Operation Epic Fury has been going on for almost a month now. Iran's air force is no more. Ditto for their navy. The remaining leaders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are running around like hydrophobic rats, trying to avoid American and Israeli smart weapons, which are getting closer with every hit.
Iran can't keep this up, and President Trump is planning to keep hitting them, and hitting them, and hitting them, until they cry, " Uncle".
But will he use the ultimate weapon in the American arsenal? That would be a big, beautiful red line to cross, tossing a nuke (or a few nukes) at Iran. But there are folks out there who think he might; a piece published Tuesday at the American Conservative thinks that President Trump may well decide to toss a hot rock.
Trump might even be tempted to accomplish this monstrous objective with the use of nuclear weapons. Amid muddled messaging from the White House, one of the most consistent themes has been the declared intention to “obliterate” Iran—and nuclear weapons offer the surest way to do that.
A new rhetorical theme emerged last week, when Trump threatened to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages.” The phrase is associated with Curtis LeMay, who served as Air Force chief of staff during the Vietnam war. LeMay is known for something else too: his promotion of nuclear weapons and complaint that Americans had a “phobia” of using them.
Trump doesn’t seem to share that deranged perspective, but nuclear anxieties are growing thanks to his belligerence. Two weeks ago, a United Nations representative resigned from his post and leaked the disturbing information that “the UN is preparing for possible nuclear weapon use in Iran.” Days earlier, officials from the World Health Organization told POLITICO they were worried about a possible nuclear attack.
A leak from the United Nations, especially one who has just resigned, is worth every penny you paid for it. And a World Health Organization rep? Why would they have any insight into this, into whether President Trump may or may not pop a nuke over Tehran? They wouldn't, of course.
I mean, look at the experts consulted here:
Last month, Arta Moeini of the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy told The American Conservative that the U.S. could launch a nuclear strike as “one last Hail Mary of trying to get Iran to capitulate.”
During the Cold War, the prospect of “mutually assured destruction” helped prevent America and the Soviet Union from resorting to nuclear weapons. A whole genre of game theory evolved to make sense of the novel standoff situation. But in the war with Iran, that logic doesn’t apply, since Tehran possesses neither nuclear weapons nor allies who would use them on its behalf.
Moreover, Trump doesn’t seem to have internalized the “nuclear taboo,” the idea that strategic planners consider the nuclear option illegitimate and uncomfortable to even contemplate. Joe Scarborough of MSNBC reported during the 2016 presidential race that Trump had questioned a foreign policy adviser about the impermissibility of using nuclear weapons. “Three times he asked at one point, if we had them, why can’t we use them,” Scarborough said.
I don't trust anything Joe Scarborough says any farther than I could throw a D-9 Caterpillar.
Read More: Trump Says Iran's Peace Proposals 'Not Good Enough,' Sets Deadline on When US Will Intensify Attacks
Clock's Ticking: Trump Warns Iran They’ve Got 48 Hours to Open Hormuz or Face Hell Raining Down
My answer? No, President Trump is not going to torch off a nuke on Iran or anywhere else. Or at least, the odds are so infinitesimal as to be explained only in terms of quantum physics. Here's why, and I'm going to tell you.
First: Why would he need to use a nuke? The United States and Israel have already rendered Iran's military forces non-existent with conventional explosives, suicide drones, and smart weapons. Nukes were and are designed as a sort of hyper-explosive way of achieving accuracy by volume; drop enough bombs or launch enough bullets, and one of them is going to hit something. A nuke makes that easier by making a much bigger boom. But precision smart weapons obviate the need for that. We don't have to burn down a city to kill a terror regime's ruling goblins. We just need to catch them at the breakfast table and stick a Tomahawk missile in the window.
Second, it's important not to start reading things into President Trump's sometimes forceful and, let's say, enthusiastic rhetoric. For one thing, the president has shown himself to be apt with misdirection; in his first term, he was fond of firing up the left with mean tweets, in effect pointing and shouting, "Squirrel!" While the legacy media and Democrats were on the lookout for bushy-tailed rodents, there was the president, making deals, deregulations, cutting taxes, and so on.
Third and finally, President Trump knows that torching off a nuke anywhere in Iran, no matter what he thinks, no matter what Curtis LeMay thought, is still crossing a big red line. That's how most Americans see it. That's how most of the world sees it - including Russia and (we hope) China. If anything might bring in Russia and China and kick off World War 3, it would be a glowing crater where an Iranian city once stood.
No, President Trump almost certainly will not employ a nuclear weapon. If he does - if I'm wrong about this - then all of a sudden, the world is going to have a lot more and bigger problems than a bunch of 7th-century maniacs in Iran.
