetization.” This term is “noosphere;” and builds upon Friedrich Nietzsche’s stance in Zarathustra that human beings must always challenge themselves – that is, continuously strive to “overcome” otherwise “herd”-directed yearnings.
[18] Philosophy and jurisprudence contain many clarifying advocates of “oneness.” Most notable are Voltaire and Goethe. We need only recall Voltaire’s biting satire in the early chapters of Candide, and Goethe’s comment (oft-repeated) linking the contrived hatreds of belligerent nationalism to declining stages of human civilization. We may also note Samuel Johnson’s famously expressed conviction that patriotism “is the last refuge of a scoundrel;” William Lloyd Garrison’s observation that “We cannot acknowledge allegiance to any human government…Our country is the world, our countryman is all mankind;” and Thorsten Veblen (“The patriotic spirit is at cross-purposes with modern life.”) Of course, there are similar sentiments discoverable in Nietzsche’s Human, all too Human and in Fichte’s Die Grundzűge des gegenwartigen Zeitalters.” Finally, let us recall Santayana’s coalescing remark in Reason and Society: “A man’s feet must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.” The ultimate point of all these cosmopolitan remarks is that narrow-minded patriotism (e.g., “America First”) is inevitably unpatriotic and broadly destabilizing.
[19] See Karl Popper’s epigraph to The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959).
