Fascist Nuke Fears, Moneyballing Nuclear War, and Risk Factors of Armageddon
We should be worried about either the US or Israel using nukes against Iran.
I’ve been concerned about the “fascist nuke problem” since 2023. The same ideological blind spot in Western analysis that accommodates a genocide in Gaza would accommodate either the US or Israel busting the nuclear taboo. In the most perverse way, nuclear war would be a logical morbid symptom of America’s imperial decline.
But there’s two parts worth addressing here. One might seem pedantic, the other is the substantive sources of my angst.
Risks, Not Likelihoods, of Nuclear War
Regarding pedantry, you see the following question quite often, especially from journalists:
The guy in the post above is soliciting an objective probability that does not exist. He wants to put a number on the odds of something happening that can’t be assigned a number in any meaningful sense. Which is to say that asking for a percentage chance of nuclear war is an error in categorical reasoning.
When we assign objective probabilities to an event, it’s because we can observe a full distribution of possible outcomes and then calculate the likelihood of the thing happening. You can assign an objective probability to being dealt an ace in your next hand of Blackjack because the range of possibilities is limited by what’s in the deck; known and calculable.
But when we can’t map the full range of possible outcomes and don’t have enough observations of a thing to estimate frequency, we can only assign a subjective probability. And the thing about subjective probability is that it’s a fancy way of saying “In my opinion…” It’s finger-in-the-wind shit.
If it’s true that, in the language of rationalist political science, “war is in the error term,” then nuclear war is literally unpredictable.
And yet!
The risks of nuclear war can go up and down. Maybe you can’t predict someone getting cancer with any reliability, but you can diagnose whether a person is more or less prone to get it based on the intersection of risk factors. This is how we should think about the risks of nuclear war: They can compound and amplify, making situations more or less prone to nuclear weapons use. All nuclear crises are dangerous but not equally so.
Bottom line: The chances of nuclear war are unknowable; the risk factors of nuclear war are both knowable and currently catastrophically high.
Why the US/Israel Could Nuke Iran
In the last three days, Trump has made two threats of war crimes and an explicit threat to commit genocide that many people are interpreting as a nuclear threat.
A unique source of risk from Trump is that he has impaired judgment, both because he is not rational in relation to the state and he is comically incompetent. Accordingly, Trump is prone to miscalculation—which is how he got into this mad war with Iran that even other bad presidents managed to avoid.
Another, much deeper, source of nuclear risk is that, as an avatar of what I described as the fascist nuke problem, Trump lacks the key barrier to nuclear use that a moral person would have:
The nuclear trouble here, if it is not obvious, is that if you can de-humanize one you can de-humanize all. This was always the most terrifying thing about Trump, it’s built into his politics, and you cannot really separate it from a willingness to engage in mass-casualty violence…The way we think about nuclear deterrence has an ideological blind spot when it comes to extremist politics like fascism (or whatever synonym you prefer)…the dehumanization of a population is at least a favorable condition (if not a prerequisite) for wielding nuclear death over them.
This will to violence predicated on mass dehumanization along civilizational lines equally applies to Israel. And the risk of Israeli nuclear use is heightened by the fact that Israel does not acknowledge possessing nuclear weapons, which, in its genocidal logic, means it has a lawfare pretext to use nukes and then deny it.
The other source of risk is situational: Trump is trapped in an escalation spiral that has no off-ramp other than unilateral ceasefire. There is a risk that Trump sees the nuclear gambit as a way to escape his self-made trap while saving face as a strongman. The risk of that mindset grows because of its context: the alternative—continuing the war—will accumulate more US losses, deplete America’s munitions stockpiles, and induce a global financial crisis. Gamblers facing the prospect of loss have higher risk propensities.
Finally, we should consider some comparisons with other nuclear crises, if only to grasp how dangerous our situation is now.
When Trump threatened “fire and fury” against North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in 2017 and early 2018, we were far closer to nuclear war than most people think. I wrote an entire book (and made a very amateur doc) about this. We avoided nuclear war then in spite of Trump, not because of him. South Korea wanted to end the crisis, served as a peace broker, and helped Trump frame a loss (Kim Jong Un getting a nuclear ICBM) as a win via summit diplomacy. The North Korea case, then, suggests something terrible for our current moment: We would’ve already had nuclear war if not for luck, and we have no reason to believe that we can get so lucky again now.
There was also heightened risk of nuclear war in the early stages of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But at least in that case, force checked force—there was a mutual fear inducing restraint in Washington and Moscow, and Putin was egoistically rational (if malign).
In the ongoing Iran War, we don’t have dueling nuclear powers—we have nuclear-armed predators waging what they think is a civilizational war against people whom they see as less than human. And we have them losing that war in meaningful ways while possessing escalation dominance. The intersecting risk indicators are flashing red over Iran. God help us get lucky again.
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