The world has never witnessed a nuclear war. Hiroshima and Nagasaki don’t “count." Strictly speaking, these examples of World War II destructiveness involved the one time use of nuclear weapons during an otherwise conventional war.

Before August 1945, nothing nuclear could have been expected. But today, eighty-one years later, a nuclear war is not merely possible. It is distinctly plausible. Though nothing can be predicted scientifically about such a conflict, we needn’t be logicians or mathematicians to reach the following conclusion: All decipherable nuclear war prospects would be intolerable.

To clarify, history warrants pride of place. To some discernible extent, each weapon system ever devised was eventually used. Realistically, therefore, some form of nuclear war will take place over time and produce variously unbearable outcomes.

There is more. In comparison to what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, these once-preventable outcomes will be force-multiplying and effectively irreversible. They will also have transformative impacts on still-remaining human survival options. A nuclear war - any nuclear war - would resemble an incurable disease. Of necessity, all meaningful “therapies" must lie in prevention.

In identifying war-avoidance methodologies, gifted thinkers will need to seek science-based “cures." To meet this obligation, only “deep thinkers" should be granted eleventh-hour responsibilities. Under no circumstances should a survival-centered species place its collective fate in the tied hands of political leaders.

It’s high time for candor. Nuclear war is not a contrived peril. To be avoided, it will have to be studied dispassionately and with immediate reference to certain primary distinctions. The first such distinction centers on differences between an intentional nuclear war and a nuclear war that is unintentional. It may sound elementary, but these differences are staggeringly complex and potentially determinative.

Among other things, if the distinction between intentional and unintentional nuclear war is overlooked or undervalued, the United States, Israel and other major states will impair residual capacities to survive. Whether suddenly or incrementally, such an impairment could become existential and irremediable. Moreover, a nuclear war could take place even if only one belligerent was nuclear-capable. Technically, this would be called an “asymmetrical nuclear war."

For gifted strategic thinkers, seemingly self-contradictory assessments would be expected. Not every oxymoron would be unreasonable. In world politics, as in economics, good news can sometimes be bad news. Though humankind is obviously fortunate to have avoided nuclear conflict up until now, such good news could also signify something “bad" because a nuclear war would be unprecedented, so that scientific thinkers could predict little or nothing about the tangible likelihood of a nuclear war.

In Israel and the United States, “high thinkers" (a term first given to Americans by 19th century philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson) will need to decipher complex strategies for averting nuclear conflict and minimizing unpreventable harms. Such confounding calculations would vary according to presumed enemy intentions and the supposed prospects of accident, hacking intrusion or decisional miscalculation. Here, linguistic precision would be imperative. To wit, any instance of accidental nuclear war would be inadvertent, but not every inadvertent nuclear war would be the result of accident. All such examples would represent the interlocking elements of a single overriding problem - preventing a nuclear “final epidemic."

In the final analysis, these are not matters for educated laypersons or military professionals. Nuclear war prevention and mitigation ought never to be approached by national security thinkers as a political or tactical issue. Informed by serious historical understandings and by consciously-refined analytic capacities, US and Israeli strategists should continuously prepare for a large variety of intersecting factors. Though this variety would be multi-dimensional and daunting, it ought never to be considered insoluble.

The hazards of seat-of-the-pants nuclear warfare calculations can be understood only in light of their conceivable intersections. All such intersections would be more-or-less plausible, a conclusion based on scientific expectations of formal logic (there is no actual history here) and the knowledge that mutually-reinforcing intersections could become "synergistic." Accordingly, close attention to credible nuclear synergies - intersections in which a “whole" conflict outcome would be greater than the sum of its “parts" - would be necessary.

In dealing with nuclear war risks involving Iran, North Korea, Russia, China, India or Pakistan, no concept could prove more important than “synergy." Unless synergistic interactions were correctly anticipated, Israel and United States could underestimate the cumulative impact of any examined nuclear engagement. The flesh and blood consequences of such underestimations could defy dispassionate analytic assessments and pointless post-war justifications.

In America’s current war against Iran, even the non-nuclear combatant could launch a dedicated cyber campaign against enemy power plants, data centers and public water installations. To deliver major harms to Israel, Iran does not need its own nuclear weapons. Even while limited to asymmetrical warfare, it could rely on certain already-nuclear state allies (e.g., North Korea or Pakistan) and on its own cyber weapons.

Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971) and is Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue University. He is the author of many books, monographs and scholarly articles dealing with nuclear strategy and nuclear war. In Israel, he was Chair of Project Daniel (PM Sharon, 2003-2004). For more than fifty years he has published on nuclear warfare issues in the Harvard National Security Journal (Harvard Law School); Yale Global; Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence; Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs and other publications. His twelfth book, published in 2016 (2nd ed., 2018) is titled: Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel's Nuclear Strategy. https://paw.princeton.edu/new-books/surviving-amid-chaos-israels-nuclear-strategy. He was born in Zürich on August 31, 1945, a few weeks after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (Happy birthday from Arutz Sheva)